NJMEA Early Childhood Music And Advocacy Highlighted On Caucus NJ With Steve Adubado Amy Burns Far Hills Country Day School aburns@fhcds.org
L
ast fall, I was contacted by the producers of Caucus NJ with Steve Adubado to appear on the show to discuss the benefits of exposing infants to music and the benefits of technology in music education. After speaking with the administration at my school and researching more on the topic through Missy Strong’s articles and resources she gave in the course, First Steps in Music by John Feierabend, I decided to participate. I took part in a solo discussion and a panel discussion about the importance of music in early childhood education, as well as the benefits of technology in music education. The Importance Of Early Childhood Music Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967), a Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist, educator, and the inspirer of the Kodály Approach to music education, was asked at what age music education should begin. “Nine months before the birth of the child”. Later he refined his answer: “I would go further: the musical education of the child should start nine months before the birth of the mother”. (Kokas, 1970; Salbert, 2015) When reading articles and works written by Zoltán Kodály, John Feierabend, Missy Strong, Lili M. Levinowitz, and more, there is a strong case for the
importance of early childhood music, especially ages 0-9 when the brain is developing rapidly. When reading Missy’s article titled, Neuroscience and Music Education: Why What We Do Is So Important published by SmartMusic, we learn that “a baby is born with about 100 billion neurons, each with approximately 2,500 synaptic connections. By the time a child is three years old, it is close to 15,000 per neuron.” (Strong, 2019). The neurons are basically the cells for communication and the synapses are the connections between the neurons. By the time a child is five years old, the brain “reaches approximately 90 percent of adult size…unless cells form complex neural networks and negative blocking is avoided, unused cells are pruned and not recaptured. Peak times for learning are diminished.” (Gordon, 2013) Why is it important for music educators to know this? Due to the facts that nurturing stimulates synaptic growth in the early years, synaptic connections among neurons are vital and significant, and repetition during these early years develops habits, exposing music to infants is essential for their musical aptitude to grow (Feierabend, 1995; Gordon, 2013; Strong, 2019). According to Edwin Gordon, music aptitude is a measure of the potential to learn music. When children reach a certain age, around nine, children’s musical aptitude peak. After that peak, the loss of creating a musical foundation of learning cannot be rewritten (Gordon, 2013). However, this does not mean that students cannot learn or appreciate mu-
TEMPO 28
sic. It means, as Feierabend states, that “there is an irreversible loss of that musical potential” (Feierabend & Strong, 2019). As Missy points out from Stefan Koelsch’s research, all children are inherently musical. In her podcast with John Feierabend, they speak to the fact that just as schools do for subjects such as math, art, reading, etc., children need excellent instructors of music to draw out their musicality (Strong, 2019; Feierabend & Strong 2019). The benefits of music education in early childhood are numerous. As stated above, children’s musicality will develop greatly during that period of time. In addition, learning music from the ages of 0-6 is similar to how children learn to speak a language at that age. As with the language babble stage, children learn music through a sequence which includes singing in tune and marching to a beat (Levinowitz, 1998). Exposing children to music has also shown an acceleration in brain development, particularly in the areas of language acquisition and reading skills (Bright Horizons Education team; Gersema, 2016). Steve often invites experts in the field of early childhood brain development onto his show to show support for the Right From the Start NJ Campaign (https:// rightfromthestartnj.org). Right From the Start NJ is a public awareness campaign created to educate the public at large and New Jersey policymakers about the critical importance of the early years of child development, from birth to three.
OCTOBER 2019
