Kenneth K. Guilmartin: Making Music Together

In anticipation of the 2016 National Conference, I visited with DSA member and Dalcroze Certificate Kenneth K. Guilmartin (who is also a fellow Princeton area resident). Ken and I first met over thirty years ago in Manhattan, when he and I were both studying with Bob Abramson. He generously took time from his busy schedule to share the story of Music Together, the thriving early childhood music education organization he founded, and how it all got started.

Our talk covered a lot of terrain, ranging across the rich landscape of Ken’s life, our common ground as former Abramson students, our shared interest in research on music cognition, and, of course, the development of his highly successful music-and-movement ed organization. At the heart of the conversation was his connection to the Dalcroze training he received from Abramson; for I was especially interested in how the lessons Ken learned from Bob informed his vision of Music Together. Turning to the opening lines of the Acknowledgements listed on the final page of the book that accompanies the Music Together song collections, of which thousands of copies are sold each year, we can get an idea of those lessons’ importance:

The authors would like to acknowledge the major sources of influence on the ongoing evolution of Music Together since it first began to take shape in the mid-eighties. The work of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, particularly as interpreted by Robert Abramson, is fundamental to Ken Guilmartin’s approach to music and movement education.

On the Nature–and Nurture–of Music Together

When he came into the world (specifically, in New York City, in 1946) Ken harbored an innate love of music. It’s something all people feel as children, naturally, without any training. What’s more, we all enter the world with the seeds of musical ability awaiting cultivation. As he likes to say, “We are born sounders and movers, coming out of the womb. Even in the womb, we’ve been moving and listening to sound for four or five months. Children remember songs sung to them in utero.”

It’s a powerful theme, and one he readily warms to: “We’re born as sounders and movers: we are music. Moving, imprinting sound; sound imprinting movement.” Of course we Dalcrozians heartily agree.

Yet during those critical early years before starting school, a time when kids make big developmental strides every day, Ken’s own musical gifts remained largely untapped. Clearly music excited and delighted him: that much his mother could see. But other than the radio—not a reliable source of suitable musical stimulation for children—she didn’t have any way to really satisfy his curiosity. And there were other matters to attend to.

As fellow educators who have a shared stake in addressing humanity’s need for music, we know this state of affairs all too well. Despite the best of intentions, many parents remain largely unaware of how to proceed on their children’s behalf. Those who love music and sense its importance yearn for an answer to the question: “What can I do to encourage his/ her interest in music?” Well, the good news is, thanks to Ken and the organization he founded thirty years ago, each day more and more parents are discovering ways to do just that—encourage their child’s musical interest; in ways their parents never knew. So it’s a bit ironic, perhaps—ironic and poignant—that his own family of origin would’ve been a good candidate for the kinds of musical sharing his organization now makes possible at more than 2,500 licensed sites located in over forty countries across the globe.

Ken’s father James, a lawyer and district attorney, preferred easy listening; but he didn’t exert much of an influence, musically speaking. Ken’s mother Joan, a psychiatric social worker, enjoyed dancing and listening to jazz; but, even though music ran in her family, she was unable to carry a tune and didn’t pursue music very far. In this regard, the uncertainty she felt about guiding her son’s musical growth makes sense. Even when nature grants a child the rare potential to be especially musical, absent the nurture of musical enculturation—that is, without one generation passing songs, and skills, and musical values on to the next—it’s unlikely that much will come of it.

In Ken’s case, however, something did come of it. Or rather, he took his innate gifts and made something of them. Somehow, from the lost opportunity, as if from an invisible garden, conspicuous in its absence, his vision for Music Together sprang forth. It was a vision of families with young children sharing positive experiences making music, together, with their caregivers. Hence the company’s name: “The ‘together’ in ‘Music Together’ means with grownups. It’s not just groups of children. We don’t do ‘kiddie’ music: we do music; so adults don’t mind singing along. Even if they think they can’t sing, they end up singing along anyway, because we reassure them that it doesn’t matter how well you do it.”

The idea is therefore not just to create a setting in which children and their families may enjoy music making in a classroom once a week; but beyond that, to give them the tools they need to make music whenever they want to—specifically so music making can become an integral feature of their lives. “Then you have an environment at home where music is happening. So much happens by way of music and music relationship, enhancing development in the children and also in the grownups.” Indeed, the children are not the only ones who end up growing: “Many of the adults come in not being able to sing in tune. But after a couple years of doing tonal patterns and humming along as best as they can, even they start singing in tune!” If only Ken’s Mom and Dad had taken part in such a program. This is a key reason why Music Together provides materials and a curriculum that parents can use easily at home: so children have ongoing access to age-appropriate music. “Kids listen to the CDs a lot. We give them movement and dances and things to do at home. Ideally it becomes a part of daily life—not to practice or study; not something you have to do—because it’s just there.” The information Music Together gives parents on its website and in its other publications reinforces this critical message: If we believe that music making is an essential element of a well-lived life for all human beings, not only for the most gifted ones, then giving small children opportunities to take part in good music making experiences on a consistent basis amounts to a quality of life issue.

