What Does Charlotte Mason Say about Music? Volume 2

The second entry of six walking through Charlotte Mason's volumes, searching out everything she had to say about music. In this post, we take a look at Volume 2 - Parents and Children.

(2/185) The seventeenth chapter of this volume deals with the development of the senses. This quote comes from the section entitled "Discrimination of Sounds." "A quick and true ear is another possession that does not come by Nature, or anyway, if it does, it is too often lost. ... Music is, no doubt, the means par excellence for this kind of ear culture. Mrs. Curwen's 'Child Pianist' puts carefully graduated work of this kind into the hands of parents; and if a child never become a performer, to have acquired a cultivated and correct ear is no small part of a musical education."

(2/252) Music is a vital part of the first year of a child's life. The title of this section is "Intellectual Labour of the Child's' First Year." "When we consider the enormous intellectual labour the infant goes through during his first year in accommodating himself to the conditions of a new world, in learning to discern between far and near, solid and flat, large and small, and a thousand other qualifications and imitations of this perplexing world, why, we are not surprised that John Stuart Mill should be well on in his Greek at five; that Arnald at three should know all the Kings and Queens of England by their portraits; or that a musical baby should have an extensive repertoire of the musical classics."

(2/262) Art (which encompasses music) is intimately linked with ideas! "We begin to understand that mere technique, however perfect--whether in the rendering of flesh tints, or marbles, or of a musical composition of extreme difficulty--is not necessarily high Art. It is beginning to dawn upon us that Art is great only in proportion to the greatness of the idea that it expresses; while what we ask of the execution, the technique, is that it shall be adequate to the inspiring idea." "...and lastly, we shall inspire our children with those great ideas whilch shall create a demand, anyway for great Art."

(2/269) Oh, the wonderful twenty-fifth chapter of Volume 2 - The Great Recognition Required of Parents. If you have not studied the fresco on the wall of the Spanish Chapel of the Santa Maria  Novella in Florence, John Ruskin's commentary on it, and Miss Mason's own Recognition that came through it, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you do so! This is a quote about just one small part of that fresco. "Next, Music, with head inclined in intent listening to the sweet and solemn strains she is producing from her antique instrument; and underneath, Tubal Cain, not Jubal, as the inventor of harmony--perhaps the most marvellous record that Art has produced of the impact of a great idea upon the soul of man but semi-civilised."

(2/278-279) "Give him living thought in this kind, and you make possible the co-operation of the living Teacher. The child's progress is by leaps and bounds, and you wonder why. In teaching music, again, let him once perceive the beautiful laws of harmony, the personality, so to speak, of Music, looking out upon him from among the queer little black notes, and the piano lesson has ceased to be drudgery."

What Does Charlotte Mason Say about Music? Volume 1

I'm in the process of studying Charlotte Mason's six volumes to find out just what she said about music and music education in her philosophy and methods of education. I intended to write one post about what she said about music, singing, hymns, folksongs, foreign language songs, sol-fa (or solfege), and music appreciation. But WHEW! what a lot she had to say about these topics! So I've decided to break it up into separate blog posts. This post will cover Miss Mason's words about music in Volume 1. I will link subsequent posts at the end for easy reference.

I've arranged these quotes by volume number instead of topically. I will make a separate post on this first topic, music, for each volume, so we don't have one giant page to have to scroll down. I hope I'm not going to regret that, as this is designed to be a reference post for myself! We'll see how it goes! If I end up hating it, I can always put it all together in one post later.

Volume 1

(1/81-82) The context of this quote is the healthy aspect of the out-of-door life. The section in which it is found is called "Noisy Games." She speaks of exercisng the organs of voice, preventing weak lungs and weak throat, training them to strength through the work of noisy outdoor games. "...if the children can 'give voice' musically, and move rhythmically to the sound of their own voices, so much the better. In this respect French children are better off than English; they dance and sing through a hundred roundelays..."

