The Mind Behind the Musical Ear: How Children Develop Musical Intelligence - Hardcover

This book will undoubtedly become required reading for all those concerned with, or undergoing, training in music education. -- Andrew Peggie "Music Teacher" Makes intriguing reading for anyone who has puzzled over the mechanism by which young children learn tunes.--Gerald Haigh "Times Educational Supplement " [This book] will undoubtedly become required reading for all those concerned with, or undergoing, training in music education.--Andrew Peggie "Music Teacher "

When we listen to music, what exactly do we hear? How do we come to hear in new ways? In "The Mind behind the Musical Ear", Jeanne Bamberger focuses on the earliest stages in the development of musical cognition. Beginning with children's invention of original rhythm notations, she follows eight-year-old Jeff as he reconstructs and invents descriptions of simple melodies such as "Hot Cross Buns" and "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star". In a running commentary on Jeff's discoveries and a series of dialogues between herself and two imaginary college students who take different approaches to music, Bamberger reflects on the thinking strategies that guide Jeff at various moments in his musical development. This approach allows the reader to experience the discovery process along with Jeff and the two students as they sort out fundamental and commonly held assumptions about music. By emphasizing the idea that each "hearing" of musical composition is a "performance", one among many possible hearings, Bamberger suggests that there are different ways of constructing meaning and that the processes of perception and conceptualizations are reciprocal. Over time, Jeff gains the capacity to make multiple hearings and descriptions of the same piece, each of which reflects his cumulating understanding of its musical structure and meaning. One of the book's central themes, played out in the student dialogues, is that knowing how - to sing a melody, for example, or clap a rhythm, or recognize a tune - may be quite different from knowing about, being able to state what it is that one knows. Both are powerful kinds of knowledge-in-action, and deep learning involves the development of a close, meaningful relationship between them. As Bamberger shows, this meaning-making as one learns to move between doing and description is a critical factor for learning in other cognitive domains as well. For educators and cognitive scientists this book has broad implications. It should help teachers and researchers to think about the conventions they use in making sense of everyday materials - to become aware of the "windows" that shape their world - and to develop a corresponding sensitivity to the various ways in which children may see these materials. Recognizing the potential in what and how children already know may be critical in helping them succeed in school.