Thinking Like a Kid

My Article Thinking Like a Kid was recently published in the Hudson Valley About Town periodical. You can read the entire article here or at About Town. Thanks to Paul De Angelis and Gail Jaffe-Bennek for getting this out there.

Thinking Like a Kid

When I first started teaching music at the Montessori at The Old Schoolhouse in Tivoli, NY, I didn’t quite know what to suspect. I had taught hundreds of adults and kids for almost 20 years but I had never worked with pre-schoolers. I did have the experience of being a dad of two boys (ages 3 and 5) so I had an idea of what I was getting myself into. To be honest, I was kind of freaked out. Two years later, that half hour music class has had a profound affect on how I learn and teach music. It brought me to a realization that, to put it simply, the best way to learn music is to think like a kid.

Repetition
Kids approach a new song with a natural sense of wonder. When they connect to a song, they initially latch to the melody and the rhythm. Once a child starts to sing a melody she will repeat it an amazing amount of times. Adults have a harder time doing the necessary repetitions to get a song to the point where it is truly internalized; with kids this happens naturally. Whether you are old or young it takes the same amount of repetitions and if you turn your mind off and do your work, it will come.

Perfection is in the eye of the beholder
Kids celebrate every chance they get and music is no exception. A child will perform a song, mess up on half of it, play wrong notes, and restart twice. When they finish, they will stand, take a bow, and parade around like Lady Gaga at the Grammys. In contrast adults will play an almost perfect performance, make one mistake at the end, and feel so disheartened they will consider quitting music all together. Our perception of what we are doing can taint an otherwise beautiful performance. If we can get to into that kid mentality and lose the self-judging, our performance will improve dramatically.

Feeling it
Though it’s not a commonly held belief, music is a language that anyone can learn; my work at the pre-school has made that clear. Kids quickly learn to feel the notes they sing in their bodies. When we sing high notes I ask them to point to where they feel the sound and they point to their heads. When we sing low notes, they point to their chests. Good musicians are often said to have “a good ear” but in reality a good ear is essentially a sensitive body that can feel many different, subtle vibrations. When we sing from our body (through breathing, resonating, and tongue placement) we do away with much of the guessing game—our voice becomes an instrument—and we learn to sing just the way we learn any other instrument. Again, kids do this naturally; adults need a lot of convincing.

Absorbing and emulating
When I introduce a new song in class, I begin as the only one singing. After I’ve sung the song a few times slowly and we’ve all tapped out the rhythms, some kids will sing, but the littlest ones will stare out into the wind as if they were somewhere else completely. While the child may not say a word in class, later she or he will repeat what was absorbed to their parents, pets, cashiers, and teddy bears. The process of absorbing and emulating is fundamental to how humans learn. While most adult learners are good at emulating, absorbing music doesn’t come so easy. In order to internalize a song we must turn off our minds and allow the music to seep in. Considering our complicated lives, this can be a hard thing to do. We all know the feeling of being taken somewhere new simply by listening to music. In the learning process, we must engage as if we are a child and in the words of Sly and the Family Stone, “Let the Music Take Your Mind.”

Thinking like a kid
Life to a child is limitless, most experiences are new, and there are no boundaries other than those set by our surroundings, our families, and our communities. If we stay young in our minds, we can harness the same energy they possess; an energy we all possess.

Taking Time to be Creative

This weekend I had the unusual opportunity to have the house to myself for an entire 24 hours. No kids running in and out of my studio, no students, just a quiet rain falling outside.

As I settled into a night of working on a new song I've been writing for over a month I began to realize that the process of being creative may not be built exclusively on the time in the studio, some of it must be spent getting your mind and heart in the right place.

Before I actually sat down and started working I took time to finish a book, take a shower, relax into a pot of green tea and sit out back for a few minutes to watch the birds flit about on my back porch. When I finally hit record, I was relaxed and had an empty mind. I spent the next six hours working straight and focused on my new track, what a luxury!

The Argument against multitasking

There are many distractions that can derail a creative thought. Cell phones, texts, Facebook, kids, even personal hygiene can all take us from the task of being creative. There is growing evidence that the brain is only able to process two tasks at a time. In this NPR article the argument is made that multitasking divides the brain. The scientists in the article point to an experiment that shows the brain "can't maintain more than two tasks" at a time without pushing something out. If I'm writing my song and in my flow and suddenly my kid comes into the room and then I get a text on my phone...its over. I don't need a neuro-scientist to tell me this, it happens every freakin' day!

It takes four hours to get one hour of work done

The mental preparation it takes to get into your flow may be obvious to some people,  However with modern diversions of email, Facebook, Twitter, texting, not to mention family responsibilities, it is easy to lose that singular focus and allow ourselves to get distracted. The result is a lot of small movements in many directions which rarely move us along our creative path.

In the end it really takes a concerted clearing of the mind to get into the space to be creative, a process that is not always possible to turn on or off at will. We've all had those moments when we had an amazing intuitive thought that we neglected. When we returned to it later in the day, its gone and we spend the rest of the day searching our minds to find it.

These days, my goal is to figure out how much time I have to focus creatively and then push some time out in front to clear my mind, open pathways, and turn off my email, cell phone, and Facebook!

As always, I love to hear your thoughts on creativity and practice.



Love of music starts at home

Thanks to Andrea Pyros for this great article about the importance of teaching music to our children in our homes. There is a lot of great stuff in here and we feel privileged to be a part of it.

Read the article here

Passing on fear to your children

I was speaking with a mother the other day about her kids taking music lessons. She was interested in her 3 year old singing and mentioned that her 6 year old son was not musical.

Wow!

It is impossible in my mind for someone to not be musical. Music is no different than speaking, reading and writing, something that anyone who is reading this blog is able to do. There are many kids who don’t play an instrument or sing but if they enjoy music either through dancing, drumming on a table ,or simply listening, they are musical.

In my mind there is no such thing as a non-musical 6 year old. As the father of a 5 year old boy, I know that I influence my kids through my actions more than my words. By involving myself in the music and dance I encourage my kids to do the same. If I consistently tell pwoplw how unmusical I am or my spouse is, my kids will pick up on the energy and pass it on.

Likewise, peer influence is incredibly high even at a young age and singing is something many boys do not consider cool (which is odd considering Bono, Sting, Bob Dylan, and Otis Redding are all pretty cool in most peoples eyes) It is our role to allow kids to experience the full spectrum of possibilities and that means not placing our own fear of music, art, or creativity into their minds at such an early age.

We are NOT born with a god given talent to sing, dance or play an instrument, all people have the ability.

So we can either pass our fear on to our children or we can “take a pass” on fear and encourage kids to experience a rich and full childhood.

Don’t believe me because you don’t think you can sing? Ask yourself where that feeling originated and then come visit me, I’ll give you a free lesson and prove you wrong!