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.
No comments:
Post a Comment