Musical meaning for children and those who teach them.

It is always an amazing phenomenon when music teachers gather, but particularly when it is early on a Saturday morning. Gatherings of music teachers mean that music will be made, provocative thoughts about teaching and learning music will be raised and learning will likely happen. Any time is the right time for such gatherings, as teachers appear in demonstration of their tremendous commitment to music as performance and pedagogy. Early one morning in April 2005, blanketed in a Seattle mist, music teachers assembled together with the collective strength and passion of their commitment to the whole musician through a series of sessions about "making music last a lifetime." Of the various sub-themes that emerged, one that swept across the sessions concerned the matter of musical meaning--for people of all ages and for those who teach them.

We care about the experience and education of people in music and through music. As music teachers, the radiant and resonant sound of music is one of our prime gifts to the world. Teaching is a bona fide talent and skill, too, and it also is our gift to be able to facilitate and activate the musical selves of the people we teach--awaken in them their expressive potential--to help them craft their ability to think musically, perform, create and re-create musically. Because we are musicians and teachers both, we understand the coinciding points of music making and music teaching, and how one supports and enriches the other. Music is a powerful "property" and deeply satisfying process that is both personal and social. We understand the unique niche it fills in the lives of people everywhere, the claim that music has on the human psyche and in the human body. We play and sing and dance because we must, because it is a part of what makes us human, and we pride ourselves on what we can do to tap that human potential in those we teach.

There are several launch points regarding the roles and values of music in our cultures and communities: our music-pedagogy pathway, the children we teach, and the amazing power of music and its making. While these points may appear to comprise a circuitous route for examining musical meaning, they are nonetheless relevant for understanding ourselves, our students and our professional endeavor. With an under standing of these facets, we are able to marvel that we are in an amazing place in the world and are endowed with the privilege of living, working and playing through music and in music. We can revel in the knowledge that we possess the arts of musical expression and the human realm of teaching--giving to--others. These facets matter to those of us committed to the arts of music making and music teaching.

A Noble Calling

Musical meaning is at the heart of who we are and what we value. To be professionally Involved in music is one of life's noble callings. Music is one of the beautiful things in life, and across the world people are drawn to listen to music, dance to it, sing it and play it. Music is a human phenomenon, an artistic form that is both personally expressive and socially meaningful. The musical acts of performance, creative expression and informed listening can be richly fulfilling to all who engage in them. By hard work and sheer determination, some of the truly fortunate land in situations where music is what they "do" all day (and maybe well into the night). They make music as performers, composers, improvisers, arrangers and even sound and recording engineers, and as teachers they enable others to make music and understand it for its full intent. These music professionals need not work to support their musical interests; rather, their musical interests are the core of their professional work.

"Musicians who can, teach." This phrase is quite the 180-degree opposite of a stance taken by some who believe that if everything else fails or falls through, teaching is always there as "the fall-back career." This fallback view is uninformed, of course, or ill-informed. It suggests a hierarchy of specializations, with teaching at the bottom and all other means of musical activity piled high above it. It assumes that while few may make it as professional performers (or composers or arrangers, for example), everyone can be successful as music teachers. Rather, the opening phrase implies that some, but perhaps not all, musicians will succeed professionally as music teachers to children, youth or adults, but that there will be challenges to confront and overcome in the process of meeting the needs of individuals in groups in order to maximize their musical potential. Music education is a professional endeavor that requires particular traits and techniques, and not everyone has them or will be able to acquire them.

