Can You Feel The Beat?

At the very core of our lives is the beat. It is a mystical thing, this repetition of sound over and over.  It is amazing, the fascination that springs from what seems to be a boring and simple activity: clapping or keeping an even and steady beat.  It’s not the most exciting part of playing music but it’s crucial to a well performed piece; a fundamental building block of music.


The most fundamental property of music is beat, an underlying, unchanging, repeating pulse.  Feeling and moving to steady beat develops a sense of time and the ability to recognize and coordinate movemnts within in time.    

The beat is something that we all like to keep, and you don't need to have any musical knowledge to do it. We all have clapped our hands, danced, nodded our head or just tapped our toes in time to music. This simple act is at the very heart of music making.  Many professional musicians will tell you that the distinction between a good musician and a poor one is how well they can feel for the beat. This "feel" is crucial and it is strongly affected by early childhood experiences. You don't even have to have music to keep the beat, although every opportunity should be taken to keep the beat to music when it is performed or listened to.

Before outlining activities, there are a few basic principles for keeping a beat, The first rule is to concentrate on keeping the beat very steady. It should be emphasized with children that the beat is not a speed contest to see who can go fastest.  It is, rather, an exercise in keeping together a very - even - steady - beat.  For many of the activities that will follow, it is essential to keep the beat as slow as possible. For children at an older age you can even point out the truth that the slower you keep the beat the more difficult it is to it keep steady.
So the-

challengeisnothowfastyougo,

but how slow you

can go and still

keep the

beat stea-

dy.

Steady beat is different from the Rhythm Patterns of a specific song:  Rhythm Patterns are patterns of sound that fit within the steady beat.  To illustrate this, tap as you sing each word of “The Muffin Man”.  The ability to keep a steady beat is developed over time, and can be started with very young children.  This skill is required for walking, talking, using a pair of scissors and bouncing a ball, as well as many other abilities. 

Feeling and moving to steady beat develops a sense of time and the ability to organize and coordinate movements within time.  Feeling and moving to steady beat develops a sense of time and the ability to organize and coordinate movements within time.

To illustrate a steady beat, tap with each underlined syllable as you sing the song:
Do you know the Muffin Man, the muffin man, the muffin man.
Do you know the Muffin Man, who lives on Drury  Lane.

Observe, Notice, Question, and Expand - Repeat The following few postings include fun ways to “catch a beat” – appropriate to the age / ability of your child. Any of the ideas for younger children can be used for older children.   When adding new skills or concepts, keep in mind the goal of increasing their self-concept as a competent musical person.

Try to remember to use these BEST TEACHING METHODS:

• Observe first (watch to see what they already know, or if they remember what they learned last time)
• Verbally NOTICE THEIR actions (label, comment, and imitate what they are doing);
• Initiate activities to expand on what they are doing well and are motivated to do. Start by asking questions: “What else can you do? Can you ___? How ____ can you do it? Where else can you tap it?” You can even make connections “That looks like a _____ !”
• Invite and help them try something new, “Can you do it like this?” Let them try to imitate, but if having difficulty, assist them physically to get the idea, then let go and see if they can do it.
• Sit back and watch to see what they have learned. Then repeat the skill in a multitude of ways to reinforce their abilities, for example, swishing hands high / low, or swishing feet.

The Progression of Abilities in Keeping a Steady Beat

The ability to react to the beat in music is an important learning process.  Many young children are able to steadily tap to an “inner beat”.  Yet they may have difficulty changing their “inner beat” to correspond to the pulse of music or a drumbeat.  Encourage, but don’t impose an external beat too early, it may result in tension, resistance, or loss of confidence in their abilities.  Encourage practicing a beat in a variety of ways. Realize that children will progress through these developmentally appropriate stages as they grow and develop their abilities:

• Let them experience a steady beat, by tapping on their knees or other body part.
• Start your own beat and verbally encourage them to imitate.
• Have them walk or march (without recorded music), and watch carefully for their “inner beat”.  Imitate their beat with hand movements, drum, sticks, or tongue clicks, then pace a rhyme or song to their own “inner” beat.
• Play music with a strong beat, and “catch” the beat with their hands on top of yours (clapping or tapping), or with them bouncing on your legs, etc.,
• With your hands over theirs, start beat, but remove hands after a few beats.
• While singing, practice with variety of hand movements and body movements.
• While singing, practice with percussion instruments.
• With recorded music, practice with movements and instruments
• Use beat to play simple accompaniments on melodic instruments, ie. xylophones.

