Music Appreciation With The Hiner Method
Music Appreciation: According to the Hiner Method, using the masterpieces of musical culture to create an alternative to the “clip thinking” of children from early preschool age and up.
The way information is presented in our informative and cultural spaces contributes to the development of " clip thinking" in children. This is due to the intensive development of the " clip culture" of the 21st century.
What is clip culture?
- Material fed in a mosaic, fragmentary form
- Use of bright and short-term pictures
- Quick change of short video series
- The lack of a logical connection among fragmented images
- Fragmentary information
- The loss of holistic patterns in through that fragmentation
Such a presentation forms the perception of the world in which the child is not able to self-identify him or herself or to develop as a person. The child, instead, turns into a digital “cog” of the consumption system, an inanimate part of a video game.
What is dangerous about the development of " clip thinking"?
1. The inability to concentrate on information for a long time, reducing the ability of analytical thinking and independent thinking
2. Intellectual and spiritual degradation
3. Vulnerability to manipulation and outside influences
4. Decreased ability to empathize
5. Tendency to act out rashly
The course “Music Appreciation” with the Hiner Method is able to develop resistance to clip thinking in a child.
The goal of the course is to help create a spiritually developed and rational person who is able to think critically, filter out informational garbage, be able to focus and maintain a high level of concentration and self-realize as a unique, holistic, creative person.
Especially important for children of the digital age is the ability to empathize with others, the ability to be human with respect to their own kind and to the world, nature, and the universe.
How "pop music" and "pop culture" inhibit the development of our children?
Pop music takes root in the consciousness of our children even before their birth, even when parents do everything possible to avoid it.
The primitiveness and repetition of musical constructions in the endlessly changing kaleidoscope of a video sequence is what the child most often encounters even when watching children’s productions or fairy tales.
In music videos, this is especially obvious.
Pop music now fills the air wherever a person appears. The clogging of the musical space with primitive musical vibrations hampers the development of the child’s thinking and litters his intellectual space.
Modern digital technologies exacerbate the picture: the aimless interaction with the "tablets" and smartphones of children of primary school age interfere with their spiritual and mental comprehension of the world. Children are exposed to the drugs of the digital world: "chronophages" -- time eaters.
Instead of healthy interaction with the surrounding real world, the child receives an overload of information. He or she is not able to comprehend, understand and digest an avalanche of incoherent images. Following very short pictures, the child’s consciousness does not have time to process one thought, as he is offered another, a contrasting and also intriguing one.
A picture, color, symbol, sound has long been used as a means of influencing a person’s subconscious.
The biggest problem in the " clip consciousness" is the impossibility to trace the beginning, development and outcome of the development of any thought or idea. The impossibility of combining puzzle pieces into a single picture turns a child into a helpless consumer of information.
Pop music does not contribute to the development of the thinking process in the way that classical music does. It is aggressively repetitive and simplified. Essentially, a motive, image or symbol sticks in the mind and is imposed on the child.
The physiological, hypnotic effect of such music on the consciousness of a child deprives him or her of the ability to distinguish low vibrations from high, spiritual from physiological, good from evil.
Why is classical music so important for the development of our children?
Classical music is able strengthen the quality of a child’s attention, to awaken in him or her the perception of the spiritual beauty of the world, to develop intelligence and creativity in each person.
Masterpieces of classical music help little men or women realize their own purpose, spiritual significance and uniqueness. In children, they strengthen confidence in their strength and understanding of themselves as a unique part of the overall harmony.
That is why classical music, the musical thoughts from the masterpieces of world art, as the thought of spiritual abstraction of a higher order, can greatly develop the memory and thought processes of any person starting from early preschool age.
Why is this possible only with classical music?
Classical music leads the way and raises the soul of the child, like engineering designs of water create beautiful fountains. It elevates the perception of the world, leads the child away from concentrating solely on physiological desires and needs.
In classical music, there is a theater with its intrigue, development, main and secondary images.
So, for example, the sonata form offers the listener not one primitive motive and not one musical phrase, but several. But this is not the main thing! In classical music, even the simplest phrases evolve; in pop music, they stay the same.
Moreover, in simple terms, in classical music . . . more notes. And more different nuances in the presentation of these notes. A child learns to listen, to be able to distinguish between intonation, timbre, interpretation of musical images. His or her relationship with the sounds ceases to be thoughtless.
Such music requires a much greater concentration of attention, efforts of will, consciousness, an ability to react and respond to the sounds of the world. And then the child’s soul chooses what it needs for growth and understanding.
