Ah music, the gateway to my heart! I just love music! I love playing music, creating music, listening to music, learning music. I love instruments, bands, artists, musical eras, sounds, music recording, and just about every aspect of music.
I can attribute so much of the reason for my love of music to the music I listened to as a child. I grew up with parents who LOVED music (and still do). My father is a guitar player, singer, songwriter and avid music aficionado. He has his musical tastes and I have mine. There is a lot we have in common and some things we don’t. We still share music with each other a lot. But, it was the music that was playing in our home, in our car, and just about everywhere, all the time that helped me develop my love of music as a child.
My Dad listened to a wide variety of music from classic rock to classical, from jazz to world music and a lot in between. I received a broad sense of the scope of music from what I heard as a kid. Some of the artists he loved (and still loves) most are Bob Marley, Sting, Eric Clapton, Paul Simon, Miles Davis, Papa Wemba, Peter Gabriel, The Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Mozart and a lot of other popular and more obscure music. I am so grateful that he exposed me to the world of music. Not only did it intrigue me enough to pursue music as a passion, but it created the base for my career in music education, which I am so grateful for.
My part of the music education space has a lot to do with my love for music that was created from childhood. I love teaching the aspects of music like how to play instruments, and read music, but I also love music appreciation. And I like to bring some of my favorites into what I share with students. Our online music learning program, My Music Workshop, has some cool original children’s music, mostly written by my talented wife Lianna, but it also has some original jam along tracks that I put together and that express some of my musical taste. We don’t feature a lot of popular artists because of copyright laws but we can certainly point you and our students to those artists and are happy to do so! You can give My Music Workshop a try for free if you want here.
I believe that appreciating and understanding music is the baseline that inspires musicians to keep striving to learn more, to push their ability and to play and create unique music of their own.
I know that my upbringing was unique in that my father is musical. Most parents aren’t musicians and that’s great. We here at My Music Workshop are lucky and grateful to get to pass along our love and understanding of music to our students, those with musical parents and those without.
What I have learned is that whether you, as a parent, or grandparent are musical, you can still share the gift of music with your kids. Anyone can play music for their kids. Anyone can play music around their kids a lot. And anyone can play a broad range of cool music around their kids. That’s where you come in. In a previous blog, we suggested that parents play music around their kids as much as possible. I will always stand by this. It does take some effort, especially if we aren’t used to playing music in the house or car a whole lot. Or, if our default media for relaxing is TV or internet. I suggest listening to music as the focus of what you and your family does (at least once in a while), and listening to music in the background while doing other things.
Check out our other blog, “11 Ways You Can Help Your Child Learn Music at Home!” for some more tips.
The point is that children are sponges, they absorb everything, music included. Now is the time to get them excited about music and the best way to do this is to listen to as much music as you can with your kids. Get their opinion about what they like, let them hear different music and tell you if they want to hear more of it. After doing this for a little while they’ll have some new favorite music that they’ll likely ask you to play over and over. If you also like the music that isn’t so bad.
So, what music is good to listen to with your kids? I’m excited to share some of my thoughts on this in our next blog post. See you there.
If you are interested in checking out My Music Workshop, the online music learning program for kids, that my wife Lianna and I developed, click below for a 7-day free trial. We hope to see you there!
