Musical Child

Math Scales

2010-09-09T11:25:00.000-07:00

Here's an idea to help musically inclined kids practice their basic arithmetic skills: Practice math sequences like you practice scales. This basic rebranding of "Counting By N" combines a clear metronomic pulse with a drive to perform faster and faster.

Just as we practice musical scales to expose where certain knots are in our fingers so that we can learn tunes more quickly, we can practice the Math Scales to get the basic arithmetic muscles smoothed out so that higher order problems can be solved more quickly.

Usually we practice in the car. While I bang out the pulse on the steering wheel they can run through a 6 scale or a 30 scale. Important variations include starting from non-zero values, as well as doing minus scales.

The grand challenge for the older child is to run through "all" the scales from 2 - 9 in a row for a record time. Actually even for me just the act of speaking out all those numbers is somewhat fatiguing so it takes some practice.

This is infinitely extendable and some ideas for variation that we've only begun to explore include:

singing the scale
trying them to different rhythms
try making chords of the sequence, like what is the 7-scale major chord? Take the 1,3, and 5 note of the 7 sequence and add them together.
Try different sequences like the squares, cubes, Fibonacci numbers.

Why do this:

Identify weak spots. You'll quickly find out which steps in the sequence don't come out smoothly and naturally
Gain fluency. If the child can bang out the N-scale quickly, they can do the arithmetic quickly.
Helps them jump around the sequence correctly. Perhaps they forget 8 times 7 but remember 6 times 7 is 42 and can quickly fly two "notes" up their 7-scale to 56.
Reinforce the idea of practice in math, as something that can be improved and not just "I'm good at math" or "I'm bad at math" (See Carol Dweck, Mindset).

Practice Ideas: Scales + Improv

2009-05-14T11:58:00.000-07:00

My son loves to improvise but it is my job to also focus him on practicing his technique. Often between scales he launches into an improvisation within the key of the scale that we've just practiced. I don't want to suppress these creative outbursts, but I also want to move our practice along. One thing that works well is to suggest that he fit the next scale or arrepegio on my agenda into his improvisation when he gets a chance. This engages his creativity and gets the scale practiced at the same time.

In a twist on this game during piano practice, I told him that one hand was being well behaved but the other hand was totally wild. The left hand was dilligently practicing it's scale but the right hand was improvising. After doing that for a bit, of course, the right hand decided to behave but the left hand became unmanageable.

These games help me get through practice, and avoid the absurdity of chiding him to "stop improvising and practice your scales so you get used to the key so that one day you can, um...., [sheepishly], improvise."

Ball Practice

2009-03-19T18:14:00.000-07:00

It has been very difficult to get my almost-4-year-old to concentrate in violin practice and lessons. Thanks to some clever treachery by our teacher though we are beginning to settle into a rhythm. Between every violin exercise that he does he gets to do something that is more immediately interesting to him. We have had success with 2 kinds of diversions: puzzles, and balls. For example, he gets to add one more piece to his puzzle every time he does, say, 10 ticki-ticki-pa-pas. Or he gets 10 "ball catches" after every 10 of some other violin exercise.

He has so much fun that all of a sudden he is asking to practice instead of resisting, and even making progress on the violin.

Felix Mendelssohn: Greatest Prodigy?

2009-02-05T12:09:00.000-08:00

NPR has a great story on an Octet that Mendelssohn wrote at the age of 16.

Says Rob Capillow:

"And that was the greatest music, in my opinion, ever written at a young age," he says. "So I think in terms of sheer compositional quality, Mendelssohn — not Mozart — was the greatest child prodigy in the history of western music."

My favorite part of the piece is the analysis that starts at about 3:00.

Thanks to Luke for the pointer.

Calling in the Heavy Guns

2008-12-01T11:33:00.001-08:00

Now and then when a practice session isn't going so well I need to call in the heavy guns. An occasionally call to Bach or Brahms can do wonders to get the focus back on practice.

Me, dialing: Hello, Johann?
Me, I mean, Bach: Yaaah, how's it going?
Me: Well we're having a little trouble focusing on your Gavotte here.
Bach: Well let me talk to him....