The ability to hear . . . Does this not require today to teach us different languages? And not only languages! The ability to communicate with others is based on the ability to hear and understand sounds. Vibrations, intonation, voice, timbre, breathing are often much more truthful than the picture. Without the ability to hear the beautiful uplifting sounds, the child is denied access to understanding the world’s harmony.
Listening to classical music involves, in the process of listening, the ability to analyze material (compare individual intonations, melodies and harmonic turns), feel them (respond to the moods conveyed in music) and remember (be able to recognize intonations, melodic and harmonic turns) simultaneously. It is invaluable for the development of each baby, both hemispheres of his or her brain.
Hiner Method of teaching Music Appreciation. What’s new?
Before the Hiner approach, music appreciation was presented to children spontaneously. It was considered that the distinct and concrete result of music appreciation was not important. Whether or not the children learned the material they listened to was not important. The main thing was to let them hear this or that piece of music.
We believe that the thoughtless and unsystematic inclusion of classical music can also be just a “littering of space,” especially if a child perceives a musical masterpiece as background noise and does not assimilate any musical thought.
But how to teach your kid to listen consciously to classic works?
This is where the uniqueness of the Hiner approach lies.
In the Hiner Method, the child gets acquainted with the classics through the so-called "teasers." Before he or she faces a masterpiece of musical art, we give the child the brightest and shortest quotes to “read.”
Since the “Soft Mozart” system allows even the youngest children to communicate with the music notation one-to-one using our Elementary and Interactive Music Staff, he or she is able to listen to and play “teasers,” perceiving the musical themes not only through hearing and voice, but most importantly with his or her own fingers.
Here are the main stages of such training and its main principles:
"The driver remembers the road better than the passenger." We give students the opportunity to play themes from the works that you and your child are currently studying.
That is why there are a lot of simplified arrangements of classical music fragments in the library of the Soft Mozart program repertoire. Parents of a child can easily perform such fragments. Even learning them helps children memorize elements of music from the very first tries (even if played imperfectly).
For the little ones, we created tiny “quotes” from musical masterpieces that children can read and perform on their own.
In addition to working with the elementary musical text, the child lays out tiny melodies from musical masterpieces with cards. This greatly develops his musical memory and hearing.
And only after the brightest themes are processed among all family members, we offer to start listening the masterpieces in their original form. Previously learned quotes become clues that help a child hear individual fragments more clearly and respond to music more consciously.
Systematization of "immersion" in musical masterpieces.
We do not haphazardly give material to listen to: we do not offer children “musical vinaigrettes.”
After working on a “quote” or “quotations,” we select interpretations of a particular musical work with professional precision and offer it to students to listen to regularly for a month.
We ourselves choose interpretations of a musical masterpiece and teach teachers and parents to do this with the help of numerous samples on the Internet.
As a result of regular listening to the same masterpiece in different interpretations, the child gradually develops a musical perception of not only the familiar and beloved "teasers," but begins to follow the development of musical thought in general. He or she becomes a full-fledged listener to the classics and begins to truly love it.
Integration with story or theatrical action. For early learners, it is especially important to follow the development of musical thought. The easiest way to do this is if there is a fascinating story behind the image. In our Method there are samples of such stories (“Music and Noise,” “What it Takes to Make Mistakes,” “Heart of Music,” “Kingdom of Tune”).
A teacher can come up with any simple story that would be well combined with the musical work and its development. We teach this in sufficient detail with the help of fairy tales about the "Kingdom of Tune." This is a very interesting and fascinating process.
However, without musical "teasers"--the ability to play the material of any story or fairy tale-- the effectiveness of learning falls.
"The driver remembers the road better than the passenger." Active learning prevails. Always!
From active music listening to music history and musicology. The ability to play a classical piece of music at least partially, the ability to dive into it and recognize various interpretations, prepare the platform for the child’s analytical and cognitive activity: the desire to get more information about the composer, the era, the genre of the piece, and so on.
The next step in development will be the ability to generalize and see musical art in the system of other arts. This truly awakens the child’s desire to learn more about whole layers of history, about different eras and much more.
So, from the possibility of personal interaction of the child with the musical text, the child begins the path of his or her intellectual and spiritual development. Without this small, but important personal contact with the world of sounds, the development of love for the musical language is ineffective.
This approach helps our children overcome the “clip thinking” and achieve a higher spiritual and intellectual level of development.
My sincere thanks for English adaption of the article to Reba Kochersperger