Reading Music 2

(part 2 of 6 from the article Reading Music)

Why don’t you give written music right away?

Music is sound—an auditory experience, not a visual one.  Students should be exposed to good-sounding music from the very beginning.  They can recreate beautiful sounds, just as they recreated spoken words, long before they have the experience and skill to read music.  As with spoken language, my goal is to develop in your child a sense of how music works and sounds so that when written symbols are introduced, the student has real-life experience for the symbols to relate to.  Initial music experiences are building the scaffold for later understanding.