And I hand over the phone and let the old Master explain what needs to be done. If things really call for some ornery castigation I'll even call Beethoven himself to sputter out insults in a terrible faux-German accent. The mere threat of a call to Beethoven is often enough to get the focus back on correct bowings.

Once I even called Brahms on the phone and asked him to play along on a cello as we practiced his Waltz in Suzuki Violin Book 2. Afterward, I asked my son how he liked Brahms' improvised cello part. He liked it, so I asked him to play on his violin an octave higher, as I hadn't been able to hear Brahms play very well. It turned out to be true, Brahms' cello part was indeed quite nice.

Vitus

2008-12-01T11:05:00.000-08:00

Vitus is a great movie about a prodigy who gets a bit overwhelmed by all the pressure his generally well meaning parents lay down upon him. It's an inspiring movie in it's own right, and it's a particularly good movie to watch for anyone who fears they may be putting a little too much pressure on their child.

I'm not going to recommend that actual young musical children watch it though. I don't think I'll show this to my kids.

Daniel Barenboim on Concentration in Practice

2008-08-09T23:24:00.000-07:00

In his autobiography A Life In Music, conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim says this about practicing (p9 in my copy):

"All individuals have different spans of concentration. I have no strict rule mself, such as playing eight hours a day or no more than forty-five minutes. Both extremes are equally counter-productive. I never play a single note when my concentration is no longer at its height, for to do so would be to fall into the trap of playing mechanically."

This sounds great in theory but some caveats may be in order in the case of small children. After all, they may still be learning the rudiments of how to focus on anything. Follow this guideline too strictly and your 5-year-old might never practice. You have to gently toe the line and work to extend and optimize their periods of concentration.

But it is a very important warning. You can usually bribe, threaten, or otherwise cajole a child to eventually get through practicing the days lesson but it truly could be counterproductive. I'll bet most kids could learn as much in 10 minutes of practicing where they choose to concentrate then they could in a week of being forced to while they're trying to weasel out of it.

You need to gently redirect the wandering mind and try a few times to get back on track. But I agree with not pushing too hard. The trick to finding the period of concentration in the young child might have more to do with finding the right time of day in the right part of eating and sleeping cycles. And if focus is not there sometimes you have to just let it go.

I've often struggled with the case where my child brings plenty of concentration to the table in a practice session, except it's all directed at music outside of our assigned lesson plan. I'm loathe to suppress his creative expression though I'm sympathetic to the view that he needs to keep building his technical proficiency to ultimately increase the range of what he is capable of expressing on the instrument. Our violin teacher introduced the idea of 2 different practices, so you keep a very structured frame of mind for the "official" practice and are more laissez-fair on the other one. That view has sometimes been useful but proven a little too structured for us. When an idea arises, you need to pursue it. But if you do nothing but chase ideas you might miss important elements of your training. Emphasis on 'might'. Improvisation fits more naturally into our piano practice; no surprise there since our teacher is a jazz man.

Professor Pocket

2007-12-06T22:57:00.000-08:00

Parent Hacks has a lengthy review of a new "learn Spanish" CD. I followed their advice and got a copy on Itunes yesterday and it's a hit with the kids already. It sounds very interactive, almost like a TV show and cleverly overlays the Spanish and English. The music is definitely simplistic, repetitive "kids music" and is neither the most nor least annoying example of the genre.

Perfect Pitch and Tonal Languages

2007-11-14T22:06:00.000-08:00

The Genius In All Of Us Blog links to an interesting story about perfect pitch in kids raised with tonal vs. non-tonal languages.

If I heard it correctly, they did a study of kids that started music at ages 4-5 in China and the US, and testing them later found that 70%+ of the Chinese kids had perfect pitch vs. 11% of the U.S. kids. Wow! That's a big difference.

Speaking Music

2007-11-14T21:50:00.000-08:00

I want my kids to learn to speak music like a language, spontaneously and fluently. I found a game to help this process while practicing arpeggios.

