Making Music Together Increases Kids Empathy

This morning I came across a really interesting article, "Making Music Together Increases Kids Empathy."

http://www.psmag.com/culture/making-music-together-increases-kids-empathy-41627/

Wow!  Something that we're doing every day can increase our empathy.  I say "our", because we've already decided that learning music is just as good for parents as kids.  This is particularly good news, because, being a sucker for parenting books, I tried to read a book about Emotional Intelligence, and I just didn't get very far.  Not that I didn't think it was important, but the book didn't grab me and I felt a little bad about it.

I'm not going to reiterate the article.  You should go read it. I'm just going to agree with it.  Kids in Suzuki violin are nicer than other kids.  In fact, in four years of group classes, I can't think of a single instance of one child being unkind to another.  The kids at Suzuki Institute and Fiddle Camp, too.  All really nice kids.  I've commented on it and just chalked it up to good luck, "Boy, what a nice bunch of kids in the boys' group classes this year, so supportive and fun," and "You can't ask for a more fun bunch at camp."  

Mountain Road Fiddle Camp 2011

It's surprising because Suzuki violin is inherently competitive.  
"What song are you on?"
"I just finished Book 1 and you're STILL on Minuet 3."
But the competition just seems to spur them on, in a positive way.

Suzuki Institute 2011

People often ask me if Huck is jealous and competitive of Gus' music.  He isn't, at least not in that, "He got a bigger piece of chocolate cake than I did," sort of way that brothers are notorious for.  In fact, I think he's Gus' biggest fan.  

In part, it is because Huck has his peers in his class to compete with.  He and a friend have been neck-to-neck since they learned to play Twinkle, and now they're both finishing up Gossec Gavotte.  When either of them performs a solo for their group class, the other watches attentively and claps louder than anyone else in the group!  That alone is a wonderful lesson, to compete in a supportive and nurturing way.   

Fiddle Camp between classes

So, if playing music with other kids increases empathy, what does this say about family music?  Where do we need empathy more than at home?  Don't we often say the unkindest things to the people we love most?  We're patient with strangers at work and at school, but often there's no patience left for our families.  When we play music together, we listen to each other.  We watch each other and interact.  And it brings us joy.  Sometimes, it doesn't work that way, and someone walks away mad.  But as time goes on, that happens less.  We're learning, and we're learning together as a family.  And if we're increasing our empathy while we're at it, we should all go play some music together.

What we're focused on

This post is about focus, extreme focus.  Although most of us admire this kind of focus, we usually encourage our kids to do things in scheduled increments of no more than an hour.  That's the very best part of homeschooling.  Allowing the kids to work on what they're interested in for as long as they want.

Gus is involved with an amazing project with an awesome bunch of talented musicians.  He's working on it all the time and loving it.  He's practicing the songs for hours a day.  When he's not doing that he's poring through the Mountain Minstrelsy book, picking out more songs, or strumming his banjo, chord chart in hand writing more songs.  Its what he's humming as he plays Legos, and what he's talking about after I tuck him in and turn out the light at bedtime.



This is what Gus's life looks like right now. 

 Helping to make sure that the mikes and recording equipment are set up correctly.

Learning how the sound board works.

Making SPACE ECHOs.

 Practicing with the band.

 Composing more Mountain Minstrelsy.

Writing about science.

Making art.

 And, as always, taking pictures of the cat.

Poor Little Soldier's Boy

Mountain Mistrelsy, a book by Henry Shoemaker, arrived in the mail.  We sat down on the porch to read it.  It is a collection of songs from the turn of the century, the previous one not the recent one, collected from the porches, campfires, hunting and lumber camps of Northern Pennsylvania.

You can't open the book and sing the songs.  The tunes were lost, only the words remain.  Soundless songs of loss and despair, of love and death, cries for social change.

A group of local musicians are bringing these songs back to life for a recording project called Mountain Mistrelsy.  Gus has been asked to play fiddle for the project.

We flipped through the book, reading a page where the title grabbed our attention.

Gus was immediately drawn to A Soldier's Poor Little Boy, the story of the orphan of a soldier freezing in a snowstorm and begging an old lady to let him into the warm.  I read the story, but it didn't sing to me.  I only saw words on the page.

