Listening with Purpose, Part I

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Listening with Purpose, Part I

A lot of us…allow music to be a background to what we do and because of that we forget that listening is an active challenge to the brain. There’s so much auditory material in the background of our lives and it has made us lazy.

Graham Sheffield, chairman,
Royal Philharmonic Society

Classical music is everywhere. Not just in elevators as the phrase suggests, but in restaurants, buses, supermarkets, and commercials. We are taught, by the sheer fact that our everyday life is saturated with it to ignore it. We are conditioned to let music in general and classical music especially, take the role of background noise. What then are we missing in the process?

Helping our children listen with purpose requires our own ears to first be opened. Chances are that it has been a long time since you have listened to a piece of classical music with a critical and focused ear. How many instruments can you pick out? What’s the main melody and who has it first? How does the tempo (speed of the beat) affect you? What mood is being conveyed? Is the piece primarily legato (smooth) or marcato (marked and accented)? Lots of questions? Yes, there’s a lot to learn!

Even the youngest of children can attain aural discrimination with little effort and time. Of course, this means that classical music must be in their environment. The car is a perfect place to play listening games. Everyone is in the same place by necessity, and usually everyone can hear equally well. A bit of prep work will go a long way to making car trips fun and educational. After all, what homeschool mom or dad doesn’t appreciate logging in some school hours on the way to and from their many activities?

Some important areas to focus on while teaching your children (and yourselves!) to listen to classical music are instrumentation, pitch and rhythm, style and mood, and form. In this article I will focus on the first two topics.

Instrumentation:

• When you have a bit of time to explore, visit the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s instrument page and choose one or two instruments from each family. Listen to each example and come up with adjectives to describe the sound. Flutes might sound smooth and “hooty”; harpsichords sound sharp and bouncy; cellos sound mellow and flexible. Don’t make value judgments on your children’s choice of adjective, just get them thinking. Very few words are meant to just describe sound, so music borrows terms from visual (bright and dark) or physical properties (light and heavy, big and small). Allow them to use whatever analogies fit for them.
• Once you have explored a number of instruments, find music that isolates different families of instruments. Giovanni Gabrieli wrote wonderful brass music in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Mendelssohn’s Octet for strings is an accessible and fun piece for all ages and has a lovely melody that is easy to remember. Chanticleer is an excellent choral group that has dozens of CDs to their credit. African music often has isolated percussion sections.
• After listening to music for each family, listen to symphonic works with all of the instruments playing simultaneously (Some good ones to start with are Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture or Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony and you can easily find some history to go with both of these pieces to round out their lesson). Make up bingo cards with pictures of all of the instruments you’ve studied and see who can identify all of them first. Have them pantomime the way to play each instrument in a game of Musical Charades. Before long, your children will surprise you in the grocery store by shouting out, “Mom! I hear an oboe!”

Pitch and Rhythm:

• Pitch refers to the frequency of vibration of the sounds you hear, the relative high or low of the notes, and rhythm refers to the orderly (or sometimes disorderly) structure and organization of the sounds in relation to time. These concepts are a bit more intimidating, but with some time can prove to be rewarding ones to study.
• The best way to begin pitch experimentation with your children is by getting them to sing themselves. Young children (up to 2nd grade or so) have very limited ranges, especially on the lower end of the spectrum. Visit this online piano and after clicking on the word “scales” at the top right side, click the play button for the C scale. (Just in case you’re wondering what a scale is, watch this.) The C scale, beginning with middle C on a piano, is the main range for a young child. There are exceptions, but you will find that most children will not be able to match pitch much below or above those pitches. Adults have much lower ranges so what’s comfortable for you probably will not be comfortable for your children. Try out some recordings of children’s choirs to get an idea of the range your children can use.
• Purposeful listening for pitch can include the high and low of the music, the concept that smaller instruments make higher sounds (tie in some science and acoustics while you’re at it!) and larger instruments make lower sounds, the contour/shape of the melody (I like to have my children “paint” the line in the air with a paintbrush, or even their finger- up when the notes go up and down when they fall), and the consonance or dissonance of a piece (whether the notes sound like they blend well, or grate on each other).
• The best way to begin teaching rhythm is to find the beat. Whenever you hear music anywhere, tap the beat on your children, or have them tap it themselves if they are older. I used to tap when I held the babies in the snugli, or bounce with them and dance around the room. March with them to the beat, have them jump, give them pencils to use as drumsticks. Does it get faster or slower, or stay the same? Kids naturally feel the structure in music and you’d be hard pressed to have them not respond physically. As long as they’re not in danger of wrecking your furniture (or harming a sibling!), let them!
• To further work on rhythm, have them divide the beat. Tap the main beat of any piece that you hear, then break that in half and tap double the speed. Can you triple it? Quadruple it? The key is to help focus your children to stay even and steady with their beat. Give them a pencil and ask them to conduct. (Have them watch this to see what a conductor does.) With concentration, they can learn to feel it rather than hear it. That is when the music really gets into their gut.
• Some classical selections that are wonderful for the study of pitch are Mozart or Rossini arias from their operas. The melody lines are beautiful and have interesting contour. For easier pitch matching, choose more women singers than men but be sure to use a variety overall. Mozart’s Requiem also has a wonderful piece called the “Confutatis” that has juxtaposed sections of rhythmic, low parts sung by men against high, legato (smooth) lines sung by women. Copland’s Appalachian Spring has wonderful melodies and solo lines for different instruments. Any music can be analyzed for pitch study and you will be surprised by what your children notice when you ask them to really listen.
• Likewise, any piece can be used for finding the beat, or talking about rhythm. Try Mussorgsky’s A Night on Bald Mountain or Pictures at an Exhibition. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is rhythmically exciting, while Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring is rhythmically simple and fluid.

Once you begin practicing focused listening, you won’t be able to stop. Every piece of music you hear will have nuggets of beauty that stand out and those jewels you find will go with you throughout your life. Sharing this gift with your children will give them lifelong appreciation for The Finer Things.

Christine is a homeschooling mom of four, three boys and a girl ranging in age from infant to 7 years. A musician by trade, she desires to help other homeschoolers find the beauty and simplicity in teaching the arts to their children in her column, “The Finer Things”. Visit her at her blog, Fruit in Season.