It's easy as A, B-flat, C

By Chris Pasles

June 27, 2004 12 AM PT

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Times Staff Writer

Running his fingers across a brightly colored computer screen, leaving trails of dots, lines and squiggles, 5-year-old Brandon Washington builds what he calls a “music city.”

Then he touches a “play” icon, and the city springs to aural life. Instruments can be heard performing his idiosyncratic marks as if they were notes in an orchestral score. Brandon wriggles with delight.

A student at the New Mt. Calvary Enrichment Center, Brandon is seated in an exhibit called “Music Island” recently installed at the Zimmer Children’s Museum in West Hollywood. The exhibit -- the brainchild of venerable Los Angeles composer Morton Subotnick -- allows kids to create, edit and hear their own music just as easily and directly as if they were finger-painting. Other parts of it let them experiment with rhythms alone or compare melodies to sharpen their listening skills.

Brandon also has more than the sound of Western instruments at his fingertips. By clicking on other icons, he can hear his composition played by Chinese instruments, in rhythms and scales appropriate to Chinese traditions, or African or South American instruments in those culture’s modes and scales.

Subotnick’s enthralling high-tech display, one of three such kiosks at the Zimmer, may represent the most up-to-the-minute way of introducing youngsters to the joys of making and listening to music. These days, though, it’s far from alone. Even as many observers bemoan the decline of music education in schools, new computer programs, books and videos abound, and tried-and-true methods that have fallen out of the limelight are flourishing.

On VHS and DVD, film composer Patty Carlson gets children improvising right off the bat in her “Piano Logic.” In “Raising Musical Kids: A Guide for Parents,” author and USC Thornton School of Music dean Robert Cutietta offers moms and dads a host of helpful hints -- most important, perhaps, on how to motivate their offspring to practice. Pianist-educator William Westney asks us to rethink our whole attitude toward mistakes in his book, “The Perfect Wrong Note,” suggesting that clunkers have value after all.

Meanwhile, computer-based courses, such as “Music Ace,” are available to teach children music fundamentals, while interactive programs like the ones at the Zimmer (minus the world culture choices, developed exclusively for the museum) can be purchased on three CD-ROMs from Viva-Media.

“I don’t think of what I’m doing as purely music,” says Subotnick, now 71 and a pioneer in electronic as well as computer-generated music. “I think of it as musical creativity and musical expression.

“That’s why I identified early childhood as the area to work -- not later -- because there’s still room for enormous creativity, for developing imaginations and making new kinds of connections which give us the ability to do everything, not just music: to think, make judgments, accept new experiences, who knows? It’s a powerful tool.”

A head start

What everyone involved in teaching music agrees on is the importance of reaching children early.

“It’s like riding a bike,” says Cutietta. “You can learn it later. But, boy, if you get this down in the early years of life, you have it for life.”

In fact, 20th century Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly -- who fostered a method of music instruction now offered at the Colburn School of Performing Arts -- felt that an elementary school music teacher is more important than an opera house conductor. “He said that the conductor of the opera house, if he’s not very good, will be out the second season,” says Mark Williams, a Kodaly teacher at the downtown school. “But a bad music teacher can ruin generations of children.”

A persistent problem in music education is the huge gap between a child’s desire to play an instrument immediately and the years of hard work actually required to master one.

That’s a difficulty that Carlson -- whose film scores include the PBS “Wild America” series and who taught herself to play the piano at 21 -- tries to bypass in “Piano Logic.” She devised a way of looking at music as what she calls a “numeric language,” enabling a novice to focus on visual cues and spatial relationships between notes and thus to play without first learning to read music.

“Fluency is not that easy to teach,” Carlson says. “But in ‘Piano Logic,’ you have fluency immediately because you’re flowing across the keyboard, playing real music.”

“Piano Logic” can’t prevent people from making mistakes. But when it comes to wrong notes, some new ideas have also cropped up.

“One of the things that’s very clear is positive reinforcement,” says Cutietta. “You don’t fix a mistake where it occurs. You go back before the mistake was made. There’s a chain, so you have to figure out where the start of the chain is, play through that again and then give students feedback.

“A lot of people let them go on until they make their next mistake, because it seems a little odd to stop someone who’s not making a mistake. But you have to. You somehow have to make them aware of the fact that they did it right. That’s a change.”