In sum, then, the Music Together recipe features three key ingredients: first, a means of consistently delivering Parent-Child classes to preschoolers and their caregivers, classes where families can encounter a wide repertoire of developmentally appropriate songs and arrangements so engaging, the music will satisfy the adults as well as the kids. Next, a way to make the music available to families not only in class, but also outside of class, in recorded and printed versions, and a clearly spelled out curriculum that combines the music with age-appropriate stories, activities, and movement games. Finally, a research-based philosophy that gives parents, especially the ones who feel inhibited about making music, an empirical basis for their participation in musically infused play, making it a safe place for enjoying music making without any threat of judgment. Through no fault of his parents, and largely owing to cultural factors, none of these factors were present in Ken’s own upbringing.

And so it was less by design than by happenstance that his mother’s move to Princeton NJ in 1954, when he was eight years old, positioned him well for later developments on this front. The move placed him among others who could encourage his musical growth; and they did. But he was also more self-motivated than most. And so, as he grew Ken seized upon whatever opportunities to pursue his love of music came his way. First it was just popular music; it wasn’t until later on, in college, when he would discover classical. “I grew up listening to the radio in the ‘60s; to rock and roll and then jazz. My first LP was the soundtrack to the Benny Goodman Story, a 33 1/3 vinyl record that I played on a little record player meant for 45s. I just wore it out listening to Gene Krupa playing ‘Sing, Sing, Sing.’”

But home wasn’t the only place where adults missed opportunities to support his musical growth. The time his kindergarten teacher asked him to silently mouth the words of the songs the class was singing in a school concert lingers in his memory like an off-key tune. Later he came to see how cultural factors led her to miss a chance to engage her young charge in music making. The school and parents all expected his teacher to produce a certain musical result: a performance, rather than focus on her students’ learning process. The experience lives on as a cautionary tale from which Ken derived a key principle of the Music Together philosophy: “When teachers apply performance standards to music development, especially at these young ages, it’s not developmentally appropriate.”1 This principle is a corollary to Ken’s emphasis on giving kids ways to participate in developmentally appropriate practice instead of getting them to perform, focusing on their learning process rather than on producing a preconceived result.

Would he himself have developed differently if, rather than linking music making to performance—and the comparisons and judgments this entails—his earliest role models had welcomed his participation unconditionally? Would his relationship to music now be different? There is, of course, no way to know for sure. We do know, however, that, undeterred by the early challenges he faced, he took up drums in fifth grade—inspired, no doubt by Gene Krupa’s explosive example. And then there was the family business.

Ken’s mother’s side of the family has had a long history in the educational publishing business. Jane’s father John F. Sengstack, a New York accountant and amateur violinist, bought the music publishing house Clayton F. Summy Company in the ‘30s (as a retirement project). Her brother David got his start in the business as a sales manager in 1948, when it was still in Chicago. A decade later he became president and sole stockholder—his sister wanted nothing to do with it. He later acquired C.C. Birchard and Co. and changed the company’s name to Summy-Birchard Publishing Co., which provided textbooks for schools across the country; and in 1978 he moved the business from Evanston to Princeton. As he further expanded the company’s holdings he changed the name again—first to the Birch Tree Group, Ltd. and later to The Sengstack Group, Ltd. By the time he sold it for millions of dollars to Warner/Chappell Music, Inc. (a subsidiary of Time-Warner, Inc.) in 1989 the company held roughly 50,000 copyrights, the best-known of which was “Happy Birthday.” A gift that kept on giving, this one song and its familiar lyrics accounted for roughly a million dollars a year, a hefty chunk of the company’s revenues.2

When Sengstack moved to Princeton, Ken was in his early thirties. In the three years leading up to the company’s sale, from 1986 to 1989, Ken worked full-time for The Sengstack Group, giving him a chance to get to know his uncle much better. A strong male role model whose rare combination of business acumen and social consciousness set a formative example, Sengstack had a special interest in early childhood development. Upon selling the business, he used some of the proceeds to launch a private foundation to support charities that focus on giving children nurturing experiences during the first three years of life. In addition, when Ken’s vision for Music Together started to take shape, Sengstack’s extensive background in music publishing made him an excellent resource. Birch Tree’s assets had included the international rights to the Suzuki Method, and the company also published the innovative Frances Clark Library. When Ken was in his teens his mother arranged for him to study piano with Clark, whose New School for Music Study was (and still is) located in nearby Kingston, NJ.