(1/133-134) This one needs no introduction. It's good stuff! I have a previous blog post that touches on some of these topics. "The Habit of Music.--As for a musical training, it would be hard to say how much that passes for inherited musical taste and ability is the result of the constant hearing and producing of musical sounds, the habit of music, that the child of musical people grows up with. Mr. Hullah maintained that the art of singing is entirely a trained habit--that every child may be, and should, be trained to sing. Of course, transmitted habit must be taken into account. It is a pity that the musical training most children get is of a random character; that they are not trained, for instance, by carefully graduated ear and voice exercises to produce and distinguish musical tones and intervals."

(1/314) This next quote has a reference that I don't quite "get," but I'm including it because I think it has something important to impart about selecting music instructors. "Certain subjects of peculiar educational value, music, for instance, I have said nothing about, partly for want of space, and partly because if the mother have not Sir Joshua Reynolds's 'that!' in her, hints from an outsider will not produce the art-feeling which is the condition of success in this sort of teaching. If possible, let the children learn from the first under artists, lovers of their work; it is a serious mistake to let the child lay the foundation of whatever he may do in the future under ill-qualified mechanical teachers, who kindle in him none of the enthusiasm which is the life of art."

(1/314-315) This quote immediately follows the previous one, but hits a different topic, so I have separated it here. "I should like, in connection with singing, to mention the admirable educational effects of the Tonic Sol-fa method. Children learn by it in a magical way to produce sign for sound and sound for sign, that is, they can not only read music, but can write the notes for, or make the proper hand signs for, the notes of a passage sung to them. Ear and voice are simultaneously and equally cultivated."

(1/315) Here, Charlotte links music, dance, and the Swedish drill she recommends for physical education. "For physical training nothing is so good as Ling's Swedish Drill, and a few of the early exercises are within the reach of children under nine. Dancing, and the various musical drills, lend themselves to grace of movement, and give more pleasure, if less scientific training to the little people."

What Does  Charlotte Mason Say about Music? Volume 2

The Case for the Ukulele in a Charlotte Mason Education

Let me start by saying that this post isn't limited to a Charlotte Mason education. I can find the case for ukulele in most any situation! So if you're here, and you are not a Charlotte Mason homeschooler, or if you aren't a homeschooler at all, never fear. The information found here applies universally.

The "broad feast" of a Charlotte Mason education has many opportunities for music throughout the school day, and I'm here to present a case for the ukulele as a perfect complement to those lessons. I came to the ukulele a couple of years ago, and I immediately fell in love with this happy little instrument. I'm an unabashed ukevangelist, starting a ukulele club for kids, and introducing a group of mama players to the instrument as well.

Let's look at some of the characteristics of the ukulele that make it ideal for a homeschool music setting:

• The instrument is inexpensive compared to others. A quality beginner ukulele can be obtained at a starting price of $40-$50. Compare that to the price of a piano, violin, wind, or brass instrument! With the exception of a recorder (OH, PLEASE - NOT A RECORDER! - said every mom who has ever had to ride in a mini van with a kid with a brand new recorder!), it's the most reasonably priced beginner instrument out there. A bonus with inexpensive instruments: Young students can play without fear that they may damage a priceless instrument!

• The instrument is quickly learned compared to others. Please don't get me wrong; there is nothing more beautiful than music played by an accomplished pianist or violinist. But to attain that level of proficiency/mastery takes MANY years of expensive private lessons. A child of ten or so can learn enough ukulele to accompany vocal songs in a month's time. It takes no time to become an "okay" ukulele player, and "okay" is good enough! By all means, please, keep sending your kids to their piano lessons. We need more excellent players out there! But in the meantime, add the simple ukulele to bring music to your household! YouTube has many ukulele teachers who can help your child to learn to strum, play chords, and even finger-pick melody lines. The majority of ukulele players out there today are self-taught or YouTube taught. 
  