Oops, I goofed

Westney, in “The Perfect Wrong Note,” is more radical. He contends that the natural way to learn is through mistakes. Toddlers, he points out, fall down a lot before they learn to walk. If we focused on the falls, we’d predict they’d never stay on their feet.

“I was misunderstood at the beginning,” the author maintains. “People said, ‘You’re saying mistakes don’t matter.’ That’s not what I mean. Mistakes are the pathway to control.”

Westney distinguishes between an “honest” mistake and a “careless,” or quickly excused, one. “An honest mistake is something that comes as a surprise to you. Traditionally you would say, ‘That was my fault. I need to concentrate harder.’ I’m saying no. You say: ‘How interesting. I wonder what that’s telling me?’ ”

If a student can isolate a mistake and repeat the passage enough times “with gusto,” Westney says, he or she will come up with the right way to play it. “It might take you two or 20 times, but the body is great at this. That’s how we learn very naturally. Babies focus on one thing at a time. They don’t ever feel guilty about their mistakes.”

The body as a source of musical wisdom is not a new idea. It’s at the center of the otherwise different methods developed in the 20th century by Kodaly and his contemporary Emile Jaques-Dalcroze. The latter was a Swiss educator puzzled by his music students’ problems executing even relatively easy rhythmic passages when they were perfectly able to walk or run rhythmically. “He concluded that all people possess musical instincts naturally, but sometimes they cannot transfer their musical instincts to their musical needs,” says Mari Izumi, who teaches Dalcroze movement at the Colburn School.

The upshot was that, through lifelong experimentation, Dalcroze created a series of exercises that connect the whole body to the rhythms and expressive energy of music and dance.

It’s inspiring to watch Izumi’s 5- and 6-year-old pupils toss colored scarfs back and forth with their parents, expertly on the beat, as she shifts at the keyboard from three-quarter waltz time to march rhythms. Equally uplifting is hearing Williams’ Colburn class of 10- to 12-year-olds singing not only in tune but with expression.

“The first thing we do is get the children together and just start singing,” Williams says. “I couldn’t care less if a child could carry a tune or not, because if we work with them long enough, they can.”

Indeed, in the Kodaly approach, instrumental training doesn’t begin until kids have had at least two years of singing. “What we’ve found is that the minute you put an instrument into a child’s hand, they stop singing,” Williams says. “And we feel that singing is the most important thing because the music goes into the psyche of the child. It goes into the brain, and they can’t lose it.”

No one knows how many kids will continue to study music after exposure to these methods, but until recently in this county, there was no objective way of evaluating their progress if they did.

“The United States is really the only country that doesn’t have any kind of accreditation or certification or standard assessment for students or teachers in music,” says Scott McBride Smith, president of the International Institute for Young Musicians and the Royal American Conservatory Examinations. “People need to have an idea of what it is they should be doing and how they’re really doing. The standard needs to be fair, it needs to be challenging, and it needs to be across the board. And the same thing for teachers.”

So working with the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, Smith developed a series of Internet-based piano and music theory tests on 13 levels, for beginners up to performers. He sees the exams as an encouragement.

“There are always ups and downs in study,” he says. “Every single child that ever played the piano has had trouble putting the hands together. That’s when we lose a lot of them. Just having a goal -- ‘Well, you can’t stop now, you’ve got to take your Grade 2 in May’ -- keeps people going beyond that.

“Some people really don’t care, and that’s OK. At least they have music in their lives. But for those who are serious, how would they know how well they should be playing after two years? With no national standard, it’s just someone’s opinion.”

At the moment, Brandon Washington is too busy building his music city at the Zimmer to care about national standards. But already he’s involved in music in a way that has been denied to untold generations of kids: He’s composing and editing it. And he’s its future.

Kid-friendly lessons

CD-ROMs

Morton Subotnick’s “Making Music,” “Making More Music,” “Hearing Music.” $29.95 each. www.Viva-Media.com

“Music Ace” and “Music Ace 2,” $49.95 each; “Music Ace Deluxe,” $79.95. www.Harmonicvision.com

Books

“Raising Musical Kids: A Guide for Parents” by Robert A. Cutietta. Oxford University Press, $27.50

“The Perfect Wrong Note: Learning to Trust Your Musical Self” by William Westney. Amadeus Press, $24.95

Videos

“Piano Logic” by Patty Carlson. $99.95, DVD; $89.95, VHS. www.pianologic.com

Information websites

www.oake.org (Organization of American Kodaly Educators)

www.dalcrozeusa.org