I will "ask a question", for example, by playing an ascending G major arpeggio for two octaves. And my son will answer the question, playing a descending G major arpeggio. I mix it up among various keys, and various rhythm patterns, without describing them in words.

Learning to reverse is nice but I don't want him confined by a game of precise reversal, so sometimes I tell him to answer the question however he wants.

This game quickly translates into other areas. For example, I asked him what he wanted for breakfast by playing the theme to Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21, which we had been listening to of late. I played the theme and sang the words "What do you want for bre-eakfast?" And he answered back with his violin, and singing, "What are my choices?".

Fidgeting

2006-11-25T23:52:00.000-08:00

In general I don't think of my son as particularly fidgety. Sometimes yes, but it's not like he can never sit still. But sometimes when I sit down for our Suzuki violin practice, his fidgeting really tries my patience. He might play the piece that he's supposed to, but only if he's spinning around on his feet while he does it. Or he will wiggle so much between songs I'm afraid he will drop his violin, and sometimes it drives me crazy.

But finally I came to peace with it, and realized: these figets are part of him, this "mischannelled" energy is not separate from his creativity, and trying hard at this age of 4 to get him to stand perfectly still is as likely to suppress this spirit as it is to cultivate it in some idealized way. So I let him express himself physically this way, trusting that in due time he will be able to stand as still as he needs to and all that energy that spins him around will still be there working with him. I have no desire to work against that.

Ken Robinson

2006-11-25T23:44:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you've stumbled upon this blog for no other reason than to find out about this very entertaining and inspiring talk on the importance of creativity in children. It is well worth the 20 minutes to watch it all the way through, even if it's just to hear this line: [non-literal transcription:] "Can you imagine being [7 year old] William Shakespeare's father?....'Put down that pencil and go to bed. And stop talking that way, you're confusing everyone!'"

Substitutions

2006-11-25T23:36:00.000-08:00

Word substitution games are a great way to get the attention of very little children. If they know how to say a couple words, then they're ready to play. For the one-year-old's sake, we've been playing a lot of an ABC game, where we'll sing as shown below but substituting different sets of words in. The names of the people in the family is always a hit, and foods are a good category too. Increasingly, the baby will even sing the substituion word on pitch.

"A B C D E F _________"
"H I J K L M N O ________"
"Q R S T U ___________"
"W X Y ______________"
"Now I Know my A B __________"
"Next Time won't you sing with __________"

And then we all clap and have a good time.

Early Site Reading

2006-11-01T15:35:00.000-08:00

My son is in the "Big Kid" Music Together class and it was recently my day to volunteer there. I got to see a very clever technique for learning site reading:

Equipment:
1) A magnetic board
2) A small set of magnetized cards with pictures of animals.

Technique:
1) Playfully teach kids a sound/pitch for each of the animal cards
2) Mix up the cards and lay out a sequence of them on the magnetized board.
3) Sing the sequences of sounds.
4) Repeat

Brilliant! The kids loved it.

Mozart Effect Study

2006-09-21T11:35:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post reports on a new study of the Mozart Effect in young children.

"It is very interesting that the children taking music lessons improved more over the year on general memory skills that are correlated with nonmusical abilities such as literacy, verbal memory, visiospatial processing, mathematics and IQ than did the children not taking lessons," said Laurel J. Trainor, the lead researcher of the study at McMaster University in Canada. The study is being published in the journal Brain.

The article almost lost me in the beginning making the "shocking claim" that "Six children who took Suzuki lessons had larger and faster brain responses to musical stimuli compared with six children who had no lessons," but ends up making the more interesting point. The study is going to published in the journal Brain, I'll add a link here when it does if I can find it.

Thanks to Tamara for the link.

Babies can learn to Match Pitch

2006-08-25T00:42:00.000-07:00

Even a baby can match pitch. I'm not sure where to find the research on this, but I've observed it myself in an almost 12 month old baby.

Play With Sequence

2006-08-25T00:27:00.000-07:00

Sequences are everywhere and one way to help a child learn their latest musical sequence is to pick something from an area that they are passionate about.

