Generally speaking, four years old is a good age to start learning music, but why don't I let my children learn? If nothing else, the main reason is that there are many misunderstandings in the introduction of children's music at present, with more problems than achievements and many problems emerging one after another. Although I work in a professional conservatory of music, there are still few institutions or individuals that make me shine in the introduction education of children's music. I don't want to teach my children, so I choose to be absent.
In 2000, my brother and accordion teacher and I started a piano children's school. The earliest children (then five or six years old) are now undergraduates of the Central Conservatory of Music, and have also been admitted to other famous engineering and medical universities (or just admitted to graduate schools), becoming the literary backbone of the school.
Fifteen or six years later, I talked with professional or non-professional piano players aged 2 1 or 2, and I had many feelings. In particular, I found that the concepts of rhythm introduction and hearing first emphasized at that time were not only important for music learning, but also significant for a person's all-round growth. No matter what major they are engaged in now, music is becoming their close partner and an indispensable part of life.
For more than a century, the so-called world's four major music teaching methods, crozet (Swiss), Orff (German), Kodaly (Hungarian) and Suzuki (Japanese), have covered all the music education systems in China from children to universities. However, after I visited Gansu Shadow Play in 2007, I found that these teaching methods all emphasized the concepts of rhythm and listening. Shadow play has been used by generations of artists who don't know any music scores and have never heard of any teaching methods for hundreds of years. The wonderful way and unique effect have amazed and excited me, a native of China who is familiar with western music and China music. Therefore, there is a chapter in the doctoral thesis that uses more than 40 thousand words to introduce this wonderful inheritance of shadow play.
After such a comparison between China and the West and thinking about the growth process of students, I think that the introduction of children's music should follow three principles, so that it is more likely to truly realize the purpose of "cultivating interest and increasing self-cultivation" that most parents think at present (any principle will be invalid for genius, so we will not discuss genius here).
First, introduce the rhythm.
We often say that rhythm is the skeleton of music. Conductor and pianist Hans von Polo declared that "music begins with rhythm", and Orff and Dalcroze emphasized the study of rhythm to the extreme. But at present, the study of various musical instruments can't really do this. Apart from percussion, as long as it is a melodic instrument, I have hardly seen one today. It has been several years since I started practicing rhythm. The study of shadow play begins with an informal percussion instrument-Ganbangzi (jujube bangzi in Qin opera), and then goes through two or three years of "second-hand" learning (operating gongs, cymbals, bells, bangzi) and drums (operating gongs, drums, gongs, etc.). In this case, it will take two or three years to learn only rhythm and performance. These two or three years are like three months of physical training for recruits, and only after the training is over can we divide our troops-rhythm is the physical fitness of shadow play, but rhythm is the physical fitness of music.
Therefore, in my mind, the ideal children's music learning should have at least one year of "music physical fitness" training-comprehensive training based on rhythm. During this year, they were exposed to various musical instruments (introduction, playing as toys, especially percussion) to eliminate mystery and pure curiosity. After more than a year, if you formally choose musical instruments, the accuracy of TA interest will be higher, the "physical fitness" of music will be better, and it will go further.
Second, listening comes first.
The greatest advantage of Suzuki method is that it emphasizes the importance of "listening". He pointed out:
In fact, this emphasis on hearing has been applied to the study of traditional operas in China, whether it is shadow play or Fu Liancheng's class in Peking Opera for many years. In my doctoral thesis, I summarized the inheritance of shadow play as follows:
Therefore, my ideal children's music learning should not only emphasize the importance of listening, but also emphasize "listening to the actual voice".
The importance of listening is to cultivate a family atmosphere of listening to music from the beginning of prenatal education. As long as the whole family is there, music should be the background-"whatever style and instrument, let it ring"-and it should be the habit of parents.
The so-called "listening to the actual sound" mainly means attending more concerts and watching more live performances-even practice is more vivid than CD. There is a rule in the concert hall that children under 1.2 meters are not allowed to enter, and there are few concerts specially held for children in China. Now, we can organize concerts for children, babies and fetuses at home by various means of communication, so that children can be familiar with this real environment at an early age.
A good friend, in order to provide a real concert experience for the children in her arms, made an appointment with some parents on WeChat. She played the piano by herself and found a classmate who sang. Together, they held a public concert in a music store for 30 or 40 families. The children were noisy on the stage, and the effect was very good.
Third, pay attention to the mother tongue culture of music.
The earliest songs that my son can sing are "Two Tiger Tests", "Happy Birthday" and "Little Star". Isn't there a few children's songs to sing in China with a civilization of 5,000 years? Or, for thousands of years, children in China, especially those from ethnic minorities who can sing and dance well, did not sing when they were young, or did they all sing foreign children's songs?
The only reason is that western music education has been poisoned for more than a century, and the blood of China's music culture is so weak that the mother tongue education of music culture is seriously lacking.
Therefore, for infants aged 0-6, they are very sensitive to the rhythm of music when they go through the mother tongue learning stage of learning a language. If we can start with the mother tongue education of China traditional music culture, it is the best way for Chinese excellent culture to influence children from the age of 0.