Open the .pdf file: February 2010 Newsletter

“A child who plays before he sings may remain unmusical for a lifetime. That is why we encounter so many skillful pianists who have no idea of the essence of music.” (Zoltan Kodály)

Today during class I started  a song by tapping my knees. Everybody joined in. Suddenly I realized that while I was listening in my head to the song I was going to start, the others could not hear it, because they did not know what to expect… I said with a cheeky smile: I can hear a song in my head!

To illustrate my point about hearing songs in our heads, I led the class into a little round of audiation*: we sang part of the lines and “listened” to the other part while keeping the beat.

*Audiation is a favorite big word of Music Together teachers (coined by music educator E. E. Gordon in 1975 although the concept itself was certainly not new).

By audiation we mean the process of mentally hearing and comprehending music, when the sound is not actual physically present. (Note the difference from audition, that means perceiving music that is physically present.) Audiating music is like thinking in a language, and just as important to our musical development and understanding of music as thinking is for our language development and use. Developed audiation also includes a next level music understanding that enables us to understand and consciously predict patterns in music we have not heard before (a crucially important skill for creating novel music and improvisation).

Zoltan Kodály, composer, philosopher and music educator of the early 20th century was greatly concerned with the importance of “hearing music”. While a professor of the Liszt music academy, he realized that many of his students, although often technically very competent could not “hear” music in their heads! He then did not only start developing his music education methodology  for young children but also  embarked on a long term project to reform music education in schools. He felt strongly that in order to become truly musical, children have to learn to sing before playing an instrument, that musical education needs to start with learning songs by ear and learning to “hear” them before formal or instrumental music education.

Is it really possible, you might wonder, being technically competent and yet not musical?
Well, consider it this way: playing an instrument is an external skill, while singing is internal. It is certainly possible to play notes on an instrument without having “heard” them first or even without having developed audiation. It is, however, not possible to sing anything which has not first been imagined by the inner ear. Singing also shows that the music has been assimilated and understood. Singing is vital for developing the essential part of a musician: the inner hearing – or audiation.

I am sure we all share the experience of liking a certain kind of music yet thinking “there is no way I could play that”. I have that with caribbean rhythms. I enjoy cuban/caribbean rhythms and  I think I “get” them when listening. Yet, I cannot independently play them because I cannot imagine them in my head. I cannot audiate them, despite of my liking them they are not “mine” by assimilation. There is a lot of music I can audiate, but cuban rhythms, are unfortunately not (yet) part of my repertoire. I could play them (or learn to play) from scores, but I will not be able to play them before hearing them in my head: we only create what we can hear in our heads!

The reason Music Together is encouraging both parents and children to sing is because we firmly believe that audiation is a very important prerequisite of being musical and singing is the best way of developing audiation. Music Together is offering songs in a wide range of rhythms, keys, modalities and tonalities: to help the kids internalize and assimilate it all. We sing the songs, chant the chants, play with them, change them, make up new ones, because it is fun, of course… But also to model to the kids, to encourage them to do the same so that it all can become their own, part of their own musical vocabulary to work (and play!) as their more advanced musical understanding will develop. This rich vocabulary also will come in handy for them when they start their formal (and instrumental) music learning.