RUNNING HEAD: Elementary Music Teaching Methods

Elementary Music Teaching Methods:

Music Learning Theory, Orff, Kodaly, Dalcroze, Teaching for Musical Understanding
and Comprehensive Musicianship
Chlo Plamondon
Northern State University

Elementary Music Teaching Methods

Elementary Music Teaching Methods:

Music Learning Theory, Orff, Kodaly, Dalcroze, Teaching for Musical Understanding
and Comprehensive Musicianship
There are many different elementary music learning methods and theories that
have been thoroughly developed with the intention of guiding young people towards a
rich and meaningful musical education. This paper will discuss Edwin Gordons Music
Learning Theory, and the following learning and teaching methods; Orff, Kodaly,
Dalcroze, Teaching for Musical Understanding and Comprehensive Musicianship. There
are many differences and similarities regarding the different methods, but all are
connected with their student-centered philosophy, use of sequencing, and development of
internal musical understanding.
Edwin Gordons Music Learning Theory, MLT, is not a teaching method but an
explanation of the way that human beings learn music. MLT philosophies guide children
from their natural musical babble into musical understanding and is based on three main
concepts: aptitude, audiation and whole-part-whole learning. Aptitude testing is used to
gain knowledge about each students level of musical ability. Teachers can plan lessons
and devise individual goals based partially on these results. Audiation is thinking in
music. Gordon say that it is the brain focusing on one set of sounds while at the same
time performing a completely different set of sounds. It is equivalent to speaking to a
person while also formulating new thoughts based on current and past
experiences. Whole-part-whole learning is the concept of looking at the big pictures of
musical understanding, breaking musical ideas down as small as possible while
developing understanding, and then bringing the idea back to the whole picture. Many

Elementary Music Teaching Methods

different sequences of musical learning exist within the MLT model to guide teachers in
successful whole-part-whole learning and teaching.
Gordon explains that the process of learning music is parallel to the process of
learning a language and that there are four different vocabularies of music listening,
moving, reading and writing. Each of these vocabularies is developed in sequential
learning orders to encourage a deep understanding of music. MLT values these processes
of learning over the final product and focuses on the individual and their patterns of
learning.
Teacher, culture and family all play an important role in music learning of young
children. Through adult guidance, students learn to make sense of music on their own.
MLT is sequenced in such a way that it leads children towards conceptual knowledge by
informally guiding them towards the construction of their own understanding of music.
MLT encourages students to participate on their own accord, not through teacher
coercion. Students are able to play and explore how musical sounds make sense on their
own. The stages of music learning must be developmentally appropriate in order for
students to get anything out of the music learning process.
The essence of the Orff method lies in the emphasis on children making music,
rather than learning about it through rigorous and potentially tedious music lessons. In an
Orff classroom, one would see children singing, dancing, playing recorders, barred
instruments and an assortment of auxiliary percussion equipment, altogether. A childs
natural sense of play is the foundation to the Orff approach. Students portray a sense of
musical community while self-esteem is nurtured through the musical success students

Elementary Music Teaching Methods

feel on a regular basis. In the Orff approach, students learn to work together and
individual strength becomes important for the group to grow.
Characteristics of an Orff classroom would include students enjoying themselves
while moving to the pulse and feeling the natural rhythm of the music. Students will
demonstrate outer movements like walking or crawling, and then move into inner
movements like the breathe and the heartbeat, and then back to the outer movements with
a new focus on the inner movements. An Orff teacher will use nonsense words to help
students feel and understand different rhythms, in alignment with focusing on the childs
sense of play. Performances become important in the growing process because they lead
to the childrens sense of personal satisfaction of completing a piece of music.
Kodaly believes that children are innately musical, and that it is our job to bring
out that musicality in them through teaching them their own music and music of the
world. Folk songs are used at the core of this curriculum. The Kodaly pedagogy evolved
in Hungarian schools under Zoltan Kodalys inspiration and guidance. This learning
method is based on the understanding that all people who are capable of learning to speak
and read are capable of learning to read and play music. He believed that the folk songs
of a childs own linguistic heritage constitute a music mother tongue and should
therefore be the vehicle for all early instruction in music-making. This was inline with the
thought that singing is the best foundation for musicianship. We naturally produce
musical sounds from the time we are tiny children, and therefore singing, especially
folksongs, comes very naturally to young children.
A Kodaly teacher undergoes extensive training in order to successfully teach in
this method of elementary music learning. The pedagogical process of teaching students

Elementary Music Teaching Methods

is: prepare make them conscious reinforce concepts and assess for musical
understanding. Like MLT, whole, part, whole learning is integrated into every step of
learning in the Kodaly method. Children learn by imitation and example and so it is
important that they have examples of quality music presented to them often. Only music
of the highest artistic value, both folk and composed, is used in the Kodaly method of
teaching.
Kodaly also presents a very strict and structured sequence of teaching. Children
begin learning to sing three and four note songs and chants accompanied by a duple
meter to make it easy for them to walk/move to around the classroom musically. A spiral
sequence is developed as the music learners mature in age. Inner hearing, the equivalent
to Gordons audiation, comes up again as an important part of assessing students abilities
in learning music.
Dalcrozes goal was to discover a way to convert musical knowledge into musical
understanding. He thought that the way music was being taught in schools was not a very
good music education because of its fragmented nature of delivery and performance. In
his experience, students were performing without understanding, reading without
comprehension, and writing that which they could not hear or feel. He did experiments
combining physical responses with hearing, singing, reading and writing. He believed
that the solution to many rhythm problems could be to teach students by training their
muscles to contract or relax based on a specific time (tempo), in a specific space
(duration of sound), with a particular force (dynamic energy) (Chosky, 2001).
There are three parts to the Dalcroze music learning method eurhythmics,
solfege and improvisation. He is most aptly known for his work with eurhythmics, but