Moving from drums to piano, from rhythm to harmony, Ken was finally satisfying his hunger for music. But in 1964, when Ken entered Swarthmore, he planned to study chemistry. While there he directed and acted in plays, however, which opened the door to other possibilities. He dropped out for a time in the spring of 1965 to become a potter, and then returned to finish his degree—not in chemistry as first planned, but rather in English Literature, and the writing skills he gained came in handy later on. Music courses he took in college spurred his interest in music, however, and eventually the inexorable pull to make music became too strong to resist. During his last year in college he played organ in a blues group called Sidetrack that was based in Montreal. This was the end of the ‘60s and for a while the group served as the house band at the Cafe au GoGo in Greenwich Village; and they once opened for Jefferson Airplane and played on the same bill as B. B. King.

When he graduated he left the band, moved to the East Village, and studied jazz piano, renovating co-op apartments and renting them out to help pay the bills. The band hadn’t been a distraction, however, since it led him to discover how deeply satisfying composing was for him, and this discovery led in turn to his first professional composing job, arranging and directing music for the Public Theater. This led to similar off-Broadway and regional theater work, enabling him to draw upon several different areas he had pursued, not just music, and bring them together to create something new. When he and I spoke he reminisced nostalgically, noting that “we all have to find a path, a crooked path, to get to all the things that feed what we want to feel and express.” By the late ‘70s he was pursuing formal composition studies at Manhattan School of Music.

These studies led to a formative relationship with another key figure in his story, a music theory professor who taught at MSM, the late composer, concert pianist, and conductor Robert Abramson. A charismatic, confrontational, provocative figure and a brilliant musician—some might say a troubled genius—Abramson had received his Dalcroze training from Hilda Schuster, who directed the Dalcroze School of Music in NYC from the mid-1940s to the mid-1990s. Shuster earned the highest degree attainable in Dalcroze education, the Diplôme Supérieur, in studies at the Institut Jaques-Dalcroze in Geneva with Dalcroze himself in the mid-30s.3 Abramson received his Diplôme in 1975 (twenty-five years after Dalcroze died) and continued teaching until he died in 2008 at the age of eighty. As the teacher and mentor of many practitioners, Abramson is well remembered all over the world by Dalcrozians. He left an indelible mark on the practice of Dalcroze Education in the USA—and on Ken Guilmartin.

On the surface they didn’t have a lot in common. Unlike Ken, Abramson had benefited from being born and raised in an artistic household (in Philadelphia). A prodigy, he showed promise at an early age. His parents nurtured his musical development; and when the time came, he sought out musical training directly, studying composition and performance at Peabody Conservatory and the Juilliard School. But some intriguing parallels strengthened their connection to one another. Like Ken, Abramson also started his undergraduate training in chemistry (in 1946). While both of them ended up pursuing other interests, the scientific training they received prepared them to seek out sound theoretical principles to justify their pedagogical practices. Abramson also left college, in his case to spend several years gaining valuable professional experience, before eventually completing his schooling, earning his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at the Manhattan School of Music in 1965 and ’66, respectively. In addition to concertizing on piano, harpsichord, and organ and composing original works in a variety of genres, he also performed and made recordings with key figures in the then-vibrant folk music scene Jean Ritchie and Oscar Brand; and he conducted the pit ensembles for regional musical theater productions. Abramson and Guilmartin both shared a love of popular genres and brought that love into their composing. In addition to compositions for solo piano, songs with piano accompaniment, and songs with orchestral accompaniment, Abramson’s portfolio included film scores and pieces for the theater, featuring incidental music for dramatic productions and ballet scores. In ways that were not so obvious they spoke the same language, and Abramson made a lasting impression:

Bob was so key for me. Having come to classical so late—to reading music late—it was really difficult for me, particularly at a conservatory. But taking ear training with Bob made me feel “I’m learning something. I’m being taught. I can trust it.” Because he spoke to my body awareness. And the teaching—his understanding of education, from a psychokinetic point of view—was superior at the time.

In guiding him over these hurdles and demonstrating pedagogical methods that could help him, Abramson planted seeds that later blossomed into Ken’s passion for music education. “That was so key. I’m a natural teacher and wanted to find a way to teach music, and that was it! It became my education path.” And so, while the hurdles he faced early in his life had almost defied him to seek a path forward, it was the unforeseen possibilities Abramson’s teaching opened up that showed Ken how he could proceed. “All of us who love teaching are wounded healers and in some areas we had a difficult time dealing with x or y or z, and then you figure it out: ‘There is a way for me to get this!’ For me the way was Dalcroze.” The success he experienced via Dalcroze methods—which are not just technical, but also human—inspired him to want to teach. He studied pedagogy with Abramson and assisted him in his teaching.

