Broad music lessons for kids

June 4, 2023 6:23 PM

Music lessons for eight-year-olds all seem to be about learning to play a specific instrument. I'm looking for lessons that are more like music appreciation classes, except more technical — something that will teach a kid how the music they like is made, then explore making pieces like them, both via composition and some simple instrument playing.

Maybe a helpful analogy is a film class he's taking now. They don't focus on using a particular camera or editing application. They ask him what movie he'd like to make, then help him try to make that movie.

I'm in the Boston area. As with all of my questions, I understand and am OK with the fact that the answer may be "this does not exist".

posted by ignignokt to Education (16 answers total)

I don't think the film class analogy works, at least as you've presented it. There are things about the tools used in filmmaking that shape the film being made, but editing software isn't really one of them. Whereas it's kind of impossible to understand how music is made without understanding the instruments being played. Music written on piano can be pretty difficult to play on guitar, and vice versa, because a piano keyboard layout is so different than a guitar fretboard. Something like a dominant seventh chord is kind of hard to grasp if you're playing guitar (literally, in the case of a G7!), but is immediately obvious when sitting at a piano keyboard. Also, you need to have shot some video to use editing software in the first places, and with video it's both trivially easy to shoot, and trivially easy to find stock footage so that you have something to work with. With music, you need to create the sound to begin with, and unless you have some sort of training on an instrument, it's going to sound pretty cacophonous.

That said, I've seen two links here on Metafilter that I think might be helpful for what you're trying to do. Both are things you work through yourself, but have a syllabus structure so you're not completely on your own. Drawmusic.io's Pop Music Theory goes over scales, chords, and progressions in an easy-to-follow manner. Learning Music from Ableton goes over the parts of a song, with a focus on electronic music. The Ableton link is especially helpful because it allows you to create your own music using piano roll notation.
posted by kevinbelt at 6:45 PM on June 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

Caveat: I don't know much about music myself! But on the theory that you might do better with "music theory class" than "music class" as a search term (since the latter does seem associated with specific instruments), I did some poking around and the instructional framework Dalcroze Eurythmics does seem like it might meet your needs. Here's a program at a Boston school, though they seem quite serious and therefore maybe quite expensive. (The school itself seems serious—the educational approach seems kind of fundamentally lighthearted.) It's very somatic-based, almost Waldorf-y... if that doesn't quite do it for you I think it might be useful to look at other music education approaches, because a number of them seem focused on priming students with an intuitive understanding of music before they actually pick up an instrument, they just vary in how exactly they do this.
posted by babelfish at 8:24 PM on June 4, 2023

So this is a little weird and I apologize for the woo, probably not quite what you're looking for, but have you considered something akin to eurythmy classes?

"Working with rhythm in eurythmy and in the other subject, helps the child fully and properly incarnate into his physical body. The ability to move gracefully and with a good sense of rhythm indicates that there is a resonance between the soul-spiritual being of the child and the physical body. Doing eurythmy allows the child to experience with her entire body the building blocks of language and of music. The children learn the physical and etheric gestures for all the consonants and vowel, for the notes of the musical octave, and for other musical elements..."
posted by wurl1tzer_c0 at 8:54 PM on June 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

If you can find them you might like practical musicianship classes. They tend to explore musical relationships and "theory" from a practical point of view often using voice. I did a couple of years of practical musicianship for classical music when I was about 10 and it did more or less what you are describing, although I think it was more "pre-composing" than "composing". If you have a serious conservatory near you, they may offer a youth programme with composition classes. If they take people as young as 8 for composition then I would expect it to cover an interesting and enjoyable introduction to how music works
posted by plonkee at 3:28 AM on June 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

The basics of music are rhythm, melody, scales, and chords. Piano lessons are a great way to learn all of those things, and to get the tools to explore on your own. It doesn’t need to be a classical pedagogy, there are many piano teachers who can work in other idioms and incorporate what inspires the student. And since most modern pop and electronic music is made with synthesizers that are piano keyboard-based, getting familiar with a keyboard opens up a whole lot of possibilities.
posted by Jon_Evil at 5:30 AM on June 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

Leonard Bernstein's young people's concerts might be interesting
posted by InkaLomax at 5:49 AM on June 5, 2023

I'd look into one of your local School of Rock programs. (Yes, the franchise/concept they made a Jack Black movie about.) There seem to be 4 or 5 in the general Boston area.

The thrust of the program is that in addition to getting "play an instrument" lessons, the kids form bands of 4 to 6 or 7 students each, work out parts and arrangements for songs, and eventually put on concerts in front of real live audiences. I do sound for a variety of local events and festivals, and the local SoR groups make fairly regular appearances at these, and they also do a few shows a year at legit music venues. I've no perspective on whether or not this adds benefits on top of "traditional" music lessons, but the kids generally seem to be having a blast, and the teachers at my local schools seem to put a lot of emphasis on cooperating with and helping the other students and the people working the shows and in being professional (be on time, tune up before you hit the stage, know how your gear works, so on and so forth.)

I think 8 is about the lower age limit, but I dunno for sure. And the whole thing is a franchise, so I believe each school has a fair amount of leeway in how it's run, meaning your kid might like the concept but not click with the teachers in one school and want to try another. Also, a few other music teachers in my area have, uh, "borrowed" the idea of forming student bands, so there might be someone else in your area doing something similar cheaper and/or with a different teaching style.