Some musicians see teaching as a fulltime activity. We are the musicians who teach in our home studios, conservatories and colleges, community centers and schools. We enter into the realm of music teaching for various reasons, chief among them an enthusiasm for developing in others the capacity to think and express ourselves in musical ways. We musicians who teach may have lived music for all of our lives, coming from musical families of singers and players, beginning our own musical study at an early age. Or we may have been musically curious for many years before our entrance as late as adolescence into our first formal lessons and ensemble experiences. We "grow" our musical skills and knowledge over time, in grueling practice sessions and grinding rehearsals; in theory, history and culture classes; and in the opportunities they can muster for making music. We recognize and relish the social interactivity of performing with others. We become aware of the good works of our music teachers and their dedication, patience, personal warmth and good humor, and we become inspired by our teachers to follow in their footsteps. We musicians who take up the call to teach, do so from the standpoint of our own musical expertise and our sincere interest in working with people. As rock-solid musicians ourselves, we learn to guide others in discovering music and acquiring the skill and knowledge for personal musical expression.

Not everyone is meant to teach music as a daily practice or as a focus of their life's work. It takes a special blend of both musical and personal qualities. For those who teach children and youth, particularly in classes and massed groups that operate within schools, and in private studio lessons, there are additional qualities worth having--vital strategies of communication that many experienced teachers will swear by. Even as a musician requires training and practice to become a proficient creator and re-creator of music, a music teacher also requires the pedagogical training and practice that is wrapped solidly around the subject of music.

Musical Children

If the act of teaching music is one of life's noble callings, it helps to understand the children who are the prime recipients of the teaching act. It also is important to note the music they already have within them, as they are not blank slates coming to us without musical experience; their music is already there inside them and in progress. We wonder: who are the children, musically speaking? What music emanates naturally from them? What music do children learn easily at home and school? How do they acquire musical knowledge and skills? What does music mean to children? Where is the joy for them in music making?

We understand children are musical from the beginning. They are vocalizing at birth, babbling rhythmically and across a spectrum of pitches by the end of their first year. Before age 3, they are singing discrete pitches, imitating and inventing songs with patterns. Their range and tessitura increases and, with training, children are singing well over an octave in tune and in time by the end of first grade. Likewise, their movements are falling into selected rhythmic patterns by age 3, and they are capable of clapping rhythmically and replicating short rhythms on instruments before kindergarten. It is no wonder, with such musical development, particularly in homes where music is valued and frequently heard, that children can be readied to read and even write quarter-, eighth- and half-note rhythms by school age. Their listening skills and motor development prepares them for instrumental play, too, so that children have developed the eye-hand coordination to benefit from instruction on the piano, violin and percussion instruments by the time they enter school. There are developmental tables in Music in Childhood (Campbell and Scott-Kassner, 2005), which, while not meant to prescribe with precision the stages at which children learn to sing in tune and move in time, provide a general sense of their musical growth from infancy onward.

Beyond these developmental sketches, there are the images we individually carry of children making music together-naturally, beyond the teacher's direct influence. We remember our own childhoods, think of the children we are raising or already have raised, and recall the many children we have taught over the years. Children are their own musical communities, and we remember them chanting to double-dutch and "plain" jump-roping, drumming their spoons on table tops, playing their singing games, swaying and head-nodding to their favorite tunes and singing in the wind. Their music can happen through sheer exuberance and drive, and it is their musical behaviors that create joy for those within earshot. In multiple settings of children, music is play, communal exchange, expressive energy It is vital to their being, it is social and it can happen without training. But thankfully, it is through training and with teachers who model the music well and facilitate learning that children can become even more musical.

We feel the joy of children who sing, dance and play. Children are preservers who hold fast to our past musical history, and they are inventors. They make the music we teach them to know, and they create their own. Give children a piano, and off they go, playing with the possibilities. Pots and pans will do, too, or sticks, boxes--anything they can get their hands on. Because they have tunes and grooves inside them, children express them with little provocation. They may play the Bach D Minor Invention as their assigned piece for the week, but we should not be surprised if they veer off into new territory, off the beaten-track and into their own need for musical invention. Children may become lost or ensnarled, and some of their music may go missing without teachers and other musically proficient adults to help the young along, however. They need their teachers to take them to their "musical maximum," beyond the point of their natural musical sensibilities. Teachers are their musical guides, and it is their knowledge of children's individual needs, ways and means that bring children to their fullest musical potential.

