A plug for GIML and a lightbulb moment on the Early Childhood online short course, July 2022

It was the summer of 2022. Right before going on the fabulous NYCOS Kodaly summer school and the full PDLC in Elementary General Music in Massachusetts I did an online short course in Early Childhood Music through GIML (the Gordon Institute for Music Learning).

If you have never tried doing any music teacher professional development online, you should give it a go! Firstly, join GIML - it’s only about £50 (£12 if you are a student!) and fantastic value for money. They put on free Zoom workshops and faculty hangouts for members throughout the year, and there is access to recordings of older sessions, recordings of Gordon’s lectures, a newsletter, research journal, lots of good things. Anyway, you get free membership of GIML for a year if you take a PDLC or online summer short course. I don’t think I have paid for membership since I first joined as I keep doing courses. It's so worth it, I cannot recommend it enough. 

I knew from what I had read/heard on podcasts that Early Childhood Music is very important in MLT.  Gordon said that the critical period for affecting music aptitude was between 0 and 18 months, followed by 18 months to 3 years, followed by 3 years and above before music aptitude stabilises sometime around the age of 9. I confess, before I knew about MLT, I didn’t have very much interest in early childhood music, thinking that it only involves doing music that is not especially interesting, you know, things involving 2 or 3 chords in major tonality, mostly in duple metre.  I still think that a lot of early childhood music education is delivered using music that is in terms of tonal and rhythmic context, all very similar. This is not the case in MLT, where exposing children to as much variety in tonalities, metres and styles as possible is considered essential (research shows that exposing children to contrasts of tonality and metre results in better understanding of these contexts, demonstrated later on with better intonation and sense of pulse, rather than exposing them to sameness). This demands high levels of musicianship in teachers, as is it uniquely challenging to deliver (in a good way!)

With the knowledge of how important it was, I decided to enroll on the GIML Early Childhood short online course to find out more.  A lot of it, I don’t remember it too clearly. It was all so new to me then, and at times I was simply overwhelmed with the newness of it all. Everyone was moving with CFM (continuous fluid motion) on the screen which was really weird (sometimes I feel self conscious moving like that, but I’m getting over it and I'm starting to think that moving with flow might even be very good for one’s mental health!). Sometimes, we were to experience the class as though we were tiny infants, which put me in a strange head space. And if there were any questions asked of us, I wasn’t ready for it, I wasn’t really able to verbalise my thoughts much, and I still had some very basic questions about MLT still to sort out in my own mind. So I wasn’t really ready for talking in breakout rooms and offering my thoughts - I was still in acculturation! I think I stayed pretty quiet. Just now, I had a look and found a few notes on my Google Drive from the 3-hours-a-day-for-5-days course, and it seems I didn’t write much. The overall impression of the experience was powerful though, and has stayed with me. 

One of the best moments was completely unexpected: some of the other students on the course were in Iran, and requested to share some Iranian children’s music with us, sometime towards the end of the week. I wasn't expecting anything like this but thought it sounded nice to to have a sharing of culture. So I listened and watched - I remember finger puppets were involved! I didn’t understand the language of course, and also, I quickly realised I didn’t understand the music either. It was really unfamiliar sounding. I couldn’t work out the tonal context. I couldn’t really process and predict much of the music immediately as it was being performed, as it didn’t make a lot of sense to me - in other words, I could not audiate what I was hearing. In the middle of this performance, the singing/puppets stopped and then there were some tonal patterns, I think. Then, the original song started again, and suddenly it was all different! It made more sense! I started audiating two possible resting tones - I didn’t know which one was correct, or perhaps they both were! But, it was totally different to me now. It was an extraordinary experience - to experience unfamiliar music just as though I was a baby, and in hearing it presented in the MLT whole-part-whole format - now I could see for myself what that does for understanding. Adults can learn about things, read research, understand a theoretical concept, unlike babies. I was already keen on the idea of whole-part-whole and the value of pattern work, just from hearing about what it was. But nothing is more valuable than having the experience for yourself, and feeling your audiation kick in, with no intellectualisation, no music theory, it just happened. Thanks, Iranian classmates! And thanks, Gordon!