Joining the Blogosphere – Composition Readiness Training

Welcome to the very first Making Music Praying Twice blog!  I, Kate Daneluk, will be your predominant blogger.  Feel free to ask if there is a topic in early childhood brain growth, music development, or musical prayer life you'd like me to comment on here.  I'll let our facebook fans know when a new blog is posted, so simply fan us there if you'd like to be notified.  Or, simply check back here with us to hear more about our family story of faith, relationships, music, education and crazy family life!

This has been an unusual week for Making Music Praying Twice.  John met so many great Catholic School teachers, principals and DRE's at the NCEE Convention this week.  Also, I didn't teach any classes this week due to a combination of vacation schedules and a mild but still unpleasant virus which decided to play Round Robin with my children.  This was complicated by two major plumbing incidents caused by my two year old and idle time.  Even with these challenges creating a grumpy, tired Mommy, my grumpy, tired children still find moments for creative music making.  Our 2 year old is especially vocal lately and treats us to Hot Cross Buns, O Come O Come Emmanuel and The Choo Choo Train Song which is a silly little song her Daddy wrote years ago when our oldest was still in the womb.  She is trying so hard to substitute her own lyrics, which is especially challenging when you don't really speak fluently yet.

I encouraged "creative substitutions" (the slight altering of lyrics) in my oldest years ago because the research told us to, but now I have my own experience to rely on.  I've seen this work in my own children.  The more I encourage simple lyric substitutions, the more prepared they are for composition down the line.  While my oldest has been writing original, well constructed songs for a few years now, I'm just seeing the fruits of our efforts with our almost 7 year old.  Within the last two months, his songs have gained structure and are less unconsciously "borrowed" from other songs he knows.  My 5 year old however, still writes songs that sound more like strange musical ramblings.  The effort is put into using the language to express his ideas and the music is of secondary importance. 

I will try playing games where we each write a song using repetitive words or sounds like "popcorn"  or "bop".  This will allow him to utilize his full composition abilities without expending brain power on language.  Even so, I know that the imperfect attempts are part of this process and that giving him freedom to recognize the differences in well written songs and his attempts will make for much stronger composition skills in the future.  Correction now may show an immediate improvement, but will not help him grow into a better composer.

Other efforts to encourage composition readiness include improvising harmonies and writing simple songs about the everyday, but it is in these simple lyric substitutions that a very little child can first make a song her own and when that happens, music will be hers forever.