The application of theory to practice is an ongoing process, with theory informing practice and practice informing theory. The more we find answers to our questions, the more questions we find that need answers. Can the children comprehend shifting meters or shifting tonalities? When can I use the terms duple and triple? When are the children ready for musical instruments? Why can’t I try syllables or reading with the children now? What about expanding rhythm and tonal vocabularies? What about tonic and dominant functions? Too often our own impatience probes us to move forward whether music learning is ready or not. Musical discriminations that seem obvious to us often require advanced audiation. Children may be able to learn to read rhythm and tonal, but discriminating rhythm from tonal, in itself, is an advanced skill in audiation, let alone with notation. Children can be convincing with their imitating, leading us to believe they are syllable savvy or reading ready, when they are not at all.
We can answer a lot of our newly generated questions through exploration in the classroom, informed by theory, but many cannot be answered until children’s music learning advances enough to demonstrate answers to our more sophisticated questions. Children who are somewhat competent with various meters in sound may be able to handle some shifting meters, but those engaged with rhythm syllables have a language with which to discriminate one meter from another, label those differences as duple or triple, and comprehend shifting meters. Children may be able to learn new rhythm and tonal vocabulary or functions in whatever meters or tonalities, but the basic vocabulary that develops a sense of meter and a sense of tonality enables them to move forward to rhythm and tonal syllables and then to music reading, while acquiring additional rhythm and tonal vocabulary throughout. Children may be able to learn a musical instrument, but a child can deliver only what is within that child rhythmically and tonally. Applying rhythm and tonal skill to an external instrument is more difficult than actualizing the internal instrument through song and movement.
Generating questions, exploring in the classroom, finding dead ends and then exploring some more, all informed by theory, is how we learn as teachers. We just have to be sure that our children’s musical minds are ready to generate answers to the questions of our thinking minds.
