About Music Together®
Music Together® began in 1987 as an educational project of the Center for Music and Young Children, of Princeton, NJ, an organization dedicated to understanding how children develop musically. The Music Together program, which is designed for children birth (yes, actually birth!) to five years, is based on the center’s research findings, of which the most important ones are:
1. All children are musical. They have the same innate ability to learn music as language.
2. All children can achieve basic music competence (they can learn to sing in tune and keep the rhythm).
3. Parent participation and modeling is essential for the children’s musical growth, regardless of the parent’s musical ability.
4. Young children’s musical growth occurs best in a playful, musically rich, and developmentally appropriate setting, free of direct instruction and performance pressure, where learning activities are accessible, interesting, and fun for both children and adults.
Music Together teachers believe that music ability is as much a basic life skill as walking and talking. All children can learn to sing in tune, keep a beat, and participate in musical activities with pleasure and confidence, and it is their birth right to get the chance to do so. We nurture the child’s natural enthusiasm for music and movement as we sing, dance, chant, and play instruments in an informal setting that will enrich their musical environment and guide them towards a lifetime of music making enjoyment.
Community, participatory music making is a deeply human phenomenon gradually disappearing from our culture. In western cultures children’s music experiences are often limited to passive listening to recordings. Without the chance to actively make music, play with music, play in musical ways with their loved ones their music development suffers delays, just as their language development would suffer delays if they only experienced it from recordings and never got to participate. Many a child raised solely on recorded music will be unprepared in later life to appreciate music or to receive more formal music instruction.
About Whirligig Music
Whirligig Music was founded by Moni Kiraly and is ran joyfully by Moni and Brandy with the goal to bring Music Together to the communities of Dripping Springs, Buda/Kyle and the San Marcos area. In the meantime lots of families discovered the joy of family music making and the Whirligig Music community is happily growing – and humming, drumming, tickling, giggling, dancing, shaking and finding new ways of musical expression weekly!
Click here to read what parents participating in the program are saying and come join us, become part of our fun loving musical community and bring music home!
