Interview with Eliana

Interviewer (A.K.A. Mommy): Eliana, what do you like most about Music Together?
Eliana: Kafee!
Interviewer: Oh, your teacher, Miss Kathy?
Eliana: Yes
Interviewer: What do you like most about Miss Kathy?
Eliana: Kafee funny.
Interviewer: What does Miss Kathy do that’s funny?
Eliana: (Makes a blowing sound) FFFFSS…
Interviewer: I don’t understand. What is FFFFSS?
Eliana: (Points to light switch and makes blowing sound again) FFFSSSS…
Interviewer: Oh, you like blowing out the lights?
Eliana: Yes

(For our next to last song in each session, we all make a blowing sound and Miss Kathy turns out the lights. Then she picks up her guitar and we all sing a lullaby-type song quietly together.)

Interviewer: What else does Miss Kathy do that you like?
Eliana: Hug.
Interviewer: Oh, you like hugging Miss Kathy and your friends during the good-bye song each week?
Eliana: Yes.

From this point on the interview was largely me asking if she liked certain activities and Eliana saying “yes”, so the rest will be from Mommy’s point of view.

There are so many things we love about Music Together. I love having 45 minutes of constant engagement with my child and husband, where I don’t have to be in charge, and the dishes, laundry, etc. aren’t sitting in front of me calling my name. Eliana tends to shy away from large groups of people and go into observer mode rather than participant mode in class situations. Weekly interactions with Miss Kathy and the other families in our group have helped her come out of her shell at Music Together classes and engage in activities with the same energy she has at home. Obviously, there was already a lot of music, singing, instrument playing, and dancing in our home before Music Together, but the classes have given us so many new ideas, like circle dances, blanket dances, and scarf dances—Eliana’s favorites. The CDs and songbooks also provide lots of fun songs that are composed and chosen specifically to help young children develop a sense of melody and rhythm, the two building blocks needed to engage in musical activity at any age. Just as Miss Kathy predicted, Eliana’s first step towards singing has been to join in on the last words or sounds of a phrase. Some of the songs on the CD are just “nonsense” syllables. Since these don’t require a lot of verbal work for Eliana, these are the ones with which she has started to “sing” along. She has also picked up on the fact that the last note of a song is often held for a long time. We enjoy watching her sing the final note and shake her head to add a little vibrato.

While attaining musical skills is one wonderful benefit of Music Together, it is not the primary focus of the program. This is very important to us. Some children’s music programs are about creating little Mozarts. We don’t want Eliana’s early music experiences to have that much pressure. We want them to be fun. Some of my fondest memories of my childhood involve me sitting on the piano bench next to my sister or my nana, gathered around the piano with our whole family singing, marching around the basement banging on my toy drum while Dad played his trombone, and hearing the common tonalities in the voices of my mother, my sister, and myself as we sat side by side singing in the church pew. The love and acceptance and connection I felt in those moments are still strong in my memory. While these were common family experiences a generation or two ago, to sit around the piano or guitar and sing together, such events seem to be less and less common in our society. Many people feel like if they can’t sing like Celine Dion or Josh Groban, they shouldn’t sing at all. Music Together helps children to see that singing, playing instruments, and dancing are natural activities for people of all ages. Our classes become small musical communities, and give us the tools to share fun musical activities with our friends and families. After Thanksgiving dinner, for example, we turned on our Music Together CD and Eliana led the whole family in one dance after another. Making music together is one of the most intimate experiences I had had with other human beings, and one of the few activities that the Bible specifies as being part of our eternal experience. Music Together has truly offered us a little piece of heaven.