“I want my child to start piano lessons.” I hear this statement ALL the time. YES! GOOD! HOORAY! WONDERFUL! GO FOR IT!
But wait. Is this truly the beginning? Is this where we start? Not quite.
Music is a language. For many it is a foreign language. It is knowable, learnable, and perhaps even inexhaustible. It is a beautiful language from God that can miraculously unite spoken languages when words cannot. I don’t have to speak German to appreciate Mozart. I don’t have to be fluent in Latin to listen to Gregorian chant. True, it helps to know Italian when experiencing Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville” but I can still enjoy (and even memorize!) the music even if I don’t understand it all.
But the point is this: music is easy and yet complicated, can be studied for years and yet picked up in minutes. There are several different stages of interacting with music, if you will. You can listen, appreciate, love, learn, study, and master all kinds of different music at all levels.
Stage one: listen (everyone does this whether they like it or not)
Stage two: appreciate (beyond just listening, this is caring)
Stage three: love (beyond just appreciating, this is having a personal connection)
Stage four: learn (beyond just loving, this is desiring to know more)
Stage five: study (beyond just learning, this is digging deeper with more purpose)
Stage six: master (beyond just studying, this is becoming “wise” in music.
The first three stages can be done by anyone, regardless of music lessons, and, in fact, should be started WAY before formal music lessons of any kind begin. If you are wanting your child to begin piano lessons, don’t try to skip stages one through three because each of these stages “sets the stage” for the next stage.
You want your child to start piano lessons? Great, it starts yesterday. But there is still time to catch up. There is ALWAYS time to catch up. It is NEVER too late to learn piano and it is NEVER too late to appreciate music. But it is a language and must be studied in order to be understood. And the first step is both the easiest and, for many, the hardest. Listen.
Stage One: Listen
Listen to the kind of music you want your children to appreciate. Expose them to music. Expose them to GOOD music. Expose them to a VARIETY of good music. Listen while driving. Listen while reading. Listen while doing homework. Listen while cleaning.
Choose good quality music with a wide variety – and a LOT of it! Allow your children to experience the Baroque harpischord as well as the African salsa drum, Paganini’s violin etudes as well as the crazy silly otamatone! There is SO much fun and inspiring music that God has created for us to discover and enjoy so that we can glorify Him no matter what nation we are from!
Still stuck on exactly how to start? Choose your method…CDs? USB? YouTube? Pandora? The possibilities are endless these days. Now write a list of musicians or albums you know about and enjoy. Keith and Kristin Getty? John Williams? Mozart? Vivaldi? Share those with your children. How about genres of music. Renaissance? Classical? Romantic? Jazz? Now start researching what other styles of music exist that you might not be familiar with. Mongolian throat singing? Prepared piano? Russian ballets? Bollywood? Let’s add in some interesting instruments. Erhu? Bodhran? Electone? Theremin?
Yikes! We’ve got a good list going now! Choose ONE new genre, musician, or instrument to listen to each week. Just one. And you’ll be amazed how the discoveries keep coming! What is the goal of stage one? LISTEN. Just listen. Listen often. You’ll quickly move into stage two and three as you and your children discover their favorites, but don’t stop with favorites. Keep listening. Discover Stomp, Blast, PaGAGnini, Victor Borge, Adeimus, John Philip Sousa, handbells, spoons, alphorn, balalaika, contra bass clarinet, rain stick music, Dixieland, Canadian Brass, Klezmer, the Fightin’ Texas Aggie Band, Louis Armstrong, The Five Browns, “Soon Ah Will Be Done,” “Stealing Apples,” “Vltava,” and “Toccata and Fugue in d minor.”
Browse ideas on my YouTube playlists and start your own! But whatever you do, don’t limit yourself to elevator music and the radio…be intentional and start your own music journey and the music journey of your children today!