Lessons from the Children

As the little prince in Saint-Exuperey's classic work observed, "Adults never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome to be always and forever explaining things to them." Without explicit explanations, we learn from children through their gentle and joyful conversations. In fact, children's own words of wisdom about music and its meaning in their lives allow us insight for better pedagogical pathways that take them forward. The quips and quotes that follow belong to children in the Songs in Their Heads project, even as the interpretations come from my own reflections as a practicing music teacher (Campbell 1998).

"Music gets me going and gives me strength"--Carrie, age 6. The multiple effects of music are sometimes startling to realize, as it stimulates, sedates and motivates children. Music can settle down a child, as well as perk up another one. It can serve the timid and the thick-skinned, the serious and the happy-go-lucky and the restrained or repressed and the emotionally "unbridled." Through careful selection of music for play, work and quiet times, we teachers can help empower children, instill in them a strength of spirit and prepare them to perform their waiting tasks with energy and even cheerful demeanors. It would benefit us to tap into the knowledge of music therapists, who are trained in the application of music for the treatment of particular types of social behaviors, emotional conditions and even moods. The development of stronger relationships between teachers and therapists may provide for children's increased well-being, with recommendations for the use of music within the family, at school or in the studio lesson. Suggestions for the use of music as therapy can be found in Jayne M. Standley's Music Techniques in Therapy, Counseling, and Special Education (1991).

"I love the feeling of music"-Darryl, age 6. Music is a more than an auditory sensation: it is a thoroughly and all-encompassing physical experience. Perhaps more so than adults, children tend to feel music in a visceral way and are compelled to respond to it kinesthetically. Opportunities for children to listen to music "with their bodies" are golden, as they allow the dual modalities of aural and kinesthetic means to coincide so learning may occur. How do children move? Watch them and see how their feet, fingers, arms and legs reflect the rhythmic pulse, the subdivisions, the meter, the rhythmic patterns, the melody's pitches or contours, the timbres, textures and forms. With this information in tow, teachers can model gestures that illuminate the music's meter, a prominent rhythm or repeated and contrasting themes or sections--and engage children to join in these gestures. Such strategies build musical understanding on the basis of children's natural propensity to move.

"I'd be like a museum, keeping the songs"--Beth, age 8. Even in their short, young lives, children are preservers of music. They are song keepers, and they retain and maintain the music from their family and community experiences, rehearsing them from time to time, storing it for some future chance to share it. When teachers show interest, they may open the doors to their musical "museums" and let their melodies and rhythms out to be heard. While teachers have an obligation to bring new music to children, they can also give time to children's very own music "exhibit" that can be shown and shared. Their melodies, rhythms and songs are well worth teasing out of them and putting on display, and what one child gains from sharing his or her music, others may learn and be enriched by.

"When I sing, everyone seems to like me"--Tuyen, age 11. In the daily solitary practice, the social benefits of music making may not be immediately identifiable. Yet, it is one of music's greatest values that relationships develop through the interactions occurring in the process of performing and creating music together. There is the bond of trust that builds between student and teacher in the course of the weekly lesson. There also is the undeniable reality of respect, regard and gratitude that one receives when performing to an appreciative audience. We can recall the warm reception offered by listeners to a single simple song, or to a full recital, and the warm-and-fuzzy feeling of acceptance we have received from friends, family, colleagues and "experts" who have enjoyed our performance. Music brings great joy to grateful listeners-joy that is turned back to the child as reinforcement for a job well done.

"Music is about stuff you do" James, age 8. It hardly needs to be said that children prefer action to passivity. Rather than listening and looking while others demonstrate or tell about a topic, children want to experience music for themselves. They wiggle, twist, turn and bounce when their teacher's words become too long-winded, or when the demonstration of how to play gets too long. Surely, they will need to learn onlooker-audience behavior as they mature, but children's learning is most effective when they can do to understand, reinforced by brief occasions to hear and see. How do children define "doing"? Singing counts as doing, although for some children it must be combined with other more active engagements, such as employing suitable actions. Movement to music is doing, too. Most obviously, musical instruments engage children to do: playing the great literature, exploring new territory, improvising from what skills and repertoire they have developed. For children who are into the thick of piano, violin or clarinet lessons, they are doing to the max--so long as their teachers move aside and allow them to play more than say, to experience the music by making it.

