By Dr. Paul U Lee
At the very moment that a child is born, parents are often at awe with the sudden
presence of a new creation, so perfect and full of potential. Their instinctive feeling for
their child’s vast potential is mirrored by an amazing transformation that the child will go
through during the first few years of his/her life to begin fulfilling that potential.
Although a newborn is “pre-wired” to learn life’s many basic but complicated skills, such
as language acquisition and motor skills, how well they master these skills will depend on
their environment and the types of stimuli that they are exposed to during those early
years. Research findings in developmental psychology have established the existence of
developmentally “sensitive” periods, during which a child must learn certain aspects of
language or risk never being able to learn them at all. Fortunately, language is so
prevalent in our lives that most children are not at risk of missing the sensitive periods of
language acquisition. However, we are not so fortunate when it comes to music
acquisition. It has analogous developmentally sensitive periods, during which a child
must obtain basic musical competence or risk never acquiring them. In language, certain
syntactic and tonal structures of a language will forever be lost to a child if s/he is not
exposed to them during the first couple years of his/her life. Similarly, basic musical
components, such as tonality and rhythm, also need to be acquired during these early
developmental years to be learned effectively.
In the Bay Area, we have an interesting demographic of well-informed and concerned
parents who are often aware of the desirability of early music education. However, their
desires to expose their children to music during the early years result in inquiries about
getting formal music lessons at ages of 3 and 4. This is highly problematic since formal
music education requires many skills – such as fine motor skills, long attention span, the
ability to read musical notes, etc. - which may be beyond reach for our children at an
early age, especially if they have yet to achieve basic musical competence. Trying to
teach formal music in these situations may put our children at risk of becoming frustrated
with music and losing interest in it forever. Children have innate understanding of real
achievements, and they become motivated when they are put into an environment in
which they could succeed. Therefore we owe them to expose them to musical experience
at an early age that is positive and teaches them to achieve musical competence that is
age-appropriate at each developmental stage.
There are a number of early music programs in the Bay Area that aims to improve basic
musical competence of young children, regardless of their musical abilities. This is a
noteworthy goal since more competent they are musically, better they will be able to
appreciate music in their surroundings. However, these programs leave a large gap in the
overall music education for the parents who want their children to acquire advanced
musical skills needed to learn various instruments such as piano, violin, etc. A set of
programs is needed that can effectively leverage the basic musical competence that the
children have gained in the early music education programs and use them to introduce
basic components of formal music education so that the children will not find the
transition to formal music lessons so jarring.
In order to bridge that gap, the New Mozart School of Music has introduced a set of
music courses that are designed to be fun but instructive. The aim of these courses is to
teach the children to achieve both basic musical competence and gain foundation for
formal musical training. The transition from basic musical competence to formal musical
training has been designed into the curriculum. The courses start from early toddler ages
(2 to 3 years old) where heavy emphasis is put on exposure to a rich set of musical
tones and rhythms to develop their basic musical competence. During these classes,
parents are often surprised by how much the children enjoy these exercises and how
quickly they pick them up, as they seem to generally underestimate innate musical
abilities of young children. The courses for older children (3 to 5 and 5 to 7 years old)
mix exercises that reinforce basic music competence (or introduce them to children who
have not been expose to them during toddler ages) with exercises that gradually introduce
various formal musical techniques, such as solfege singing and basic keyboarding. All of
the lessons are introduced in settings that are fun and positive, so that children learn
easily and without undue effort. For children who take these courses from toddler to age
7 will have been exposed to a rich musical experience and gained innate understanding of
basic “musical language”. In addition, they will have solid foundation to lead into formal
music lessons (e.g. piano, violin, etc.) and are well-positioned to maximize their success
in that arena if they choose to do so.
Dr. Paul Lee holds a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Stanford University. This article
stems from his interest in cognitive and neurological foundations of musical competence
during child’s cognitive development and his interactions with Christine Shin, who has
extensive training in classical music and early childhood music education theories.
© 2006-20011 Dr. Paul U. Lee. All Rights Reserved.
No Part of this article maybe distributed, or copied without the consent of its author
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