On Reading Notes

I frequently get calls from parents eager to start their young children in music. I love these calls, because there’s nothing I like to talk about more.  Often the question of reading music comes up, and often the parent would like that to happen sooner rather than later.

The parent’s intention is right on target:  Give their child an opportunity to learn music.  Start young.  Take them to the best place in town.  (I improvised that part.)  But if we’re not careful, such enthusiasm can backfire if not channeled toward the child’s best interest.  Pushing a child under six years to grapple with written notation can frustrate or bore them to the point of  taking a dislike to music.  Or sometimes the parent sees that frustration and decides music is not for them. And if they never try again—as they often don’t—it’s a shame.

I’m not against reading music.  I read music, most of the people I know read music, and it’s certainly worth learning to do well.  Besides being a universal way for musicians to communicate with each other, it gives us immediate access to centuries of music.  Everyone who studies at Musical Beginnings for a reasonable amount of time learns how to read music.  All that said, knowing how to read notes  does not make you a musician.  Both music history and the music industry today are filled with examples of superlative musicians who can’t read a note.  Good music comes from inside.  Even classical players, for whom note reading is integral, have to feel and understand what they’re playing in order for it to be something the rest of us want to hear.   

The past two decades have given us several credible research studies about how the brain—particularly a young child’s brain--learns music.  Here is a quick overview:

Learning music is like learning a language.   Just as we don’t put pencils in  toddlers’ hands before they can speak a coherent sentence, neither do we want to drill  preschoolers on note names before they can feel a beat. By the time a child is introduced to the written note, here’s what we want them to be able to do:

•Keep a steady beat.

•Recognize and execute subdivisions of that beat, and rhythmic patterns.

•Sing in tune and recognize melodic patterns.

•Improvise within a simple harmonic framework.

Sound simple?  Perhaps not to an adult.  But for a young child, it really can be.  Presented in the right way, children under seven years will absorb and integrate these skills naturally and joyfully, with their whole beings.  Then when they start to read music, and they’ll know what they are reading. 

So will a four-year-old will still be learning music even if they’re not reading notes or bowing a violin? Most emphatically, yes.  And what they learn will be more vital to their long-term success than being able to discern the lines of the staff a year earlier than their peers.  When little ones in music and movement classes  begin instrumental instruction in a year or two or three, they move faster, grasp notation more easily, and play more musically than they would if they had started right off on an instrument.

Are there exceptions?  Of course.  There are children who don’t enjoy the class dynamic, although this is rare.  There are children who can intuitively make music from notes on a page despite no previous training.  But, according to research in the field and my own experience with hundreds of children over the years, the VAST MAJORITY of young children benefit greatly from music and movement classes, they enjoy them, and through them they develop a joyful relationship to music that later carries them through the ups and downs of learning to play an instrument.

Remember, these are very little people we’re talking about, whose brains are wired to learn through play.  I say let them have some fun with music first.