3 Principles of Beat Keeping Activities

Priciple No. 1 is "Keep the beat even and steady"

Clapping Activity for Learning Steady Beat: 
Count to four and clap your hands to the count going as quickly as you can and still keep an even, steady speed.  Count to yourself to four over and over again in time to your clapping.  Keep this up until you feel comfortable in your count.


Concentrate on making sure the beginning of each syllable comes right on the clap. The tendency is to anticipate your clap with the beginning of the word coming before your clap. Try NOT to do that. Concentrate on the sounds of your voice and hands! Try to begin the sound of the number you count with the sounding of the clap. ( This is called hand-mouth coordination!)

When this feels comfortable keep on counting to four at the same speed in your mind or out loud, but slow down the clapping so that you now clap on the numbers "one" and "three" only.  If the steady, fast beat keeps going in your mind, the beat should now be slower and quite even. (Keep up your hand-mouth coordination!)
Now try and clap on the number "one" only.  Once that's easy, try it on every other "one."
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Principle No. 2: Keeping the beat takes considerable coordination:
Many teachers try to get children to march to the beat, but this is not easy for very young children.  It requires them to move the left foot and then the right in sequence while concentrating on the beat.  In very general terms, for the first years of school it is best to use beat keeping activities that repeat the same motion over and over.  Hopping up and down and slapping the lap with both hands are samples of beginning activities in beat keeping.  Even clapping is more difficult than these activities, as it requires spatial coordination in making the hands meet.


Only gradually will activities move into keeping the beat using a natural sequence of movements - like slapping first the left hand and then the right, stepping, marching or skipping.  Finally a true sequence of movements may be attempted e.g. slap lap, clap hands, snap fingers; slap lap, clap hands, snap fingers etc.
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Principle No.3: Physical movement should be a part of the activity in most instances:
Many activities will be more fun and will help children feel of the beat if you use a physical beat keeping activity to accompany the oral activity, marching for example.


Marching is a great activity for learning steady beat!

Marching is so good for children as they get a little older: this helps them to learn steady beat, they have their feet to the floor sending those beats right up their bodies to their brains, physical activity, seratonin and adrenolin producing music-making – DO IT NOW! Studies have shown that children who can find and keep a steady beat become better readers! Fred Rogers said that children are born with the beat. Makes sense, since mom's heartbeat is so close in utero.

Your child experiences steady beat when you rock or pat him to a song. This synchronized movement then allows him to actively apply this concept and internalize a sense of steady beat. Steady beat awareness is important to the development of smooth speech flow and lays the foundation for walking with coordination, bouncing a ball, and even using scissors.  Musically, it will allow your child to sing, dance, and play instruments in a group.

Do you have the beat?
Notes from: http://www.kindermusik.com/Teach/TL_Resources/ParentPerspectives/docs/fdd.pdf,
http://www.macaronisoup.com/Song.htm,http://www.macaronisoup.com/Song.htm

Basic Timing

Children who can feel and express beat possess basic timing. Basic timing is a fundamental skill that many children acquire before entering kindergarten or first grade. Children who have basic timing at an early age have a head start in at least three important areas of development: motor skills, musical skills and academic skills.

Oldies but Goodies

Mother Goose nursery rhymes are loaded with rhythm. Try reciting "Polly put the kettle on" as you start breakfast: "Rub-a-dub-dub" at bath time; "Trot, trot to Boston" as you bounce baby on your knee, the list is endless! Before you know it, your child will be chanting "One, two, buckle my shoe" while he gets dressed and "To market, to market, to buy a fat pig" when you run out for groceries.

Name that Tune

Clap out the rhythm of one of your child's favorite songs and see if s/he can guess what it is. (Hum if s/he needs a little hint.) For even more fun, let the kids do the clapping and YOU do the guessing!

Visual Rhythm

Rhythm patterns are sequences. Help your preschooler discover vusual sequences using pattern blocks purchased at a toy store or educational supply house. Keep the blocks in a basket on the kitchen counter and let your child make fun designs while you get dinner. For the toddler who'd rather bang blocks together, see if you can coax him into a rhythmic beat: tap, tap, tappy-tap!

Bring the Rhythm Home!

Form a Rhythm Band
If it's your turn for play group, if you're having a birthday party, or if you just find yourself with a houseful of kids on a rainy day, form a rhythm band. Keep the beat to the songs on your favorite CD (The beat and rhythm section from Make Way for Music CD is a particularly good one for this) or make your own music.

