This Music Class Rocks
David Wish with students in the Little Kids Rock program at Spring valley Elementary School in San Francisco. The kids entertain and are entertained by Bonnie Raitt, Tom Waits, Norton Buffalo, Jason Newsted, and Justin Willacy. Photo by David Paul Morris.
Walk into any elementary school in the country and you’ll see paintings and poems by children up on the walls. So why won’t you hear music created by kids?
“You expect your seven-year-old to come home with crayon drawings but not with a song they’ve written,” says David Wish, founder and executive director of Little Kids Rock, a nonprofit that is working to rebuild and reform music education in public schools. It has launched after-school programs and developed a curriculum for music classes, and is already reaching thousands of kids in some half dozen states including California, New Jersey, and Tennessee, training teachers, and providing donated instruments. The goal: for every child in the country to know how to play a musical instrument.
“Music is a language, and that has implications for the way it should be taught,” Wish says. “Imagine a baby with parents hovering over the crib with flash cards, saying ‘Pay attention, get your foot out of your mouth, C-A-T, cat, look at the card.’ That’s not how we do it with speech, and it’s not how we should do it with music.”
The Little Kids Rock program starts with music that kids listen to. Fortunately, most pop music is built on a basic three-chord progression and can be played on instruments like guitars that are easy to learn. “Kids can be making sounds that are pleasing to them in just a few lessons,” he says. They first learn the I-IV-V chord progression. “That’s Hank Williams, the Clash, Christina Aguilera.”
After a few more lessons they begin to learn simple one- or two-note solos and then learn to improvise and compose their own tunes. They’re shown where to put their fingers and quickly learn to play by ear, using techniques similar to the Suzuki method.
In 1996, before he created Little Kids Rock, Wish taught a group of his Redwood City, CA, second-grade English students guitar after school. When one student, seven-year-old Sergio, came in with a song he had written Wish was thunderstruck. A few years later, Sergio’s older brother died unexpectedly of pneumonia, and at the funeral Sergio performed a song he’d written for his brother.
“Music is there at your joyous, frivolous moments, and it’s the bedrock that supports you in times of great sorrow,” Wish says. The idea of sharing that gift is what motivates him. “Now, when I hear songs written by the students of teachers I’ve trained, I feel as if I’ve seeded something in the community.”
About the Author
Jake Miller, a Boston-based writer, has yet to master the I-IV-V chord progression.
This article first appeared in NRTA Live & Learn, Fall 2005.
