How to teach your child to listen to good music

A very young child is captured by the simplest objects and situations. In addition, children are very fond of making noise. If you have strong enough nerves, then encourage this loud entertainment. If you have a drum, a piano, a metallophone at home, that’s great. Play with the noisemakers together. Tools provide an opportunity to translate auditory experience into creativity. This will be the first stage in the development of a sense of rhythm, without which there is nothing to do in music.

And be sure to listen to the classics yourself. Let it sound in the background – at the subconscious level, the child will develop his own way of recognizing timbres, attention to the differences between genres and melodies. The kid will begin to learn some things, sing along. However, it is too early to wait for a conscious attachment to music. Everything has its time.

This stage is more complicated than the previous ones. Conscious listening is already an interaction with music. Your task is to make a game out of it and involve the child in this game. Listen to the work yourself, find interesting facts about it. You can even write a story: very often music has a clear script that is easy to understand. Tell it to your child like a fairy tale. Then offer to listen to “something very interesting” together.

And don’t forget to talk about what you hear. For example, the famous “Morning” from “Peer Gynt” by Edvard Grieg creates a lot of reasons for an interesting conversation. What do we hear? Why did Grieg call his play that way? What can you hear in the morning? Why is this similar (or not) to what we hear in reality? You can try to show the music with gestures, dance, or even draw.

In general, Grieg’s music is an excellent choice for a beginner listener. In addition to “Peer Gynt”, you can listen to the piano “Lyric Pieces”. They are constructed as illustrations for specific images: “Bird”, “Butterfly”, “Round Dance of Dwarfs”, “Norwegian Dance”. But all this needs to be interestingly told, to translate the melody into those images that the child already knows and loves.

Music as such is still an abstraction. It is quite difficult for kids to understand her. But if the music has an image, it is much easier to fall in love with it, because you can imagine yourself as the hero of the work.

Opera films with a clear plot are ideal for a younger student, especially for girls. They will definitely appreciate “La Traviata” and “Tosca”, because the heroes there are alive and loving, not to mention the wonderful music. “Carmen” by Georges Bizet, “Aida” by Giuseppe Verdi, “The Tsar’s Bride” by Rimsky-Korsakov, “The Wedding of Figaro” by Mozart and his “Magic Flute” – they are beautiful.

How can you understand and love something about which you cannot really say anything? Chord, accompaniment, climax – these words are not always in the vocabulary of even 10-12-year-old children, let alone preschoolers. Knowledge of musical terms will not hurt either: ostinato, tremolo, pizzicato …

Before trying to describe in words a complex piece of music, start with a simple everyday situation. Make it something fun. For example, reflect with your child about the sounds you hear at the zoo at night. Keys clink. The caretaker shuffles his feet. The lion is sleeping. Monkeys kiss in a dream. All these words – ticking, rustling, howling, tinkling, strumming – may simply not be in the child’s vocabulary. Surprise? Surprise.

At the same time, you can begin acquaintance with musical instruments. There are works tested by time and practice, on the example of which this is best done: “Peter and the Wolf” by Sergei Prokofiev, “Guide to the Orchestra” by Benjamin Britten, “Carnival of Animals” by Camille Saint-Saens.

Or, for example, if you are listening to a German symphony, there will most likely be an episode that evokes associations with hunting: “Do you hear the hunter blows his horn? This is a French horn. ” And show how she looks.

Without the aid of perception – discussing sounds, instruments, associations with their voices – classical music can be too difficult to understand.

It’s always interesting when a person is behind the music. Tell your child about the author, his fate. Will the biography of a genius who fell ill and died very young leave someone indifferent? Or a tragically deaf composer?

Don’t be afraid to surround the music with extraneous imagery. The subtlety in the perception of the sound itself will certainly come later, now the main thing is to make the music human and real.

Pay attention to the characters as well. What is at least a terrible Forest Tsar from the works of Goethe and Schubert, beckoning a frightened child in the forest.

If there is an opportunity to listen to records, be sure to listen. After all, a record is a magical thing. It is like a book: it has a story, a smell, a weight, and a relief. And her audition ceremony? ..

You should definitely not offer your child adapted pop versions of classic plays. Music, first of all, is a complex text, a filigree ligature that envelops the listener. In pop packaging, it just disappears.

It is also important to remember that children love to listen to the same thing over and over again, and there is no need to fight this: such a habit at a young age contributes to the development of musical memory.

Live performance is a great idea. Pay attention to the reporting concerts of young musicians, where your child’s peers can perform. They make music professionally, and children living in some other world are always very interesting.

The most common mistake is not in the choice of an overly complicated or boring event, but in the approach itself. Lures such as fancy clothes, toys, and ice cream form perceptual substitutions as rewards. The pleasure of food or attractions will inevitably draw attention to itself, this link will be fixed, while the most important pleasure for a child should be music and time spent with parents.