(I'll also quibble with your film school analogy, if only because thanks to technology and capitalism we're all walking around with pretty damn advanced movie cameras in our pockets. I think it's easy to start making movies even at a kid's level when you can get footage with point and shoot. Imagine if we'd never progressed beyond hand-cranked film cameras - then any "making movies" class would have to include how to put lenses on cameras, and adjust focus, and practice cranking at a steady speed, and how to use chemicals to develop film, and how to put up bright lights in the right places to get the camera to capture the right image, and all sorts of stuff like that. People still make lots of music on physical things, and so the early part of music lessons is learning how to operate that physical thing.)
posted by soundguy99 at 6:22 AM on June 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

My mom was a public school music teacher for that age using Orff Schulwerk. I haven't found any private Orff classes in our area but maybe you will have better luck with that search term.
posted by mkb at 6:45 AM on June 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: A couple of clarifications:

"Whereas it's kind of impossible to understand how music is made without understanding the instruments being played."

So, I'm not looking for classes that completely avoid learning how instruments are played. I'm looking for those that avoid focusing on one instrument entirely. Further, I don't agree that it is impossible to understand how music is made without understanding the instruments being played. Excellent pieces are composed with DAWs and virtual instruments, regardless of whether they can really be played with physical instruments.

This is certainly debatable, but let's assume this is the case for the purposes of this question.

Additionally, keep in mind that I do know how music is made and have studied single instruments for decades.
posted by ignignokt at 8:15 AM on June 5, 2023

It's not a class, but on YouTube, Rick Beato has a series called What Makes This Song Great? He takes a song, often using the multi-track recordings, and breaks it down into its components. Here's the drums, listen to what they're doing here. Here's the guitar, see how it plays off the bass here? Now see what the vocals are doing, and how they harmonize with this bit here? It's really interesting, and has helped me listen for subtleties in music that I'd overlooked before.
posted by xedrik at 8:52 AM on June 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

My friends who play music/ sing all learned how music works by playing an instrument. Piano is extremely useful for this, guitar teaches chords, drums teach rhythm, etc. Learning an instrument develops your brain, esp. the math bits, and I recommend it. Learning 1 instrument helps you understand the others. 8 is a great time to start. I took music theory in college, have some idea of how to read music, know about scales, sharps, flats, keys, etc. I sing some for fun, and dance a lot, mostly music that is not in 4/4 time. Dancing helps me listen for the instrument keeping rhythm, not always a drum, and I hear all music with more attention.

The Wii system has a bunch of music games that do teach some skills and build awareness of pitch, rhythm, etc. surely other game systems do, too. Go to concerts of all sorts of music, play a variety of music at home; talk about it. As a kid, we had a recording of Peter & the Wolf that had pauses and voiceovers to say what the instruments were doing. A good music store may have recommendations. You're a musician, so you're probably doing this stuff, but it's effective and a nice way to spend time with your child.
posted by theora55 at 9:14 AM on June 5, 2023

I think "piano lessons" with the right teacher could get you very close to what you want. The piano is kind of the ultimate instrument for learning about music in general. The piano keyboard is an excellent interface for mapping out the structural elements of music, and even those "instrumentless" DAW compositions you refer to often begin life as a few notes struck on a midi keyboard. The right teacher can engage almost any of your student's artistic sensibilities easily in front of a piano. The conventions of written music align very strongly with playing the piano as well.

I will also put in a plug for School of Rock in Watertown, MA. My 7yo daughter takes voice lessons there and is learning about the keyboard and the structure of music as well, all in the context of modern songs and sounds she is familiar with and enjoys. It is an "instrument first" program but it sounds like they have a fairly holistic approach to learning. There is a focus on *performance* that you may or may not be interested with in, where students who take lessons can join bands and put on shows together, but I believe band membership an optional addition to the regular lessons. It may not be exactly what you are looking for but I can vouch for the program being well run in general.
posted by grog at 9:49 AM on June 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Grog, you more eloquently said what I was trying to say about piano.
posted by Jon_Evil at 12:04 PM on June 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Dalcroze may be of interest.
posted by oceano at 2:14 PM on June 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

This might not be exactly the same thing, but I wanted my younger son to do something weirder than regular music lessons. At the end of a conversation with a jazz vocal grad student with adventurous taste, we worked out a looping station based way for her to work with him, with the main objective being for him to never think that writing songs/radio plays/composing is something that other people do but not him. It has been really amazing. I disagree with the idea that kids should just learn regular fundamentals and only get weird later.
posted by umbú at 5:03 PM on June 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: An update for anyone else looking for this sort of music education: Because this isn't a popular idea (most parents want to come away with a concrete "my kid can play [specific instrument]" from music education), we had to ad hoc something. It's not doable for everyone, but we happened to have the opportunities.

We asked the kid what instrument he'd guess he want to play, letting him know it's OK if the guess is wrong. He said piano, so we tried piano lessons at the local university.

Then, school offered strings and band (which is everything non-strings), so we asked him what he'd like to try there. He chose violin and glockenspiel.

To keep it fun, we said he only has to practice 15 minutes a day total. (But the more he practices, the more points he earns toward additional video game time, so he often does practice more.) So, he learns a bit of each instrument and is probably not as proficient as he would be if he just practiced one instrument a day. Still, he's learning how they work, and what the affordances of each are. Next year, he's free to drop/add and change them up.

We also print transcriptions of video game pieces he likes (which often turn out to be very challenging), and he sometimes works on those. We also do a little bit of analyzing when listening to his favorite jams, mostly counting out the measures and noting tempo and key changes.

He does sometimes play of his own volition and enjoys transcribing simple pieces to other modes and ranges, so I think he is starting to think of music as "writable" and not "read-only".

Anyway, YMMV as always with kids, but there's a data point.
posted by ignignokt at 8:39 AM on March 20 [1 favorite]