"I listen and figure it out"--Manuel, age 9. One of the fundamental beliefs of musical training is that listening is key. Young musicians develop notational literacy when the musical system provides it, and yet, an understanding of symbols cannot be expected of children until they are matched with the sounds. Because music is first an aural phenomenon, not even the most pyrotechnical performer can survive and thrive in music without well-trained ears. Listening to "figure out" music takes time, but it is time wisely spent. Careful listening enhances children's learning of a song, rhythm or complete musical piece. Children can grow their listening acuity through a variety of lesson strategies: counting the silences, conducting the meter, drawing the rising and falling lines of a melody (in air, on an imaginary poster-board) or imagining the purpose and function of the music. They can be led to sing or play musical dialogues, imitating rhythmic and melodic phrases that are delivered to them or devising answers to musical questions. They can go so far as to accept the challenge of learning a musical work by ear. (See an array of ear-training and larger listening strategies in R. Murray Schafer's Ear Cleaning [1967] and my own Teaching Music Globally [2004].) No one would argue the importance of notation as a remarkably useful timesaving technology for learning music quickly, but the ability to learn music by listening is not to be underrated or overlooked in developing children's musicianship.

"My inside-singing is my guide to my playing"--Alan, age 10. Who sings inside for no one to hear? Thoughtful musicians do, who need to work out inside, intellectually, what they will perform aloud. For "inside-singing" is like inner hearing, thinking musical sounds outside of their physical presence. It is singing silently, hearing inside ourselves what we have heard before. It is a reasonable strategy: a tendency to rehearse or a means for remembering music that is in some way meaningful to us. Kodaly was chief among those who advocated inner-hearing as a principal goal of a musical education (1974). Both inside-singing and inner-hearing are manifestations of aural skill development, a certain sign that the ear has undergone training and has realized its capacity.

Music As Power

Music is valued, in no small part, because music is powerful to children, youth, adults and elders--and music teachers like ourselves. It is laden with intellectual, emotional and social content and, as such, gives multiple meanings to all who perform and listen to it. Music is more than mere modes; it is involved in human mood making (and breaking). It is more than sonic sound-bathing; it is deeply resonant immersion of mind, body and soul. It is beyond the technical (although technique is critical); it is gestures and phrases and full-on forms of expression. Music as power is a thought worth holding, for it may otherwise pass us by that we have an amazing energy source at our fingertips to know and to facilitate to the experience of others.

Among the most powerful accounts of "music as power" is Louis Sarno's Song from the Forest (1993), subtitled "My Life Among the Ba-Benjelle Pygmies." It is a personal account of his journey to central Africa to learn of the vanishing world of the forest people, the Ba-Benjelle people, whose music he had heard and which had entranced him. He begins his adventurous account: "I was drawn to the heart of Africa by a song. In retrospect it seems wondrously strange that a mere song should have lifted me out of the rut of my life, and sent me off on an adventure that has wrought such deep and permanent change in me, an adventure that continues still."

Sarno is not a professional musician, and yet, he admitted music had always been intriguing to him. He claimed to have enjoyed Beethoven and Schubert as a boy, but then had been turned in other directions as he grew older. He was living in Paris in the late 1980s when, one night, he turned on the radio and rediscovered music. For him, the song was unlike anything he had ever heard before. (Listen sometime to the sound of the Ba-Benjelle Pygmies, for its subtle polyphony that weaves a rising and falling melody in endless repetition, hypnotic sounds like waves breaking on the shore.) Sarno was entranced and discovered that the music hailed from the region of the western Congo Basin in Central Africa. Within a few days he bought a one-way ticket to Bangui, capitol of the Central African Republic, where he would have ahead of him an overland journey of some 600 miles to the heart of the Ba-Benjelle country.