For example, astronomy is pretty popular in my house so we played a game of mapping the notes of a musical scale to the order of the planets, and then we could do things like sing Twinkle Little Star as follows:

First the easy way: Mercury is C, Venus is D, etc.
Mercury-Mercury-Jupiter-Jupipter-Saturn-Saturn-Jupiter-Jupiter-Mars-Mars-Earth-Earth-Venus-Venus-Mercury-Mercury (etc)

Then you can really spice it up by transposing. Now map Mercury to A, Venus to B and Earth to C natural (think white notes on the piano only). Then Twinkle goes as follows:
Mercury-Mercury-Jupiter-Jupiter-SaturnSharp-SaturnSharp-Jupiter-Jupiter-Mars-Mars-EarthSharp-EarthSharp-Venus-Venus-Mercury-Mercury. etc. etc.

What's going on:
1) Capturing the childs interest by correlating the musical exercise with some other fun area of their life.
2) Triggering comprehension of the abstraction of the sequence. It gets beyond wrote learning to a comprehension of the underlying patterns.

Other recommended sequences:
Dinosaurs in order of height, or historical period in which they lived.
Sesame Street characters in order of (height/age/color)
Any popular character by any measurable attribute.
People in the family by height or age.
Fingers (Pinky-Pinky-Thumb-Thumb-LeftPink-LeftPinky-Thumb-Thumb...etc)
Rooms of the house in order.
Line up a bunch of kids in an arbitrary order and use their names.

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What?! A Singing Parrot?

2006-08-25T00:22:00.000-07:00

Who would have thought a parrot can sing opera?

And dance?

Suddennly this makes it a little less remarkable when a human child can make good music. Afterall, if a parrot can do it, why shouldn't a human kid? Or does it merely make an adult that has trouble keeping a beat feel even worse about themself?

Anyway, I hope the kids enjoy the parrots. The entire lecture in the video is incredibly interesting.

2006-08-24T23:40:00.000-07:00

King of Jazz: Willie Hall

This is not a kid but kids will enjoy this very unusual violin playing and hopefully won't get too many bad habits!

Sirena Huang

2006-08-10T23:34:00.000-07:00

This performance by the 11 year-old Sirena Huang is astonishing!

What does it mean that a child can convey more musical intelligence than all but the most highly trained adults? The intricacies and depths of this playing is just not something most people would think a child capable. And yet, clearly, at least this one is.

Truly inspiring! Thank you Sirena!

Chords

2006-02-24T23:13:00.000-08:00

We've been having fun learning some basic major and minor triads. With the letters on the keyboard it's relatively easy for the child to learn them. After he learned a few, we played with the idea at story time for example like this:

Once upon a time there was a farmer called Old MacDonald, and he was looking for his animals. He was very C-Eflat-G because he couldn't find his pig, so he looked everywhere and then at last found him in the mud and got very C-E-G.
But THEN, he wanted his horse and he couldn't find it and he was very A-C-E. But at last he found it out in the meadow and then what was he? [and the child fills in the blank: A-C#-E].

Restraint vs. Freedom

2006-02-24T09:55:00.000-08:00

We've been enrolled in Suzuki violin for 6 months now after a couple years of Music Together. Music Together endorses "musical babbling"....don't take your kids hands to make sure they're on the beat, don't worry, they'll absorb it and learn just like they learn language. Don't correct them or tell them they're doing it wrong just have fun and if they see you enjoying it they'll model after you and learn everything just fine.

Enter Suzuki. The complete opposite! (I'm not sure that the writings of Dr. Suzuki endorse the complete opposite, but our experience with a highly qualified Suzuki teacher sure is). They are very concerned with learning incorrectly and having to undo embedded muscle-memory learning. Everything must be meticulously done just right with infinite restraint. When the student is 3 years old, that seems to mean that you are constantly telling him "No, not like that!" and trying endless tricks to more subtly correct him. It is a constant battle to somehow make it fun even when your primary job is to stop the free form "musical babbling" that he wants to do.

