Rhythm and Musical Sound. Even the tiny baby responds to rhythm and to melody. Rhythm brings “a cadence to the soul”, to use G. Stanley Hall’s phrase; it relaxes and soothes both mind and body; it has far-reaching significance as a spiritual and moral force. Chanting any rhythmic poem or jingles, singing, rhythmic performing of physical exercises, are the beginnings of music as a rhythmic art. When the noise-enjoying age arrives, at about six months, a string of soft-toned, musical sleigh bells, or later in the first year, at the pounding stage, a tubephone, will give as much enjoyment as harsh noises; and at the same time these are cultivating a rudimentary musical sense. With the development of the phonograph, good music can be had even in households where no one plays a musical instrument. A baby of six months will notice the music, and most children from a year old will show enjoyment in hearing it. It is less important to acquaint little children with well-known classics—which are easily thus worn stale—than it is to provide good types of melody, harmony, and rhythm,—music that is sincere, enduring, normal. If children hear much of such music from the great masters and their disciples, before the age of ten, their tastes may be permanently influenced, and cheap, flashy, sensational music will fail to attract them.
As rapidly as a child develops motor ability to use them, musical instruments of good tone, adapted to his size, will provide him with enjoyable toys that at the same time cultivate sense of good musical sound and opportunity for musical experimenting and self-expression. A stout drum, cymbals, triangle, a tambourine, flute (being careful of its use by only one individual, and that it is wiped before using) are inexpensive. Montessori uses musical glasses and a series of bells tuned to scale and sounded by striking them. Kindergartners make wind harps by stringing mandolin or other cheap strings and wires on a wooden frame made in the workshop. This may be tuned for chords and hung where the wind will play fairy music upon it.
Every little child loves to play upon the piano. The ordinary toy piano is a jangle of noises that can only pervert the child’s sense of musical sound. Good toy pianos, with about two scales, small enough for the three-year-old size, can be purchased for a moderate price from some large musical stores. If circumstances will at all permit a child to play at his own sweet will and in his own way upon a real piano, the act will not only yield him indescribable bliss, but will foster immeasurably his love of music, and provide a means of musical self-expression. Few people expect to become great artists on any instrument. Technique, therefore, is of minor importance. The love of music, the desire to find expression through music, is the important feature to cultivate, leaving technique to a later age, nearer the teens.
The hearing of singing as a daily experience of early childhood, is potent for imitation and for good humor. A baby who hears much singing or humming will, even in his first year, attempt to hum, and in his second year, make up little snatches of song. This is music as it should be, developing out of the daily experience of life, illuminating that experience. Froebel urged his teachers to encourage this spontaneous, natural singing, and to set the example by their own spontaneous singing when with the children. In progressive schools of to-day, children of all ages are encouraged to compose melodies for nursery rhymes or little poems that they know, and later to develop harmonies. Thus through creation the child develops a richer self-expression, and if he is interested to become more proficient, he furnishes his own incentive for the drudgery of acquiring technique. What more pathetic situation than that of a child compelled to “practice”, whose soul is in revolt, and who every moment is acquiring a deeper loathing for music?
For teaching musical notation, there is a pasteboard keyboard, a set of pasteboard notes of different time-length and a special blackboard with the musical lines on which the notes can be hung. With these many games can be played, even at five or six years of age with some children, although others will not be ready until seven or eight.
The Crude Tastes of Childhood. Little children, like savages, have not developed fine discriminations in color. This is largely a matter of education. The little child shows a preference for vivid color, and no sense of harmony in color. His color sense is as undeveloped as his spoken language, and needs training, especially through good examples, for its refinement. A glass prism hung in the sunlight will give him pure spectrum hues while delighting even his baby days. It is not yet known with certainty at what age children’s eyes are sufficiently developed to really perceive color, although they are evidently able to distinguish degrees of brightness before a year of age, and show a preference for red or yellow objects rather than gray. They prefer colored pictures to black and white. Kindergarten supply houses now furnish large colored wooden beads, to be strung on shoe laces, and colored papers in graduated series of hues, and large colored wax crayons the size of a marking pencil. The Montessori apparatus now includes a set of flat wooden bobbins, about two by three inches square, painted in graduated shades of the spectrum colors, which the children at four and five years love to match or arrange by graduations of shade. A box of water colors (primary colors only) is indispensable to childhood.
Art Education. Good pictures, well colored, with sufficient vividness to interest the child, abound in the magazines and the shops. The classic nursery rhymes and tales have been illustrated in color by several eminent artists, and copies may be secured through any kindergarten supply house. The little child prefers pictures of animals, children, and mothers with children, realistic or homelike. He is rarely interested in still life, the classic, or the symbolic.
The ambitious teacher can easily overdo the matter of taking children to an art museum. An occasional trip, between five and nine years of age, will do no harm, if they are permitted to wander at their will. It starts the habit of going to a museum. Of greater potency for æsthetic training is the beauty and harmony of the child’s own home, and especially of his own room. Here inexpensive but beautiful colored pictures hung low enough for him to see them easily, and charming little plaster casts, will feed his mind and his soul, as does the daily singing. He is learning that art is for the daily life, not merely for unusual places and occasions as in the museum.
At five or six years of age children may begin to make scrapbooks of beautiful and charming pictures that they find in magazines, or that are purchased through the kindergarten or art stores. Postcard reproductions in color are obtainable of many famous pictures, both classic and nursery subjects.
In art, as in morals, the constructively good will naturally crowd out the crude, the vicious, and the mediocre.
