Put On Some Music - What Do You See?

Here’s a column I wrote a long time ago that might help someone struggling with kids and music:

Put on some music. What do you see? Music can be a visible art. When you teach children how to play in the minds eye, musically moving their imagination or enhancing a story through music, it can be a real part of seeing life a bit more clearly.

It begins by letting children become familiar with a piece of music. Letting them listen often allows them make the music their own. Little children who are exposed to what is commonly known as classical music love it right away.

Not so surprising, very young children can listen a few times, and with what seems an unbelievable stretch, can hum some fairly complicated works fairly quickly. When young children recognize a piece of Bach or Handel, they come running. “I know that music, it goes . . .” and if a parent or teacher has taught them, they can tell you a little story.

Teaching children the art of listening might include pictures. Here’s an example:

Playing and listening to Bach’s “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring” while looking at pictures of the world’s great Gothic cathedrals is an enlightening experience for young children. “Wow,” says the child who’s never seen such a structure. Add Bach’s “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” to the Romanesque counter part and you have a real art and music lesson.

But pictures aren’t always necessary. Some music is better by story. Arron Copeland’s Appalachian Spring is such a piece. It’s a story of frontier life that can be introduced to children by first setting the stage of the panorama which can be heard in the beginning. The sun is rising. The day beginning in the wide open spaces of any man’s country.

The animals wake. Dear move gently in the woods, fish swim to the morning sun on the water. Later, the smaller animals appear from behind trees, from burrows, from under the fronds. There is enough repetition, “there’s the squirrel again,” and “can you hear the raccoon still balancing on that rock” to go back and forth between animals while the children listen. When we hear the bear coming in from the depths of the woods, crashing into the joy with urgency, suspense and mystery, children really see it.

The bear brings the whole world into question. Then we see the animals again, playful and active tumbling through the woods in a playful frolic demonstrating the endless repetitions of the seasons changing in the woods and the unreported picture of nature.

Then comes man. What is his mood? Is he in a wagon? Can you hear the wheels turn? Is he on horseback? Does he have his family with him? Can you see the children? As the music opens up again to a whole different feeling, our children can really feel the presence of the whole family -- Man, woman and children -- a boy and a girl.

As they come carefully through the woods, an ever quickening music with side angles depict the addition of each family member to the story of woodland life. You can see the building of a log cabin in that mind’s eye. You can smell the smoke of the fire.

Teaching music to children isn’t hard. It takes a little time and some imagination. Like seeing a wonderful train ride through cities, country side and villages in Dvorak’s New World Symphony. but then music takes us all on a ride through vast reaches of a child’s imagination.

Put on some music. What do you see?