Learn to play a musical instrument intuitively

Listening to music is one thing, creating music is another. At what point should parents start to encourage their child musically?

In principle, music courses can be attended from a very early age. For the Hungarian music teacher Zoltán Kodály (1882-967), musical education could not begin early enough. He answered the question of when the best time to learn music was with a good dose of irony: «Nine months before the birth ... of the mother!» Kodály alluded to the fact that musical abilities are not only inherited through genes, but also developed through the family situation. The musical activities of the parents and their exposure to music play an important role in the musical development of the child. This begins in the womb. It is known that the foetus' hearing develops in the womb from the 22nd week of pregnancy. The growing human being hears everything that happens outside: Sounds, voices and music.

The prenatal classroom

Early support for babies in the womb is a topic in many studies. The Californian doctor Rene Van de Carr, a pioneer of prenatal support, has written a curriculum on the subject. His «prenatal classroom» is one of the key texts on prenatal support. Van de Carr claims to have discovered in studies that a foetus in the ninth month is able to adapt its breathing rhythm to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony if the mother listened to it regularly during pregnancy.

The idea that a child's experiences in the womb are formative is becoming more important in research, but is still in its infancy, says Heidelberg doctor and psychologist Ludwig Janus. «In the past, the foetus was only seen as a biological being until birth.» It was only from the 1970s onwards that the burden of birth on the child came to the fore. But not the time before that - that is relatively new.

How parents deal with music shapes a child's musical development. It begins in the womb.

Research has not yet been able to prove that unborn children become smarter, healthier or more musical later on as a result of special support. Individual studies only show that certain intellectual abilities of a child are already formed in the womb. What is certain, however, is that the mother's voice is significant for the foetus: it is an important point of reference. This can be observed, among other things, in the fact that all babies respond positively to their mother's or father's singing.

Singing is also very important for children's (emotional) development in the years that follow. A report by Swiss music experts in 2004 came to the conclusion that the period from birth to school entry is crucial for learning to sing as the actual «mother tongue of man».

However, this report also criticised the fact that many parents can no longer sing or no longer know children's songs that they can sing to their children to comfort them, play or put them to sleep.

Promoting singing together

In order to promote singing together and to encourage parents and children to sing, a number of endeavours have been developed around singing together, such as ElKi-Singen (parent-child singing), in which children from the age of two sing and make music in a group with an accompanying person.
Musical activity and a playful approach to singing and listening to music with one's own child are certainly pursued by all music courses. If you look for music courses with pedagogical concepts that prepare music learning for children step by step, you will come across the Music Learning Theory (MLT) in addition to the well-known music learning concepts of Suzuki, Dalcroze, Kodály and Orff.

MLT is based on the studies of the US music psychologist Edwin E. Gordon (1927 015). In the 1970s, Gordon conducted observational studies of music courses with babies and small children and developed a theory of music learning from this. According to MLT, music is learnt in a similar way to learning the mother tongue: intuitively. Listening to music, free physical movement to music and the inner visualisation, hearing and thinking of music, so-called audiation (an artificial word coined by Gordon), are of particular importance in MLT.

Many parents today no longer know any songs that they can sing to their child to comfort them or put them to sleep.

The aim is not to mechanically sing or play music without musical understanding, but to develop musical competence in the same way as language competence. This gives children the opportunity to realise their musical potential.

According to Gordon, audiation is to music what thought is to language. It describes the ability to think in music. On the one hand, it is about hearing music mentally before it sounds from a sound recording or an instrument. On the other hand, it is about recognising and understanding music and its components through hearing.

This applies above all to singing, which should ideally take place before and parallel to learning an instrument. A child must have an inner conception and understanding of sound in order to be able to produce the right tones. Only when an inner concept of sound and an understanding of tonality, harmony, metre, genre and so on exist in long-term memory can «sight-singing» be carried out.

Diverse musical impressions

In order to develop this ability, pupils are often presented with sung or chanted melodies or rhythms without lyrics. In the first years of learning music with MLT, notation is not presented to the pupils as far as possible, as music should be practised and understood through the ear and not through the eyes.

To this end, the children's musical skills are developed in informal music education through short, varied melodies and rhythms (chants) without words, through musical dialogues, free movements, games and moments of silence. This type of music education is intended for babies from birth up to six years old.

Young children do not experience music through their intellect, but through their bodies.

The teacher's task is to convey a variety of musical impressions to the children and give them access to music. This participation in music is achieved through free, flowing and dancing movements to music and through musical and non-verbal communication between teacher and child.

The teacher communicates with the children by repeating musical utterances and non-verbally, for example through eye contact and mirroring gestures and movements. This enables the child to build a relationship with the music by experiencing musical phenomena such as three-four time through their own physical movements without having to imitate the teacher's prescribed movements or even learn a movement choreography.

Music should be understood through the ear and not through the eyes. Music Learning Theory therefore does not use sheet music.

Gordon says that young children respond to music of their own accord with free, constantly flowing movements. He concludes that children learn through their own physical experience and that their body learns music long before their intellect.
The process of not just imitating the music, but expressing oneself by singing and moving to the music and «producing» it from a nascent understanding, as with the mother tongue, distinguishes MLT from other courses in the field of early childhood music learning.