• Rhythm Sticks: Nothing works better than two wooden spoons.
• Tom Toms: Decorate an empty oatmeal box or nut can, etc and drum away.
• Tambourine: Staple two paper plates together with beans inside, hang ribbons as streamers for pizzazz.
• Sandblocks: Glue a square of sandpaper to the side of an empty juice box or small block of wood. Rub two together to make a rhythmic swishing sound.

Blue Danube Waltz

Today waltzes may conjure up images of elegance: ball gowns, tiaras, and lovely gliding step, but two hundred years ago the waltz was considered shockingly risque'. Here was advance where you touched your partner's body and were swept into a dizzying whirl around the ballroom floor. Simply scandalous! When the waltz was danced at a ball in London, the Times reported:

"We remarked with pain that the indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced...at the English         court on Friday last...it is quite sufficient to cast one's eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs and close compressor on the bodies in their dance, to see that it is indeed far removed from the modest       reserve which as hitherto been considered distinctive of English Females."

Despite such scandal, during the nineteenth century this Austrian peasant dance conquered the ballrooms of Europe. Vienna was the home of the waltz, and two Austrian composers, Johann Strauss I and II, were the nineteenth-century equivalent of Cole Porter, Elvis, and the Beatles rolled into one. This father and son duo was at the top of the charts for nearly 75 years.

Strauss the younger wrote On the Beautiful Blue Danube in 1867, just weeks after the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph suffered a terrible defeat by Prussia at the battle of Sadowa. It was a dark time for Austria, but Strauss's new waltz glittered. First performed as a choral work by the Vienna Men's Choral Association, the orchestral version quickly became Strauss's biggest hit, cementing the composer's reputation as Vienna's Waltz king.

"Rhythm is the life of space of time danced through."
Cecil Taylor

Beat, beat, beat

"Like the beat, beat, beat of the tom tom
When the jungle shadows fall,
Like the tick, tick, tock of the stately clock
As it stands against the wall.
Like the drip, drip, drip of the rain drops
When the summer showers through,
A voice within me keeps repeating
You, you, you."
Cole Porter

Your Preschooler and Beat and Rhythm

If toddlers can begin to keep a steady beat, then preschoolers can do it that much better. But it takes amazing skills to move to the music, so you'll notice lots of variation in ability from one child to the next. Think about it--to move to music a child needs to bring together all kinds of things!  First, s/he has to have control over her/his muscles.  S/he needs the physical aiblity to tap that toe or clap those hands with precision.  Then s/he needs the math skills to recognize the pattern of the rhythm.  S/he also has to use his/her memory to keep the paterrn repeating over and over.  Don't forget attention span--s/he needs to pay attention to figure out what's going on in the midst of a lot of sensory input.  Most importantly, your child needs those little brain connections that organize the entire shebang: the muscles, the memory, and the math.  They all must work together in a kiddy version of a waltz, tango, or bunny hop.

Your Infant and Beat and Rhythm

The daily rhythms of life change when a newborn joins a family. Suddenly, everyone must adjust to the new sleep and wake cycles, and to the baby's pattern of comfort and discomfort. And with most babies, these rhythms change often and unpredictably! No sooner do you think you've established a pattern of sleeping, feeding, playing and diapering, than your child changes the tempo, and you must learn to keep time all over again.

You and your infant are discovering beats and rhythms with each interaction. You listen closely to the tempo of your newborn's breathing. You sense her pattern of sucks and pauses as she feeds. The two of you develop brief but powerful back-and-forth moments when you make eye contact. Without any self-consciousness you begin using baby-talk, because your baby responds so naturally to a rhythmic voice. From the moment she's born, your child engages you in an intricate dance where you are intuitively aware of every subtle change in the music.

Beat and Rhythm

Babies get their first introduction to rhythm before they're even born, when they sense the comfort of their mother's heartbeat in the womb. Rhythm adds richness and meaning throughout our lives. We have rhythms of time--seasons of the year, night and day, work and play.  We also have rhythms of sound, not only in the organized beats of music, but also in a dog's bark, the steady beat of the washing machine's rumble, and in everyday spoken language.  Rhythm is like ritual.  It provides predictability and comfort, letting us know that things are as they should be.

During Family Time Class we become more aware of beats and rhythms, and, even better, have fun creating them together.  We use our voices, bodies and instruments to keep the beat.  Join in the march, waltz, or jig and discover that not only rhythm fun, it creates attitude.