• Practical and Creative classes for Reception and Year 1 children.
• An ideal foundation for instrumental music lessons.

 MUSICIANSHIP CLASSES - AN IDEAL PREPARATION FOR INSTRUMENTAL LESSONS.

Young children embark on instrumental lessons typically at about age 7. At this stage they have not been taught to understand written music. Their levels of musicianship and aural skills vary according to whether there has been regular quality singing and other forms of appropriate music-making at home, infant school and elsewhere.

Why Pre-Instrumental Classes?

Working with a Kodály approach firm musical foundations are laid before instrumental study begins. Songs are introduced and learned aurally before they are seen in written form. Children build up a large singing repertoire, using very simple material which is easy to learn and work with. They gain understanding of the music gradually in a holistic and methodical way.

While working with the songs the children develop basic skills required by all musicians − sense of pulse, pitch awareness, rhythmic control. They learn solfa names and handsigns for the limited pitches they are using, clap simple rhythms from reading cards, and practise feeling the pulse through enjoyable actions accompanying the songs they have learned. They begin elementary reading exercises with stick notation, a staveless form of musical notation used before conventional stave notation is introduced. As they work in this way they are developing the Inner Hearing, an essential skill fundamental to all musical development.

When children start instrumental lessons after pre-instrumental musicianship training, they have a solid grounding in basic musicianship and an understanding of simple forms of musical notation. They have built up a repertoire of many enjoyable songs, which they will now learn to play on the instrument. Initially they will continue to use the familiar stick notation and solfa rather than stave notation and letter-names. They can therefore concentrate more on listening to the sounds they are making, and on building up the technical and physical skills required to play, using the already-known simple songs to achieve successful musical performance.

Musicianship training continues as an integral part of instrumental lessons. This means less hands-on time with the instrument and more lesson-time devoted to developing the essential skills, but it is time well spent. It is easy to make sessions fun with group-work, duets and ensemble performances.

A New Approach

Instrumental Teachers are often required to start new pupils who have not had the benefit of pre-instrumental musicianship. A Kodály-trained teacher knows how to sequence material, and how to include musicianship training to underpin progress on the instrument, learning through the ears and multi-sensory musical experience rather than through the eyes and intellect. This approach is ideally suited to group work as well as one-to-one lessons.

Drawbacks of Conventional instrumental tuition with Beginners

In the normal course of instrumental study it falls to the instrumental teacher to address all the fundamental musicianship skills and reading skills, at the same time as teaching the physical skills and techniques required by the instrument. Many instrumental Tutor Books begin with written stave notation right from Lesson 1. New pupils are therefore faced with many challenging physical and intellectual tasks all at once. Small wonder that the essential Musicianship side of instrumental lessons often gets marginalised, as the instrumental teacher puts Managing the Instrument, Developing Finger Control and Learning to Read Music before Listening and Musicianship.

With the Kodály approach, the Inner Musician is trained first and the music is never left out. Making real music on the instrument is the last stage of performance, achieved after the right foundations have been laid.