He ran to his banjo and asked me to read the first line.  He plunked around and found some chords.  We wrote them down.  I read the next line and the banjo replied with more chords, until we reached the end of the first verse.   He played through it until he was satisfied.

He had reached through the pages of the book and the chords on his banjo drew the outline of that orphan from long ago, freezing in the snow.  

 I played through the chords for him and he listened quietly, then began to play fiddle, first long notes like blowing wind, and then a simple melody that descended with the boy's dispair, and rose with his hope, repeating over and over between the verses.  The notes of the fiddle sketched in the features of the hungry child and the woman who saved him.

We played the song together as a family over and over again, adjusting words and changing the key to accommodate our voices.  It became real to us, a spare haunting melody, like a black and white photo of the boy saved from the storm.

Gus played it for the rest of the Mountain Minstrels.  They played it together on guitar, banjo, bass, drums, mandolin, changing the phrasing and the tempo, round and round until a complete song emerged.  The boy's story, like the boy in the song, had been rescued from the whiteout of time and obscurity.  A complete picture emerged of a lonely woman who had lost her son in the war and the rescued boy, playing and singing their song by the fireplace as the storm receded into the background outside.

 

photo by Tim Yarrington

Wordless Wednesday - Fossil Hunting

What We're Practicing Today

We're enjoying a two week break from the boys' Suzuki violin lessons for spring break.  Its not that we don't love our lessons, but the break has certainly been a nice change of pace and I realized today that we're playing a really interesting mix of music right now.

Gus has written chords and melody for a couple of old, old, songs.  He wasn't gentle to his new-chord phobic parents, so we're getting much better at our B minor and F chords.  He picked out two songs:  Harry Bell, a lovely little tune about a guy falling into the saw at a sawmill, and Soldier's Poor Little Boy, about a boy freezing to death in the snow.  Surprisingly they have become some of our favorite family band songs, which is crazy because last week they didn't seem like songs at all, just words on a page.  Gus plays banjo on Harry Bell and has worked up a great solo.  We also played through some of our "old standards" tonight: Country Roads, Brown Eyed Girl, Long Black Veil, Nelly Was a Lady...



Huck has worked so hard on the Bach Minuets in Suzuki Book 1 and he has mastered them!  He wouldn't hear of shelving them for a week so he's played them every day.  He's also putting a lot of effort into getting ready for St. Patrick's Day.  He's learned Swallowtail Jig and Road to Lisdoonvarna and is really hoping that Gus will call him up on stage St. Patrick's Day so he can show them off.


Gus is getting ready for his Suzuki Book 3 graduation but was happy to shelve the Bach Bourree for a week.  He took it out today, shook out the wrinkles, and played it with some enthusiasm that it had gotten lost in all the polishing.  He's also getting Jay Unger's Lover's Waltz ready.  He's always followed his graduation piece with a fast and crazy fiddle tune (Orange Blossom Special last time) so he's going to surprise everyone with a slow pretty one this time.  Gus is working on another project that requires him to solo in the key of B flat.  To get used to the key, we pored over the Fiddler's Fake Book looking for fiddle tunes in that key.  There are precious few.  So we settled on Done Gone, which he hated for a day or two but now its his new favorite song.   If only I found this web page sooner, a whole slew of B flat songs.  He's still enjoying working on Elzic's Farewell, and I still can't keep up with the chords on that one.  And he's brushing up on all his Celtic stuff for St. Patty's Day, particularly the Old Hag set.  And then there's the Seitz in Suzuki Book 4, about as close as Suzuki gets to a hokum bow...

I've been working on these crazy mandolin calisthenics called FFcP and man do they hurt.  They're working though.  My pinky is a much more cooperative part of my hand and I can move the whole exercise to any crazy key that I would've said that I couldn't play in just by following that patterns.  And the chop chords, I'm always working on those.
I'm trying to keep up with my 6 yr old on the jigs, but I think he's passed me up.  I better watch out or the cat might too if I spend too much time blogging when I should be practicing.


That's not all we do on a beautiful March day.  After we practice we go out to play.

Acoustic Brew 20th Anniversary Celebration 2/25/2012

 

Songs

Gus has been working on putting music to the words of some awesomely morbid old songs.