Elementary Music Teaching Methods

has spent quality time developing learning theories based on both solfege and
improvisation as well. Eurhythmics is a system of rhythmic physical movements to music
used to teach musical understanding. Dalcroze believes that rhythm is the primary
element of music and that the source for all musical rhythm may be found in the natural
rhythms of the human body.
Dalcroze also speaks of audiation, and describes it as using memory retrieval to
get information across musically. He strained the importance of hearing and experiencing
all elements of music in your head. Dalcroze adds the element of moving to the music
while hearing it. Dalcroze reapplied the goals of eurhythmic training he discovered and
applied them to the study of sight-singing and ear training in order to continue in the
process of converting musical knowledge into musical understanding and meaningful
expression.
Teaching for musical understanding is a strategy that allows the teacher to guide
students towards discovering the correct answers and ways of playing music rather than
supplying students facts and knowledge directly. The goal of this type of learning is to
develop musical independence and competence in students. The learner is responsible
and capable of learning the material; it is the teachers job to present the material that
they are to learn, well.
Teaching for musical understanding is a vision of a classroom experience and not
as rigorous a method as some of the other methods discussed earlier. In fact, I believe that
this type of classroom experience can be used in the vein of Dalcroze, Orff or Kodaly
under the umbrella of MLT learning theory. The basic structure of this method is that the
teacher creates or presents problems that the students will then have to solve on their own

Elementary Music Teaching Methods

using knowledge gained through previous problem solving. The teacher defines the
problem, and the musicians find a way to solve the problem. Eventually students might
be able to start hearing the problems as well. In this type of teaching, the teacher must
conceive of the lesson from the learners perspective. This forces students to have
musical thoughts and to use information they already know to solve new problems.
Three different types of problems can arise and be planned for when
teaching for musical understanding. Performing problems, listening problems, and
creating/creative problems. Performance based problems forces teachers to avoid
teaching music to children through rote as the main model of teaching and instead pose
questions to the students to guide them towards figuring out musical problems on their
own. Allowing students to make musical choices about how to interpret a score gives
them much more musical independence than following the teachers instructions.
Analytical listening for specific features in a listening assignment is a way to guide
students through solving listening based problems. Listening can be a challenging activity
to monitor accurately, so it is important that during listening assignments, students are
asked to demonstrate in a concrete way what they are hearing. This can be something
like, moving to the music or drawing a representation of what they hear. Composing or
improvisation is solving a music problem in and of itself. This is learning to organize
musical ideas whether over a period of time, or in the moment. Providing students with
the opportunity to compose and create is an important way to include creating-based
problem solving in your curriculum.
Comprehensive Musicianship has been defined as a broad based, total music
learning and teaching experience aimed to bring the following qualities into the

Elementary Music Teaching Methods

classroom: direct connections between basic components of music, an understanding of

different periods and types of music, a connected and comprehensive approach from
kindergarten through to graduate school and to help students find themselves and
direction in life through the study of music.
Comprehensive musicianship focuses on composition in the classroom. The
young composers project brought composers into the classroom to teach students about
composition. During this time, the composers realized that public school music teachers
lacked the training to teach contemporary composition to their students. The
contemporary music project was created shortly thereafter which worked to increase
creativity in schools, create a foundation of understanding and valuing contemporary
music, connect music education with composition for the benefit of both educators and
composers, learn about what qualities contribute to good contemporary music and to
discover creative talent in schools.
Comprehensive musicianship has the ability to provide meaningful and complete
musical experiences for students. Students learn to perform, compose, listen and analyze
music. A well trained comprehensive musicianship teacher will integrate these aspects
of music learning into every single music lesson. Like teaching music for understanding,
comprehensive musicianship can be used in conjunction with any other method of
application of teaching music. In elementary classrooms, comprehensive musicianship
can be understood as children studying and demonstrating the very basis of what makes
music, music the organization of sound.
While these learning methods have fundamentals differences in the approach to a
well-rounded music education each of them are highly devoted to students developing

Elementary Music Teaching Methods

skills to become life-long music makers. Orff, Kodaly and Dalcroze methods can be used
simultaneously with the Music Learning Theory developed by Edwin Gordon, while
Teaching for Musical Understanding approaches can be employed as a part of the same
process. An elementary teacher well versed in all theories and methods will have a wealth
of knowledge in which to choose how to teach each unique group of students
encountered!

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References
Choksy, Lois. (2001). Teaching music in the twenty-first century (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle
River, N.J.: Prentice Hall.
Gordon, Edwin E. (2013). Quick and easy introductions. Chicago, IL: GIA Publications.
Runfola, M. & Taggart, C.C., Eds. (2005). The development and practical application of
music learning theory. Chicago, IL.: GIA Publications.
Wiggins, Jackie. (2001). Teaching for musical understanding. New York, N.Y., MGrawHill Companies.