I don't play the violin, but I'm amazed with the intricacy and number of things that you have to get just right to get a decent sound. So I can respect the argument that it's dangerous to learn things incorrectly. But why? I don't know....children spend years speaking incorrectly but rarely are you worried that they'll speak with good grammar as they're a little older. Perhaps speech is more fluid than muscle memory.

It is a great truth that sometimes the only way to freedom is via great restraint. You'd better believe that the most brilliant improvisers have spent their tedious thousands of hours on their scales and exercises. Meditation masters cultivate mental freedom via extreme restriction on actions and sensory inputs. Restriction is a great means to an end of total freedom. In software development circles they've given the analogy? Why does a race car have brakes? The obvious answer: so it can slow down. The non-obvious answer: so it can go fast!!! Without brakes you could never drive at 200mph.

I often fear restrictions. If I follow these narrow rules, my creativity will be suppressed and I'll never find the true potential. The leap of faith is to accept that the creativity is stronger than any constraint, and you use the constraints to channel the creativity from diffuse light to a powerful laser.

I fear telling my son "No" all the time when we practice. In fact the Suzuki teacher's might be horrified at how rarely I do tell him no. I don't want to suppress his playfulness in an attempt adhere to some impossible precision. The middle way is to play games in which the object of playfulness is attaining the precision. But it is a constant challenge.

Drum Solo

2006-01-18T20:13:00.000-08:00

Here's one VERY musical child: Tony Royster, Jr.

Random Recommendations

2006-01-12T22:51:00.000-08:00

I don't know any of these, but this was a list of recommendations passed out at our MusicTogether class:

Catalogs: “Music for little people” and “heartsong”

Recording:
Laurie berkner : victor vito
cool jazz cats
ralph covent
Farcia and Grisman
Red Grammer (”!!!”)
Jessica Harper
Elizabeth Mitchell
putamayo: african playgoround, world playground
Jonathoan Richman
Sweet honey and teh rock
brian waitt
dan zane

Red Light Green Light Drum Game

2005-07-01T13:04:00.000-07:00

Get a bunch of nice drums spread around the kids. Yell "Green Light Go" and let everyone bang like crazy. Then "Red Light Stop" and get them all to stop. Mix it up with an occaisional "Yellow Light Slow Down".

This was great for getting everyone's attention and participation, and getting used to stopping and starting on cue.

The danger with a group of toddlers is that they get so excited by the drums they have trouble focusing on whatever you try next, but it's great fun to play this at home too.

Letters on the Keyboard

2005-07-01T12:51:00.000-07:00

Write letters on tiny scaps of paper and tape them to the piano keys. This combines to fun of learning letters with learning the notes of the piano. We started doing this around late age 1 or early age 2 and at age 3 it's still providing ever new opportunties. I recommend starting with an octave or two and expanding it out further.

Results:
1) Early on, makes it more interesting to play notes on the piano.
2) Helps focus on single note playing rather than random pounding. Makes it fun to play a C major scale singiing out the letters in order. (favorite quote: "Hey, what happened to H?")
3) He started playing a cool song alternative between a low note and a high note, sequentially raising the lower notes and lowering the high notes. Upon examination, the range that grabbed him was exactly those middle couple octaves on which I put letters. I added a couple octaves so as not to keep him limited.
4) Musical Dictation: when he's interested in a song, he'll ask how to play it. I can stand back and dictate the notes in sequence and he'll find the letter on the key and play along. Good first songs are "Twinkle Twinkle" and "Hello". Currently he's into playing different animal parts from Peter and the Wolf.
5) Singing the notes of a song. Step by step...sometimes I sing him Twinkle Star but sing the note letters instead of the words. Gradually he internalizes it and will start to apply it to the piano.

Welcome

2005-07-01T12:41:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Musical Child Blog!

This site is to aggregate fun, interesting and/or effective ideas for feeding a child's natural musical interests. We're constantly playing with music at home, music class, and daycare and occasionally some cool ideas emerge. I'll also menion any particularly good media, toys, and instruments for kids. Musical events in our home town of Portland, Oregon may also be reported.