• The portability is unmatched (again, except for that recorder...). A piano is rooted to its spot in your home. A guitar is bulky to pull out or toss in the back of the van. A violin, while of a similar size, seems to have a tuning up procedure for the instrument and the bow that takes several minutes, and has to be stored in a protective case that further delays playing. The ukulele is small (usually 20-26 inches in length). It is a hardy instrument that can be hung on the wall or left on a stand for easy access (unless you have a solid wood ukulele, which must be kept under specific humidity conditions, but most players will use a uke with a more forgiving laminate body). Charlotte Mason's lessons are characterized by their brevity, so time is of the essence. You want an instrument that you can reach over from your homeschooling spot and start playing immediately. And you can take the music with you pretty much anywhere you go! Nature walks and campfire gatherings are complemented by a little music. I have had as many as four ukuleles playing in my van while mom-taxiing. Try that with four pianos! or guitars! or trombones! I even traveled all around Italy with my ukulele case strapped to my backpack (for a kids' program mission trip - not just as an annoying musical traveler!).
  

• The ukulele lends itself to accompaniment for hymns and folk songs. Most hymns and folk songs utilize a simple sequence of three to five chords. A student can learn that many chords in an afternoon or two. Of course, there are many, many, many chords to learn, but if a student has only a few chords in his or her bag of tools, most songs can be transposed to fit those chords. It is my goal to begin transposing a selection of hymns and folk songs into "uke friendly" keys, so that a student would be able to play them after they know just six or seven chords! If you have any hymns or folk songs that you would like for me to consider working up, just comment below.

• The ukulele is a perfect instrument for learning chord theory. Let me first say this. Scales are a pretty important prerequisite for chord theory, and there is no better instrument for learning scales and how the intervals work than a piano or keyboard. So this is my pitch for early piano instruction! That's not to say it can't be done without piano scales - just that the piano is uniquely fitted to the process. You actually get to SEE the intervals in front of you. Can't say enough about this! That said, not all of my kids are able to play piano scales, and they are learning so much about chords and chord families through playing the ukulele. My oldest, in fact, has learned to play piano beautifully by ear AFTER spending a couple of years on ukulele. If you don't know much about music or chords, I'll explain it this way: Once you learn what chords "go together," all you need to know is what key a song is (or what key you want it to be in), and it becomes an easy matter to hear the chord changes and play the song without having to have written music in front of you. It also enables you to transpose songs into different keys to better fit the singer's vocal range.
• So why not guitar? After all, isn't a ukulele just a smaller guitar? This is a good question, because, really, who wouldn't want the fuller, richer sound of a guitar instead of the plinky ukulele sound? (Well, me, for one... But that's beside the point.) First of all, size. The guitar is big. The body is big. I'm five foot seven, and I struggle to reach over the wide body of the guitar to reach the strings with my strumming hand. The fret board is big. I have large hands, and I still struggle to reach strings on my chording hand. The strings are steel. OUCH! [Classical guitars do not have steel strings, so they are much easier on the fingertips, but the string tension is still much higher than on a ukulele.] Ukuleles come with nice soft strings, although I have changed mine to some that are a little harder because I love the sound. No fingertip bootcamp period of extreme pain until rough and ugly callouses form. Guitars have six strings; ukuleles have four. That makes it so much easier to remember finger placement! And finally the noise issue. With a much smaller body, the volume of a ukulele is much less than a guitar. In families with sleeping babies or siblings trying to do other activities, it's nice to have a quieter instrument to reduce disruption.
  

How can the ukulele be used in a Charlotte Mason education? I am working on a more lengthy post about music in a Charlotte Mason education that I will link here when it is published, so I will just answer in brief here. Lessons that include student-performed music include hymn singing, folk singing, solfege, and foreign language singing. All of these singing lessons can benefit from instrumental accompaniment. The instrument insures that we start in tune and stay in tune throughout the song, which is important for students who struggle with pitch. Solfege (do, re, mi, fa, etc...) definitely requires accurate pitching. Whether teaching absolute or relative solfege, it is impossible to learn well without a reference pitch source. It relies on scales and intervals, both of which the student or teacher can play on the ukulele.

