Music for all and all for Music

As an adult, you enter one of our special Primary Music classrooms. Welcome to Music room P102! A myriad of instruments fill the room: keyboards, rainbow coloured xylophones, a whole host of djembes, a shiny trumpet… even a huge double bass standing guard in the corner.

Imagine you are there by yourself with nowhere to go and nowhere to be (and no phone in hand!). Would you be drawn to any of the instruments? If you knew nobody was watching or listening, would you walk over and explore the sounds? For quite a few of us I would guess that we certainly would. We are a creative community in Shanghai.

Now imagine that you are in the same room with a group of adults ... Would you feel as relaxed about exploring sounds? Possibly not. In other words, would self-consciousness trump sound consciousness?

Part of our vision for Music at BISS is building an environment where the act and experience of Music drives student curiosity and engagement to the point where self-consciousness is not an issue. This leads our students to be focused and passionate explorers of sound.

A recent example was a student in Year 1 who last week proudly told us “I play the piano”. When offered the chance to perform for the class she, without hesitation, walked smilingly to the piano, placed her fingers on the keys and proceeded to explore sounds on the piano in what was clearly a free improvisation. It was very obviously a performance from an as yet untrained pianist, but the beauty and magic of the moment was in the confidence of a child absolutely believing in and expressing her innate musicality and feeling that our BISS Music classroom was absolutely the right and safe place to explore that. This is what I want for all our students. Music is not for the chosen few and the fact that music transcends language is just one of the pointers to this truth.

Many of us have had the experience of reading a book we almost literally can’t put down. But have you ever experienced or played with sound that you “can’t put down”? I am very confident to say that all of the Music staff at BISS have had (and continue to have) that experience. This is part of why our collaboration with Juilliard has so much to offer us. The carefully chosen core works from great composers across a wide range of genres draw our students into deeper engagement with sound and music in that quest to find those sounds we just don’t want to put down.

A musical challenge for interested families this week is twofold:

1. If your child learns an instrument and practises regularly at home, then this week, allocate a small amount of their practice time to explore sounds freely without any technical goals at all. Notice how this impacts their subsequent formal and more technical practice.
2. Search your music collection together to find sounds you can’t put down. Play your child a piece of music that is special to you that they may not have heard before.