Teach, Play, Sing

Music Educators: Simple to complex. From the known to the unknown. Kodaly is wrong. →

musiceducators:

“To teach a child an instrument without first giving him preparatory training and without developing singing, reading, and dictating to the highest level along with the playing is to build upon sand.”—

Zoltán Kodály

(via leadingtone)

While Kodaly is one of the leading music…

I actually agree with the points laid out here, to a degree.

In my view, the exploration when they are young is important. I’d say there’s two things to go for - exploration for the sake of exploring and experiencing music so that children can get a feel for it naturally (i.e. the idea of “play”), but also I think some of those experiences should be related to skill building. You can explore music through the use of solfege. You could even talk about articulation in creative ways - composition is sadly neglected with young children, especially since music teachers often only get to see them once a week if that, but there’s so many ways you can use it to explore topics like this with student while allowing them ownership of it.

But as you actually enter into the period where more focused training begins (picking up an instrument like the violin or trumpet, or even beginning to focus in on singing), I think having experiences in your background, like already having a grasp on solfege, are beneficial. Audiation is a key idea and skill in the music classroom. That’s one example I feel strongly about.

And I agree with Kodaly when he says that to neglect areas of reading, dictating, etc while training is to build upon sand. Those are key skills as a musician. Are they the end all, be all? Absolutely not. But they are important, just as reading and writing are important components of English. Where we get confused is when we associate reading (music, that is) skills with actual musicianship - that would be like associating the ability to organize ideas on paper with actual creativity. You need a spark, an idea, and a brilliant way to shape it, otherwise all the basic writing tools in the world aren’t going to help you succeed. Same with music - being able to reproduce what’s on the page doesn’t make you brilliantly artistic, but you need to be able to do that to move in the right direction (in terms of traditional music ensembles, that is - there is another world out there where these skills aren’t important, but that’s a completely different post!). The best paper topic in the world won’t help you unless you have the tools to begin putting it together.

In short - I think literally subscribing to the idea above presented by Kodaly is limiting. But he makes a good point. As always, I think you need a balanced approach.

Of course, this is all just my thoughts.