Speaking music as a first language: guidelines

How to start speaking music with your child

For those with limited musical backgrounds there are numerous books and videos to refer to or even electronic keyboards with dozens of tunes built in and keys that light up to indicate what to push. Harmony is often available with a single keystroke, but it's still useful to know how to finger the chords. It's nice if one can find someone to help with basic concepts, but beware of any who tell you that you're doing it all wrong. Finding the way that inspires your children, the one they enjoy is always first priority.

Basic concepts:
To be avoided:

1. Don't refer to notes by their keyboard note names (C,D,E…). These are specific to one key. It's better to use something universal that works in any key.
2. Don't write music down in any form initially - visual information is not best for young children and is often only second best for older students. Use sound recordings, MIDI, MP3. Get kids to hear it, feel it, imitate it and play it over and over again.
3. Don't restrict students to a piano. Electronic keyboards are cheap, portable, perfectly good for learning theory, may be used with earphones when silence is required and most of them can transpose your playing into any key.
4. Don't worry about getting a touch-sensitive keyboard. They're nice, but unnecessary. Bach didn't use one.
5. Don't worry about what's right, usual, or what the composer intended. Find what sounds good to you and the kids.
6. Don't force kids to practice or to work on their own unless and until they prefer to do it on their own.
7. Don't discourage children from reading music if they evince interest in doing so. Give them whatever they're ready for.
8. Don't require a specific amount of practice time. There is a difference between a goal to spend an hour and a goal to learn something. It's easy enough to make an hour go by if that is what is demanded but it doesn't necessarily accomplish much. Let kids set their own goals and meet them.
9. Don't discuss this with a piano teacher unless you are prepared for an argument.

Useful approaches:

1. Start early. Let kids touch the keys and hear the result as soon as they can touch the keyboard. You can hold or mount a stick across above the keyboard to keep a toddler from being able to strike the keys with too much force.
2. Get kids to listen a lot to simple music they would like to play!
3. Do yourself what you would like your kids to do.
4. Always have a keyboard or other instruments handy. Take one along on picnics, when camping or visiting friends. At less than $60, it's reasonable to own several keyboards (see resources below).
5. At home, always have the keyboard out in a central place, inviting anyone to sit down and play (earphones may be advisable for when the baby's sleeping).
6. Imitate what you hear and get children to copy you.
7. Show good finger positioning and play games with using all of the fingers with equal pressure and speed up and down the keyboard - slow, fast, galumphing.
8. Practice conducting (moving, waving, winking, tapping, whatever) the music you hear and get them to follow. Find the strong beats and the weak ones.
9. Get kids to know the scale and get a feel for scale degrees.
10. Refer to scale degrees as simply 1,2,3… (do, re, mi… works fine too if you prefer.) Later they will be able to apply this to any key.
11. Just choose one scale to begin with. All white notes (C major) is fine. Some people like all black notes (almost) using F# (G-flat) which is also fine.
12. Practice putting well-known tunes into numbers (Yankee Doodle: 1 1 2 3 1 3 2 5. The Barney theme (This Old Man): 5 3 5 5 3 5 6 5 4 3 2 3 4)
13. Teach the simple, easily played chords in the scale you have chosen, starting with the I,V and IV chords (tonic, dominant, subdominant, Roman numerals are commonly used for chords to avoid confusion), moving on to the II, III and VI chords, all in major and minor and seventh forms.
14. Show kids how chords appear in multiple inversions and how fingering convenience and sound and are often a trade off - with the former being more important for beginners.
15. Demonstrate different accompaniment figures, chord patterns, arpeggios, Alberti Bass. Jingle Bells is good for that.
16. Play listening games. Identify the notes, chords and chord progressions you hear. In a restaurant a child calls out "That's a major VI chord going to a II, just like "Angels We Have Heard on High" right?
17. Show kids that the notes in the melody dictate what the chords will be and that it's really not hard to choose the right one. If the difference can't be heard, it doesn't matter which one you use.
18. Show embellishing the melody with thirds or sixths as dictated by the harmony.
19. As needed, show kids the relative minor (A minor if you're working in C) and how the minor often wants notes of the scale sharped in melody and harmony.
20. As needed, show kids the scales in keys closely related to your home key (in C, that would be G major, F, etc., and explain that in each of these, you just start your scale numbers, 1 2 3…, in a different place.)
21. After kids have acquired musical understanding and keyboard proficiency (and particularly after they have composed music they want to share), then it may be time to teach them to write music. With the musical understanding they have, they will probably find writing music very easy. It is often quite challenging for sight readers.
22. Occasionally a harmony or, more rarely, a melody may defy auditory analysis. Then it is permissible to cheat by finding and referring to the score. It's usually quite easy to find a MIDI file online that can be imported into a music composition program, examined, and played slowly one voice at a time.
23. Advanced students may want to learn all of their skills in each key in the circle of fifths. Pick a simple and then a complex piece that can then be modulated around through all the keys.
24. As with any homeschooling subject, be an intellectual role model for your kids. Your studying and practicing makes study and practice something that kids will respect and naturally want to do.