All the learning and experiences that take place at be.Living, even the most private ones, go through the process of being together. And this is where the children’s musical learning also takes place, within the collective. Just as one instrument is part of a large orchestra, each child learns to feel and make music by developing the perception that they are part of something bigger. To gain a deeper understanding of how music learning takes place at our school, we interviewed Amanda Ribeiro, an elementary school music teacher at be.Living. Check it out!
b.L: How important is music for a child’s development?
Amanda: Music allows children to develop in many ways. Music is a powerful tool for developing and organizing children’s sensory, motor and physical skills, such as practicing instruments, acquiring a pulse and rhythm. It also helps with cognition, the perception of sounds and the extent to which our mind can make connections between sounds. There is also a cultural and historical dimension. Music is about being human, about being a person. All peoples, all people from all cultures, have made and make music. Music is universal, it is part of the human condition. When we practice music, we come into contact with this ability, this skill, as well as with this history that is as old as humanity. In be.living’s music classes, specifically, we make a point of incorporating this cultural and historical dimension so that we can value human diversity. We work with music, rhythms and repertoires from different peoples, from different parts of the world and from different eras too. This sense of belonging is very important: allows us to understand, through music, that we belong to a culture, that we are heirs to a history, and that there are also other histories and other cultural lineages that we don’t belong to but that we can get to know, value and learn a lot from.
b.L: What is the purpose of music classes at be.Living?
Amanda: One of the goals is precisely to introduce the students to different cultures through music. Another aspect of our work is the music itself, the musical elements: pulse, rhythm, melody, harmony, pitch, tuning, arrangement. It also has the aim of being a collective through music. Here at be.Living, we do a lot of things together, as a community, as a group of children. Não trabalhamos com instrumentos solos como violão e piano, mas com instrumentos que possam ser tocados coletivamente e com os quais possamos fazer uma banda, uma mini orquestra, um pequeno grupo. We seek to create this dimension of coexistence, of collective music-making. We believe that listening is just as important as playing an instrument. So it’s not enough for children to know how to play an instrument, they need to be able to play with others. This means we need to develop the skills of listening and being available to others, learning to pulsate together. Competitive situations often come up during music lessons. Our society places a great premium on performance, that thing about the musician who can play with a guitar on his back, just as an example. And children have a lot of exposure to this kind of content and attitude. So one of our aims here at our music classes at be.Living is also to deconstruct this urge to perform, this stereotype of the music superstar who is actually often incapable of playing well with others. That collective purpose is vital to us and it resonates and speaks to all of the educational work carried out by the school. Every teacher here, regardless of their area of expertise, always strives for collectivity.
b.L: We often associate learning music with the prerogative of having some kind of special talent for it. But music at school is for every child. How do you work on this issue of skill and the individual interest that each child may or may not have in music?
Amanda: There really are children and people who have an easier time, a pre-disposition to relate to certain specific areas of knowledge. But that doesn’t mean that children who don’t have an easy understanding of the elements of music can’t develop that skill. What happens is that some children find it easy and others face more difficulty. This is precisely why we work with different forms of teaching and learning. When we’re working on a rhythm, for example, first I’ll play that rhythm for them. I emphasize the audible way of teaching music, giving them a listening experience first. Then, I transfer this rhythm to a vocal form. Then, we use our own voice to simulate, to imitate this rhythm. The third step is to move on to a visual way of learning, so we start writing out the rhythm. Together with the children, we thought of a way to make this rhythm easier to understand by drawing the sounds. And then we move on to a more mathematical form, counting how many low, medium and high sounds there are in that rhythm. So let’s take a walk through these different ways of learning a rhythm. Children who can’t learn by listening can learn by talking. If she hasn’t learned it by speaking, she can learn it in graphic form. If, even so, it was difficult for them to learn, we move on to a more mathematical form. In general, once we’ve gone down this path, with various ways of accessing the same content, all children are able to learn, understand and touch what they’re being taught. What I try to do is make sure that the children who learn more sonically are also able to rationalize this learning more through spelling or mathematics, and with the children who can only learn when we start counting the sounds, we work so that they can detach themselves from this counting, opening up other channels of sensitivity that depend less on rationality. There are many profiles of children and many profiles of ways of learning. We value every way of learning and we try to expand these paths so that they can also access other ways of learning music. This means that every student goes through this musicalization process, that every child becomes more musical, so that music isn’t something that depends on special talents and abilities, but that everyone can make it, experience it and enjoy it in their own way.
b.L: To what extent can a child who has had a musical education at school have this contribute to their civic education?
Amanda: I think this is a very important point because we perpetuate this myth, this false idea in people’s minds, that studying music makes someone special. It’s not true that studying music necessarily makes you a good citizen. Like everything in life, it will depend on how the process happened. A person can study music, become an incredible musician from a technical point of view, but they may not cherish democratic values, they may not value diversity, they could be an extremely closed-minded, controlling and musically prejudiced person, someone who doesn’t value the music-making of other cultures and who doesn’t recognize other types of musical thinking different from their own. Music education cannot be an education for music itself, but it needs to be a music education for people, for society and for the world. If we make music and study music in a way that establishes a hierarchy cultures and musical practices, we are doing a disservice to children and society. Music education needs to value diversity and the music-making of all cultures and people, doing everything it can to broaden the repertoire, listening and musical experiences, contributing to our students’ civic education. Music education on its own, without these values, may not necessarily be beneficial. It’s very common to hear reports of people who have studied music all their lives and have been traumatized by their teachers. This musical experience and study, depending on how it happens, can be extremely traumatic. The person is a virtuoso, plays incredibly well from the point of view of having a refined technique, but is unable to find enjoyment, pleasure or even an artistic and sensitive relationship with music, so they just maintain a strictly technical, sad and difficult relationship with music from an individual and subjective point of view.