Hopefully, this is the beginning of a ukulele series that you can use to bring the ukulele into your home and into your lessons. I will link titles of subsequent posts below for easy access.

Music Is an Atmosphere: A Path to a Musical Family

I come from a "Musical Family." Of four siblings, three of us serve regularly in our churches through music. Three have served in overseas missions with music as a central component. All four are proficient on multiple instruments. The whole family often performs instrumental or vocal ensembles. Sunday afternoons commonly involve multi-generational sing- and play-alongs. And a family vacation next week will likely result in more cargo space devoted to intruments than luggage.

Growing up, I thought this was normal. After all, many of my friends were musical, so it just stood to reason that their families were musical, too. I later realized that, while many families have their token music nerd, it is a rarer thing for all the members of the family to be musical. I thought it was normal for a family to have 20 copies of a hymnal (as my grandparents did), so everyone could have a copy to hold during family gatherings. I thought it was normal for all of us kids to still be able to march a perfect eight-to-five step. I thought it was normal for a family to find it a fun challenge to try to figure out a five-part harmony for a song (Daddy isn't so much of a singer...).

It wasn't until much later that I realized how uncommon being a "Musical Family" really is. Remarks about our Musical Family led me to understand that not everybody grew up in such a home. Recently, I've taken up the ukulele, and I've become quite the uke-vangelist... And as I extol the virtues of the lowly ukulele and how easy it is to learn, I have often heard the remark, "Yeah, but you're from a Musical Family." My response (in my head if nowhere else) is, "Don't you want to give that to your own kids?"

When I think of what makes a Musical Family, I tend to think about parents who had extensive musical training in their own youth; parents who may work in music industry or in music ministry.  I imagine that they expose their children to fine classical music through recordings at home and live performances. They make provisions for individual instrumental and/or vocal lessons for their children. But the scientist in me wants more quantifiable data than just my own impressions. So I made an informal thought survey of the Musical Families in my circle of local friends. I count about seven, an admittedly small sample size. In five of those families, both parents had music training in childhood, high school, and college. In the last two, at least one parent had such training; I just don't know about the other parent. Most had musical education through the college years. Several work in the field of music. So it appears that this is a viable path to a Musical Family - maybe even the best path. But what a discouragement and disappointment to the parent who dearly desires to have a Musical Family, but whose own childhood and young adult years did not reflect those characteristics! If that is the only path to a Musical Family, they have missed the window of opportunity.

I'm here to offer hope. The parents of my Musical Family had none of those credentials. My daddy played guitar in one of those Beatles era high school garage bands. My mama has a lovely voice - but untrained. She played about a year of clarinet in middle school band. So with very little training or experience of their own, how did they go about raising our little Musical Family?

Start at the beginning. I can probably count on one hand the number of times my mother has given me unsolicited parenting advice. So when she speaks, I try to listen! When I brought my first daughter home from the hospital, my mother came to stay with us for a few nights. The first thing she said after, "Where is your coffee maker?" (which we don't have!), was, "We need to get you a creaky rocking chair. You have to sing to your babies while you rock in a creaky rocking chair, or they won't have rhythm!" There it was: my first clue to how to raise a Musical Family. Singing, with the accompaniment of a creaky chair. That's melody, meter, rhyme, and rhythm in one simple package.

Second - Our house was full of music. When you make that statement in the context of how to raise a Musical Family, a vision arises of concertos and symphonies wafting through the house during intellectual dinner time conversation with candle light and cloth napkins. That wasn't exactly our reality. Our home was filled with refrains of 1970's rock and roll. Some of my earliest memories involve standing in front of the big cabinet speaker that was bigger than I was under the family stereo while records played Eagles and Steve Miller Band and "oldies" like the Beatles and Beach Boys. Later years brought 80's country like Alabama and the Oak Ridge Boys.

