Why We Love Music

by Carl E. Seashore

Unfortunately, the child's speech is very largely determined by imitation of those around him. How few mothers and fathers, how few teachers, how few older children have beautiful speech! The young child as a rule, therefore, encounters unfavorable speech environment. The civilized world is just awakening to the possibilities and significance of beautiful and effective speech.

Train the young child to the appreciation and development of power in beautiful and effective speech, and you will have laid the best foundations for musical appreciation and formal entrance upon musical training.

Musical talent. Children differ in musical talent, both in degree and in kind. One normal child may be twenty-five, fifty, or one hundred times as sensitive as another normal child in matters of time, in matters of pitch, in matters of loudness, and in matters of tone quality. The normal child may be very high in one of these four musical traits and low in another. Let me illustrate how these traits may be observed very early in a very highly musical child.

Playing with a little girl eleven months old, I noticed that she responded to the music over the radio. I put a simple two-step on the victrola, and she marked the time correctly by a free sympathetic swinging of the arms. I changed this to waltz time, and she picked up the rhythm. As she could not yet stand on her feet, I held her on all fours, and then she shimmied with her trunk. Was that child musical? I could give one positive answer. She had a splendid sense of rhythm and urge for rhythmic action. As I watched her in succeeding years, she very early developed original dances, and at the age of four gave delight in original "shawl dances." Her speech very early was beautifully inflected. Her speech was also very early characterized by fine and meaningful modulations in loudness for emphasis and meaning. She gave early evidence of power to imitate different sounds.

Of course, the less musical a child is by nature, the more difficult it is to find early evidences of this sort. We do not need measuring instruments so much as we need training of teachers and parents to an understanding of what constitutes musical capacities so that we can observe the child critically in his early natural responses. By the age of eight or ten these specific capacities will become more conspicuous, and at that age the competent psychologist in music can analyze and measure talents reliably.

Musical education. When and how should musical education begin? It should begin in the earliest infancy by giving the child a musical environment suitable to elicit his response. This means not simply the hearing of formal music, but, far more significantly, a sympathetic response to the child's natural vocal expressions at each level, even to the making of sounds of all kinds.

The child from the first needs a sympathetic audience. It is not so much how beautifully the mother sings as how sympathetically she responds to the beginning croonings of the infant; and this sympathetic enjoyment includes recognition and encouragement for the hearing of all sounds around, whether animate or inanimate. The mother's first task is to be a good listener.

The first elements of formal musical training should be devoted to speech. Ideally this would come most effectively through the child's opportunity for hearing and imitating the beautiful sounds and speech of those around him. Even if the mother and other associates cannot set the model for the child, they can do a great deal to further musical development by showing their appreciation of the instinctive outcroppings of the musical qualities of the child's speech.

During the first six years there should be no formal musical instruction; but, by the end of that period, the musical child should have gradually acquired a sense of appreciation for musical sounds, pleasure in self-expression in musical intonations, confidence in his ability to compose a tune, some proficiency in singing and good speech, and some degree of satisfaction in free playing with an instrument.

The principles here developed for early childhood have profound implications for later musical education. Let the emphasis lie upon the broadness of the meaning of music to the child, upon the child's learning by doing, at his natural level of successful achievement, and upon the utilization of natural motivation in place of formal instruction.