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The Widening of A Child’s Musical World: Diversity in Kindermusik Music
It’s a common reaction – “Wow!” Educators, parents, pre-school directors and retailers alike have similar responses when they first listen to a Kindermusik At Home CD or cassette from beginning to end. “Wow – I’ve never heard such a wide diversity of music on a children’s musical recording!” or “I’ve always thought music had to be silly to appeal to my child. But Kindermusik is diverse, surprising and child-like, but not childish!”
It is a proud, steadfast hallmark of the Kindermusik philosophy that children grow and delight in a rich musical environment where interactive, child-initiated musical play is at the heart of the learning experience. But why does Kindermusik choose to take such a unique path in the variety of styles, arrangements and repertoires in the music it provides children and families around the world?
Patricia Campbell, Ph.D., is Chair of the Music Department at the University of Washington, a renowned ethnomusicologist, and author of Songs in Their Head and a consultant to Kindermusik International. Here, we share excerpts from an article in which she discusses the importance of providing children with culturally and stylistically diverse music.
“Children in the 21st century live rich, musical lives. They are growing up in a many-splendored world of musical expressions, where musical diversity flows daily to them from TV, videos, and sophisticated audio systems. As children listen and engage in musical experiences in their early years, they are acquiring a musical repertoire that will last their lifetimes. The ever-widening musical world is waiting there for children to know, and music teachers, parents, and childcare providers are key to the provision of these experiences for little ones. A goal of Kindermusik is to widen this musical world for all who enter the Kindermusik classroom by offering a wide diversity of tunes from many lands and sounds of many cultures.
All children are nurtured by the music of their environment that family members and the media provide for them. In the multi-cultural and global society of today, children’s own first musical culture is naturally joined by the sounds of others styles, singers, and sonic phenomena – be it Mozart or Vivaldi, Whitney Houston or Garth Brooks. Not only are children attuned to a greater diversity of musical expressions, they are more musically capable than we ever imagined. Children are perceptive listeners, sensitive performers, and thoughtful creators of music. It is a childhood constant – their music – and they all possess the capacity to perceive and process it, to make it and to express their thoughts and feelings through it.
So, contrary to what we may have once thought, children who come to their first music education experience are neither ‘blank slates’ nor without bountiful musical gifts already in initial stages of development. Their musical learning accelerates and broadens through the guidance of teachers, parents and childcare providers. Children are naturally inclined toward music, but it is also their right to know more music better for its various uses by them and for its profound meaning to them.
The musical world we can share in is vast and varied, and includes such diverse styles as music of the Mexican mariachi, blues, gospel, and African-American jazz expressions, Brazilian samba, Nigerian juju, the classical court music of Japan, China and Thailand, and the intertribal pow-wow celebrations of Native Americans. Many of these styles are sprinkled throughout the total scope of the Kindermusik curricula.
Listen to just a few selections on any Kindermusik CD and you’ll hear a rich diversity of multi-cultural music balanced with a mixture of musical styles, such as Cantonese Lullaby from Kindermusik Village®: Cock-A-Doodle-MOO!; Mary Ann, a West Indies calypso tune from Kindermusik Adventures®: Creatures at the Ocean; Gogo, an African dance song, from Adventures: Around the World; and the French Canadian Ah! les jolis papillons, from Kindermusik Our Time™: Fiddle-dee-dee.
Kindermusik classes encourage families to explore with the sound of different languages and the At Home CDs and Home Activity Books reinforce the invitation to expand home libraries beyond the ‘top ten hits’ or basic repertoire. Toddlers can be engaged by rattles from the Lakora Sioux nation and by the African shekere. Babies can be rocked to a Puerto Rican lullaby, and young children can dance to the rhythms of a West Indies calypso. Regardless of the language in which it is presented, children can learn lullabies, fingerplays, action songs, and singing games from many different cultures. Even while their parents struggle with the new phonetic sounds, pre-schoolers will absorb the language as readily as they do the melodies.
Read what the experts say about Kindermusik
