It's said that music is exercise for the mind. So you want your children to learn an instrument? If you didn't play music to them in the womb, is it too late? Sheila Waymanmeets some music-making tots.
It's seven in the morning and six-year-old Caspar Duignan is lying on his back on the floor with a violin under his chin, trying to get the white cat down from the roof. At least that's the image his music teacher has just put in his head to encourage him to draw his bow across the strings.
"This is just to loosen him up," says Maria Kelemen of the Young European Strings (YES) school which she and her husband, Ronald Masin, run from their home in Templeogue, Dublin. Every Thursday Caspar is up at 6am to come here for a half-hour lesson on his violin, one-eighth the size of an adult's one.
Both mother and teacher agree it's a good time for music lessons. "If you go after school, they have had a full day and their enthusiasm and concentration is not so strong," says his mother, Beibhinn Byrne.
Caspar has wanted to play the violin since he was two and asked Santa for one. His mother is sorry she didn't discover YES until earlier this year.
Ideally, Kelemen likes to start teaching a child from the age of two-and-a-half. "I want to be their first teacher," she explains. "At school they teach them too early to write."
Children's arms and shoulders are totally relaxed, she says, before they're forced to put pencil to paper.
Kelemen uses an approach pioneered by her compatriot, Hungarian composer and teacher Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967), which is based on developing the inner ear. When asked the best age to start a child's music education, he said: "Nine months before the birth." That was decades before Mozart was being marketed to pregnant women, after controversial research that suggested listening to his music in particular could improve a child's intelligence.
It can all induce a serious attack of parental guilt. If you didn't play music to your bump, and in the blur of the early years of parenthood you didn't get around to doing anything about music lessons, is it already too late? Certainly there has never been more music education, of varying standards, on offer for younger and younger children, with music and movement play groups becoming popular. The latest franchise to arrive in Ireland is Monkey Music, which started in the Mill Theatre in Dundrum, Dublin last month. Others, such as Gymboree, Jo Jingles and Kindermusik, have already established groups around the country.
Monkey Music is a bit more than fun, says Ann Maybin, who has brought it to Ireland and sees it complementing what is offered to older children at the Churchtown School of Music, which she set up three years ago. Catering for children aged from three months to four years, the programme is targeted at stages of development.
"Every movement and sound is age-specific. It's not just a case of children going in and banging a few tambourines," she says.
Most music schools would like to see a child coming in at four or five for an introductory group course. At the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin the pre-instrument classes are the only ones children don't have to audition for, says teacher Denise Coleman. "I prefer to give everybody a chance, so I can bring out the most in them musically."
The pre-instrument course at Newpark Music Centre in Blackrock, Co Dublin gives children aged four and five a broad introduction to music, without the intensity of individual lessons, explains the centre's director, Nigel Flegg. "After that we would channel them into piano, recorder, or violin - instruments best suited to small children."
He thinks parents can panic and think they have to make the right decision on an instrument at age six, but if somebody takes, say piano, for a couple of years and then wants to switch, it is not a problem. "It doesn't matter what instrument a child chooses, the crucial thing is that the child is interested in the instrument," Flegg stresses.
Parents who want their children to learn with a "Suzuki" teacher must be prepared not only to sit in on lessons, but also to take notes and recreate the teaching for daily practice at home. Learning music in the same way as learning to talk is the idea behind the method developed by violinist Sinchi Suzuki in the middle of the last century to teach very young children. While violin is still the most popular instrument for Suzuki tots, a range of other instruments are now taught using the same approach.
"Between the age of three and five, children are like sponges, absorbing everything," says one of Ireland's 75 registered Suzuki teachers, Jenny Boland, who runs Ceoil Cottage School of Music in Gorey, Co Wexford. Started three years ago with four students, the school now has 90 students.
The emphasis is on fun and learning by listening, says Boland. Reading music wouldn't be introduced until they are starting to read in school.
Each week the pupils come for 15-minute individual lessons, followed by a half-hour group lesson.
"This method only works if parents are prepared to be involved," she says. "Ultimately, young children do it for their parents' attention." While violins and cellos one-sixteenth the size of full-scale versions are available for tiny hands, physical limitations prevent children getting to grips with other instruments such as the flute, clarinet, saxophone and guitar until they're at least eight. From the age of 10, almost any instrument is an option.
One instrument that comes free is the voice, and a child can get a music education through a good choir from an early age.
"Every child can sing," says the director of the Dublin Choral Foundation, Ite O'Donovan. She believes they deserve the chance to develop that innate ability. Taking girls and boys from age five for a half-hour session a week, she has never had to tell one that they are not good enough to graduate into the Piccolo Lasso choir for nine- to 12-year-olds. Some will drop out because they are not interested or the family cannot commit to bringing them for twice-weekly rehearsals.
A former primary-school teacher, O'Donovan says every national school should have a music specialist and she traces a decline in music education back to the 1970s when being able to sing was dropped as a prerequisite for entry to primary-school teaching.
Music is a "whole intellectual and emotional side of the child that needs to be developed", she adds.
Just as sport will exercise your child physically, music will exercise their mind, says John Mardirosian, founder of Walton's New School of Music in Dublin. "But it's very easy to turn a child off if forced," he warns.
It's a delicate balance between encouraging and nagging when it comes to practice. While children may need to be reminded to practise, he says, they are not going to keep at it if they are not interested. They have to see a result and get a sense of achievement by working towards a concert, an exam or having a party piece.
"The music lesson is only a small percentage of the time that has to be applied to learn. A half-hour lesson a week won't work in itself," he points out. The biggest obstacle to learning music, adds Mardirosian, is "not being too old, but not having enough time".
It's taking the time to give even the two-year-olds individual lessons which makes the approach at YES labour-intensive. The 85 pupils, aged up to 17, are learning through visual as well as audio, tactile and muscular development. When Caspar has trouble playing his piece from memory, it transpires his mother forgot to get him to write it out as part of his homework. Transcribing it and then playing from his own handwriting would have helped him visualise it, explains Kelemen.
Packing his violin away, Caspar says he chose it because he liked the sound of it. Anything else he'd like to play? "The medieval lyre - I saw it on a documentary. I'd love to play the piano too, and the harp and the flute, the drums as well," he adds, his chocolate-brown eyes alight with enthusiasm. "I'd like to play nearly all the instruments in the world."
WHY MUSIC?
Only a small percentage of children learning music will make a career out of it. But at the very least, early exposure to music will sow the seeds of life-long pleasure. There is also plenty of research to suggest that it helps brain development, encourages self confidence and enhances social skills. As Nigel Flegg director of Newpark Music Centre, says: "Any child will benefit from the process of music education, regardless of the result."
HOW DO YOU FIND A MUSIC TEACHER?
Asking parents whose children are already taking music lessons is one way of getting word-of-mouth recommendations for teachers in your area.
Alternatively, the Music Network has an extensive online directory of music schools and private teachers throughout the country which you can search by area and/or any one of 73 individual instruments through www.learnmusic.info