Everyone is musical

I just read a fantastic book by Daniel Levitin, who is a neuroscientist/musician. He's done tons of research on the way music affects our brains (and our how our brains affect the music we make), and he's engagingly written about it in a book called "This is your brain on music." I thoroughly enjoyed both this book and his presentation at the Kindermusik International conference. A really interesting guy.

He repeatedly makes the point in this book that there is a strange, enormous gap between musicans and non-musicians in modern western culture, a gap that other cultures simply don't have. He relates a story about an anthropologist friend of his, who was spending some time with a village in the tiny country of Lesotho in southern Africa. There was a celebration one night and the villagers invited their visitor to join in. "I don't sing," he said--something we hear people say all the time here in the west.

But the villagers in Lesotho just stared at Jim in shock. "'What do you mean you don't sing?! You Talk!' Singing and dancing were natural activities in everybody's lives, seamlessly integrated and involving everyone." [italics mine]

I feel that in every Kindermusik class, we chip away at that unnatural gap. We show our children that they have a singing voice, and a musical nature, and we invite them to claim it and relish in it.

And adults get to sing in a Kindermusik class, too.