Children’s Drawings and Painting. To quote from Doctor G. Stanley Hall:
Children often like to look at and more or less understand pictures early in the second year. They care most for those that have a story connected with them, and want their pictures read. Children like to draw illustrations of stories and concrete things, which must not be taken away from them in order that they may be precociously taught to see lines only. Instead, therefore, of current methods, the thing for kindergarten and lower grades to draw is the human figure, and vastly more freedom and individuality are needed. Geometrical lines are ghostly and wooden. Things in motion are more interesting, and perhaps Ruskin is right in saying that the child should be limited to the voluntary practice of art. The prevailing methods that begin with mathematical forms, cube, cylinder, etc., are stultifying and not only destroy the natural zest and ability to draw, but take away the power to enjoy art and to understand nature, geography, history, literature, which it is one object of art to inculcate.
The child desires to draw human beings, generally in action. Drawing teachers usually demand complete visual control, but the children draw lines symbolizing the direction birds fly, draw the wind, draw a zigzag line representing the dance a person is engaged in, and even gross errors are repeated after correction and explanation, showing how dominant muscle habits are. Young children draw anything with abandon and pleasure. They do not use their eyes much, no matter how difficult the theme, but draw their own image of it with about as good success as if there were no model. Children care nothing for accuracy here, which is the ideal of the methodists. Their order below ten years of age is the human figure, then animals, plants, or houses, then mechanical inventions, geometrical designs and ornaments. Children’s work is essentially pictorial and not decorative. Thus Ricci declares that art as such to children is unknown. Froebel is wrong, therefore, and the child enters the educational field by the door of literature rather than by that of mathematics.
Always some one or, at most, a few details are focused upon and magnified, betraying just what and how far the child has observed up to date. If we only had a complete collection of all the drawings of a single child with proclivities for art but who had been unrepressed by criticism or derision, we should find its very soul in each developmental stage represented. Too early insistence upon technique crushes. Teachers have so long put form above content that they little suspect the innate power and love of children for this kind of work. Above all, teaching should be to encourage and not to repress the tendency to exaggerate each new trait, and should have regard not to the finished product and should pay little attention to symmetry or to an artistic whole. Uniformity, too, should be cast to the winds and the teacher should encourage the deep instinctive tendency of pupils to perfect each item as it looms into the center of interest.
From several hundred drawings, with the name given them by the child written by the teacher, the chief difference inferred is in concentration. Some make faint, hasty lines, representing all the furniture of a room, or sky and stars, or all the objects they can think of, while others concentrate upon a single object. It is a girl with buttons, a house with a keyhole or steps, a man with a pipe or heels or ring made grotesquely prominent. The development of observation and sense of form is best seen in the pictures of men. The earliest and simplest representation is a round head, two eyes, and legs. Later comes mouth, then nose, then hair, then ears. Arms, like legs, at first, grow directly from the head, rarely from the legs, and are seldom fingerless, though sometimes it is doubtful whether several arms, or fingers, from head and legs without arms, are meant. Of 44 human heads only 9 are in profile. This is one of the many analogies with the rock and cave drawings of primitive man.
The Sunday Supplement. Fortunate the child who is protected from the encroachment of these execrations. They are like the cheap colored candy in the penny shops,—made to sell to those of undeveloped sensibilities, and further dulling those sensibilities to better life. The ordinary Sunday Supplement page for children is a clever combination of all the crudities that children enjoy—vivid color, crude drawing, bad manners, defiance of authority, clownish humor. Of course children cry for it, as they do for drugs that have dulled their nerves and set up perverted tastes. If it is kept from the child until his teens, and meanwhile his taste is being trained by natural, daily means, the probabilities are that he will then find it offensive; at least he will have passed the age when it can pervert his taste and ideals.
The clownish humor, the crude drawing, the humor of the unusual position and unexpected dilemma, without the bad manners and other unethical conditions, are furnished in abundance in the drawings of Leslie Brooke, Gelett Burgess, Peter Newell, in Tenniel’s illustrations of Alice’s Adventures, in Edward Lear’s Nonsense Books, to mention only a few. Delicately colored pictures, which adults find exquisite, do not attract the child, but in this day there are abundant treasures of pictures and picture books with colors strong, yet not blatant. In this respect the English and American work is in the main preferable to French, German, Russian.
Many books of songs for little children are published that are merely mediocre, or ill-adapted to children because not based on a knowledge of child psychology and the range of the child’s voice. Some children can carry a tune at three years, others not until six or seven years. The natural range of the child’s voice can be easily tested by trying it out with the piano; it will usually range from E to A at three years and from middle B to upper D at six years. These physiological limitations indicate that songs for children to sing should have a simple melody, within this range, and should be short. Children like simple hymns, lullabies, songs about animals, nature, play, dolls, and action songs.
If a child is thought to have vocal talent, the voice should be especially protected from strain and misuse, and intensive training postponed until late in the teens when the voice has become placed. A teacher of ability should be engaged for the first training.
All children should be trained to use the voice intelligently, which is hygienically. They should be taught to sing softly and naturally, and never allowed to sing harshly, boisterously, or falsetto. Screaming and shouting injure the voice, especially in childhood, while the vocal cords are developing. By a little careful hygiene, the example of musical, well-modulated voices in their elders, and the selection of songs within their range, American children might develop as pleasant voices as are found in some of the countries across the sea.
(music note) = boys (backwards music note) = girls
Age 0 1-2 3-5 6-7 8 9 10 11 12
From Gutzmann and Paulsen.