Infants, toddlers, preschoolers and school
age children can all benefit from the right educational toys and
musical opportunities, even on the toy piano. Here is one of many
articles that The Creativity Institute has reviewed and reprinted
on nurturing creativity in children and on educational and musical
toys.
Is Your Child Capable of Composing Music?
Maybe the next Mozart?
by Duane Shinn
We've all heard of them. Child prodigies who
begin composing music at some ridiculously young age. For instance,
history reports that Mozart was writing minuets by the time he
was five years old. Amazing. At five years of age, I'm not sure
that I knew the difference between my finger and my thumb and
I certainly wasn't composing music.
Now there is no doubt that the fact that Mozart
was composing music by the age of five does not prove that any
of the rest of us ever could compose music, but a number of studies
conducted over the past fifty or so years indicates that most
children can begin composing music as long as they are given both
guidance and opportunity.
True, in the vast majority of the cases the
end product is not going to rival anything that Mozart put out,
but just because you (or your child) may not be the best there
ever was at composing music doesn't mean the attempt is not worth
the effort. If we follow that reasoning why would a child learn
to walk or run when he or she knows he could never walk or run
as well as, say, Michael Jordan? Why would they learn to talk
if they knew they could never speak as well as Bill Clinton or
Ronald Reagan?
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