Susan Mayclin Stephenson

The Music Environment for All Ages
This blog post contains excerpts from this 44-page book, the text first published in “AMI Journal, Theme Issue: The Montessori Foundations for the Creative Personality.”

This book is a student handout in our AMI 0-3 courses.
—Julia Hilson, AMI Board Member and teacher trainer

Introduction
The natural urge to sing, dance, make and listen to music wells up from the depths of each person, from birth to death. It can be stamped out at an early age or it can be fostered to enrich all of life. This article describes how important music is to us at every time in our life, from birth to death. But, what is music? What words can successfully describe it? We might as easily try to capture all the most poignant sights, sounds, and smells of childhood holiday celebrations into a single black and white collection of letters on a piece of paper. We may not know how to describe music, but we do know that we don’t want our children to miss out on it. (Page 3)

We need to look back. There was wisdom in previous generations that we’re ignoring. We think we’re going to be “modern”, and that we can do better than our parents and grandparents. There are things that have been part of the human condition for thousands of years—that have been part of the human condition for good reason; otherwise they would have been weeded out. —Adele Diamond, PhD, Neuroscientist (Page 4)

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Music and the Stages of Life:

Prenatal, Birth to Three Years
When music always comes out of a car radio, or a CD player, how can children be inspired to pick up an instrument and learn to make music? Wherever I go now in international work I look for ways to share this experience, by matching percussion sounds or playing a piano, when I can find one. Even the youngest child, as in the picture above, delights in being shown how to touch and pull on a guitar string gently so that the sound is the same as when the adult does it. Children at this age are interested in using their hands, and in movement of all kinds. (Page 10)

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Age Three to Six Years
The Montessori bells —as in the picture above taken in a 3-6 class in Moscow, Russia—are standard sensorial materials in the Montessori primary class, and children easily learn to match and then to grade them. With enough practice a child can hear a bell tone played and know the name without knowing where in the scale it is. This is a natural skill called perfect pitch that many of us thought was inborn, or was not. No, it can be learnt at this age. Sometimes children go on to learn to read music. (Page 20)

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Age  Six to Twelve Years
In 1977 I taught a 6-12 class for the first time. This was in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands. The head of school knew ahead of time that I required a piano for the classroom, so the mother of one of the young ladies told me on the first day, “Pia is planning to be a vet, so you don’t have to give her piano lessons.”
I replied that no one would be required to learn music, but I would offer beginning instruction on recorder, guitar, or piano to any student who was interested. When I was not busy during the class time I practiced a Chopin piano piece that I was supposed to play at a wedding in Washington DC at the end of the year and Pia fell in love with it. It is eleven pages long and not easy and I could never play it without music, but working diligently, before and after school and during the lunch hour (after her fellow students complained about hearing the same piece over and over) Pia learned the whole thing beautifully, by memory, by the end of the year. She had never played a note of music before that. Almost forty years later, in 2015, Pia brought her husband and two grown boys to visit us and since neither of us had polished that piece in many years, I played a recording, Chopin’s Opus 64 #2, for her family. I am sure it inspired them to continue with their own musical studies. (Page 25)

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Age Twelve to Eighteen and Adults
Montessori spoke of the four planes of development as the basis for her theory of psychology. If the needs of the child have been met in the first twelve years (the first two planes, birth to six and 6–12) the young person at age twelve or thirteen is reaching the first stage of becoming an adult. It can be a traumatic, hormonal few years, but when these young people are treated with the same respect given to adults, and given responsibility and meaning in their work, they will thrive. In the above picture we see young people this age and adults all playing music together on the famous horsehead stringed instruments, and on other instruments, in the capital of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. They do not think of themselves as children.
The music these young people play, as they are becoming adults, will be meaningful to them—as one of the positive experiences of this potentially tumultuous time, throughout life. (Page 29)

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The Elderly
My mother was a musician and as she entered her eighties it was becoming difficult for her to play the harp or piano. I knew Montessori has helped the elderly in many ways for years, but I wanted to find out how to help her with music. In 2014, I saw the movie Alive Inside, which won an award at the Sundance Film Festival. It follows the work of a social worker who founded the non-profit organization “Music & Memory”. Oliver Sacks, the renowned neurologist and author of Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, is one of the people interviewed in the movie. The following year it was very exciting to hear of a new group being formed by Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) to research the needs of the elderly. The Montessori Advisory Group for Aging and Dementia, was first presented at the annual general meeting in Amsterdam of 2015.

Later that year the head of this group, Anne Kelly, also spoke at the EsF (Educateurs sans Frontières) assembly in Thailand where she guided me in helping my mother. Knowing well the miraculous effects of personalized music on loved ones, Anne explained that it is the music of early childhood, the music our parents play when we are young, that is the most successful in helping the elderly. Our family then researched the music of the 1920s, purchased fifty pieces from Amazon, downloaded them to an iPod and wrote out directions for her to listen to this music on a very comfortable set of earphones. Earphones are used in this case so an elder can listen at any time without disturbing others. Recently, when I was with my mother as she listened to music, even though she has trouble remembering many things, she was thrilled to be able to remember the words and titles of songs. And a friend of hers (in the above picture) asked to borrow the earphones, and then also started smiling, singing, and tapping her feet. Anne says that this is not just for happiness, but it actually makes positive changes in the brains of the elderly. (Page 32).

More information and pictures from this book CLICK: more

More on the AMI Montessori work here: CLICK: Anne and Susan

Musical Babies
This is an  earlier blog post with several delightful and informative video clips of babies (in US and Peru) discovering music. CLICK: musical babies

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Books
Information on the “Brief Montessori Introduction” titles Montessori Cosmic Education and Beginnings, Montessori Birth to Three Comparison with Traditions in Bhutan. CLICK: Books

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Blessings,
Susan

Home page, CLICK: Susan

To see other books in this series, CLICK: Books