Unreal? In fact, it is very real. Incredible? Almost. Incomprehensible? To some, perhaps. Yet, this is but one example of the power of music, reaching out to draw the listener--like magnet to iron--and we individually know other examples in our lives. We have made our own journey into music, and we act as a guide for our students' discovery of the music, too. We need no one-way ticket to some exotic land, yet we share a similar motivation as Sarno's, as do our students: to discover music, its making, its compelling beauty. Music has been transformative to us in our lives, as it also transforms our students, helping them to transcend the everyday. Some 50 years ago, Waldo Masserman, in The Practice of Dynamic Psychiatry (1954), noted that "music is a defense against fear and aloneness." Following to the other end of the spectrum, we are aware that music brings stability, sociability and tranquility.

Across the planet, people know music as power. The Navajo believe that song can bring supernatural power and blessing to help cure a sick person. The Kaluli of Papua New Guinea assert that music reflects their relationship with the natural and supernatural worlds in which they live. Village healers from Ecuador to India use chant and song believed to have been inspired by divine sources to seek protection for individuals, families and whole communities. Steve Old Coyote, a Suquamish Indian across the Puget Sound from Seattle, describes the four essential songs of healing on the Port Madison Indian Reservation: "The first song is for calling in the spirits. The second song identifies what's wrong, and in the third song we ask for the manifestation of healing. We sing the fourth song to give thanks to the creator for listening to us." (Cook 1997). Without music, the power of healing does not happen, because it is integral to the process.

Music is power to our children. While they may not yet have the verbal capacity to express it (we wonder whether music is ever completely expressible in words), children feel the music as they hear it, and are captivated by it. Beyond the medicinal, therapeutic, cultural and even the neurological and biophysical effects that it renders, music connects to children in ways no other phenomenon in their lives can. The outpouring of an emotionally charged explanation from a first-grade boy speaks legions: "I like music. I can't explain it: Sometimes it makes me happy, sometimes sad, but all the times it's there like a friend, and I need it" (Campbell and Scott-Kassner, 2005).

Conclusion

From our rendezvous in the mist-laden Pacific Northwest one Saturday in spring, we collected ourselves to consider our own roles as musician-teachers, our children and the very phenomenon of music itself. Back in hometowns, studios and classrooms, we may be finding ourselves a bit more certain of our work, refueled and retooled in the shared ideas of music as performance and pedagogy. We owe it to ourselves to celebrate our noble calling as teachers and to affirm our continuing belief in our students--children, youth, adults and elders. We should take the time to take stock in this marvelous and most meaningful musical world in which we live. We know a calling that we cannot deny; it allows us to live musically and engage people to become all that they can musically be.

REFERENCES

Campbell, Patricia Shehan, 1998. Songs in Their Heads: Music and Its Meaning in Children's Lives. New York: Oxford University Press.

Campbell, Patricia Shehan, 2004. Teaching Music Globally. New York: Oxford University Press.

Campbell, Patricia Shehan, and Carol Scott-Kassner, 2005. Music in Childhood. 3rd Edition. Belmont, CA: Thomson

Cook, Patricia Moffit, 1997. Shaman, Jhankri, and Nele. Roslyn, NY: Ellipsis Arts.

Kodaly, Zoltan, 1974. Selected Writings of Zoltan Kodaly. London: Boosey and Hawkes.

Sarno, Louis, 1993. Song from the Forest. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Shafer, R. Murray, 1967. Ear Cleaning. Don Mills, Ont: BMI Canada.

Standley, Jayne M., 1991. Music Techniques in Therapy, Counseling, and Special Education. St. Louis: MMB Music.

Patricia Shehan Campbell is the Donald E. Peterson professor of music at the University of Washington, where she teaches courses about the interface of ethnomusicology and education. She is the author of several books and has lectured worldwide on the pedagogy of world music and children's musical involvement.