Third - The challenge of providing quality music instruction on a limited budget. As the oldest, I was blessed to have the opportunity to take individual piano lessons for several years. But as the littler kids came along, the budget simply didn't stretch that far. So three of the kids never had any individual lessons on any instrument, and mine were limited. So can you raise a Musical Family without expensive individual lessons? Certainly! My parents enrolled us in children's and youth musical programs at our church. They encouraged us to participate in school band, choirs, and musical drama. The latter may seem an impossibility for homeschool families, but I lead a homeschool music cooperative in our area serving over one hundred kids in two bands and three choirs. We pool our money to hire excellent instructors for these corporate music activities. It's a lot of work, but it can be done!

Fourth - Instruments... Another potential budget-buster. My parents made sure we had access to any instrument we wanted to try. They weren't GREAT instruments; they weren't PRETTY instruments. But they were functional and plentiful. I played five years on a $50 flute and then switched to a borrowed oboe. The piano in our house probably cost about that much too. It had lost many of its ivories and the first b-flat above middle C was broken (that's a really important key, by the way), but it had a beautiful tone that my piano teacher admired. The boys had access to junker guitars - accoustic, electric, and bass, which was a good thing, because those guitars experienced lots of abuse. We had random band instruments that nobody actually knew how to play - just in case somebody wanted to pick one up and tinker with it. Just a couple of years ago, I had to drag my mother away from an accordion in the thrift store! We ALL got plastic recorders one Christmas. What chaos! But we played quite a few toot-y Christmas carols on those things before they were lost or destroyed!

And finally - Live the music. Family gatherings always included music. Hymns were easiest because they had plenty of harmony parts to go around. And remember those 20 copies of the hymn book? That was handy in a world before digital projectors and cell phones containing all the lyrics of all the songs that ever were! My daddy drove the church bus, and some of my favorite memories were before we picked up any kids, standing beside him as he drove, singing together. He sang songs for me - our kids-church songs, and he sang songs for him - old country hymns that rocked with the rhythms of the raggedy engine in that old bus. Music was never very far away in our house. Somebody was always honking or squeaking on some instrument. There were sounds of late night guitar practice keeping me awake as they traveled through the air conditioning vents from upstairs in my brother's room. There was the unflattering nickname I earned because of my propensity to bellow out songs as I moved around the house. I still do it. My husband calls it scream-singing, although it's much more like Hugh Jackman in The Greatest Showman, if you ask me... The nickname my daddy gave me shall remain a secret...

This might all seem like a haphazard and unrefined approach to raising a Musical Family. "Will it really work?" seems a logical question. "Or was it just an accident of fate?" I can't answer that. I can only tell you that it DID work in my family growing up, and it IS working in my own little family today. Without benefit of more than a year or two of expensive individual lessons (we are a homeschool family on a budget), expensive instruments (see previous comment), or a continuous family soundtrack of fine classical music (okay, I'm trying to get better on that point), my children each play multiple instruments and easily sing three part harmony - four if they let me get in on the act. They use their skills to serve others, leading music in children's church with their ukuleles. The oldest has begun playing guitar with the "grown-up" praise band. She has even successfully filled in for our absent pianist on a Sunday night, with no more training than the chord theory that she learned on the ukulele and her own exploratory plunking around on our piano at home. And she taught a ukulele class for younger kids at our summer camp.

What did we do to secure such an outcome? We rocked and sang in a creaky rocking chair; we shower-sing along with the radio in the van on trips into town; we participate in low-cost band and choir and free ukulele club through our music co-op; we provide access to a ridiculous array of musical instruments (many from my mama's stash from my childhood!); and we live with music. Deuteronomy 6 admonishes us to teach our children God's commandments when we sit at home, when we walk along the way, when we lie down, and when we get up. I think music is caught in the same way. "Music" in our home does not consist only in one instrument, its lessons and practices and performances. It is a way of life, a tool of expression, a means of entertainment in its many varied forms. Music IS the atmosphere of our home. And the children caught that atmosphere. I can't attribute that to coincidence.