My conversation with Ken gave him a chance to reflect on the pieces of his story and how they fit together. Commenting, “there’s order to it; but I had no idea at the time,” he added, “the education piece came in much more strongly when I was ready for that in my 30s, when I became a parent and got interested in growth and development.” When his daughter Lauren was three, Ken became the music teacher at the parent-owned and operated Montclair Cooperative School she attended for pre-school. He also gained valuable experience teaching Music and Movement at the Jewish Community Center in Westfield for four years, a job Abramson helped to line up. At the time he was also studying Creative Drama, the educational side of musical theater. The pieces of the puzzle were starting to click into place, preparing Ken for a catalyzing event that would trigger the crystallization of these various influences into a plan of action. And that’s where his Uncle Dave comes in.

Cultivating Music Together

Around this time David Sengstack asked Ken a provocative question: “What can we do for all the families and kids for whom Suzuki is not a good fit?” According to Ken, his idea was, “If you can help kids get to age three in good shape, so many other problems are solved.” And not just in their musical development. Curious as to why some kids drop out of music study, he and Ken speculated that it was the children who lacked developmentally appropriate experiences when they were young who were most at risk. The reason?: “In Japan they can sing in tune and keep a beat by three or four because parents are singing to their kids and ours are not!”

Sengstack underwrote Ken’s initial research into early childhood music education and his attendance at conferences, enabling Ken to further pursue the intriguing questions his uncle raised. As a result of their shared interest in early childhood pedagogy Ken became active in the National Association of Education and Young Children (NAEYC). His investigations led him, in turn, to Temple University and Edwin Gordon, whose seminars Ken attended; and, from there, on to his collaboration with Lili Levinowitz, one of Gordon’s doctoral candidates.4 Now a professor at Rowan University, Levinowitz worked with Ken to build Gordon’s theory into Music Together’s philosophy and curriculum. “It’s a very important part of Music Together. It gave us a more academic underpinning by which we could explain our points of view.”

Drawing as well on Jerome Bruner’s constructionist ideas, Ken’s research into early childhood developmental theory enabled him to put his own personal theories about children’s early exposure to music on a scientific basis. Moreover, it gave him ammunition to counter two ideas pervasive in Western industrialized societies that discourage non-musicians from experiencing the benefits of music. The first is the assumption that making music is only for the talented few who are meant to become performers (the Performance Model). The second, a corollary of this idea, is that music is merely a form of entertainment to be enjoyed passively by an audience (the Passive Consumption Model).

These cultural assumptions are not new, although recording technology has greatly exacerbated their impact. Indeed, they were already pervasive when Jaques-Dalcroze devised his pedagogical methods over a century ago. I suspect that they’re among the factors that led him to develop an innovative education not only “in” music (that is, as a way of learning music) but also “through” music. What does it mean, though—to learn through music? Given his training as a pianist and composer, it isn’t all that surprising that Jaques-Dalcroze developed his system partly as a mode of formal music education designed to prepare children for musical literacy, instrumental proficiency, and the performance culture of Western classical music. Those elements were certainly central to his original attempts to bring natural movement into his teaching at the conservatory in Geneva in 1894.

But various factors in his background also led him to form a broader vision of music education as a socializing force, especially for children—a vision at odds with contemporary European culture. These included the Pestalozzian educational philosophy he absorbed early in his life, based on Rousseau’s political ideals, and the deep impression ethnic communities he encountered in Algiers and other non-Western expressive cultures made on him when he was coming of age in 1886.5 While in North Africa he experienced music not just as a mode of performance, but also as an elemental medium through which human beings can interact with one another directly, rhythmically, and communicate non-verbal meaning. He envisioned a pedagogical system for modern Europeans that would empower them to grow collectively—and morally—as social beings, through music, as well as individually, in music. Moreover, he believed that, precisely because music is ultimately rooted in our humanity, an education through music is something not just a select few can benefit from, but each one of us, and society as a whole. The creation of a utopian community in Hellerau, a suburb of Dresden, from 1911 to 1914, gave Dalcroze a forum for trying out this alternative cultural model of human development in and through music, and his experiments created a sensation in Europe at the time. But the historic events that swept through Europe in 1914 to 1917 interrupted his work in Germany and his ideas remain revolutionary to this day. And so, despite Dalcroze’s and others’ contributions on this front, we still face the same deeply entrenched cultural assumptions.

Ken recognized that American society’s framing of children’s music development in terms of performance is rooted in its Western cultural heritage. It’s a lineage that brings certain benefits: “I like to say ‘performance orientation is the Olympian path.’ If you’re going to do the Olympics and get out there, all right, great. It’s difficult and challenging; incredible, miraculous when people traverse it and achieve,” as well as certain costs: “But that’s not how children should start. That’s why the children weren’t learning; because they need the modeling.” These ideas came from early childhood theory. And so, to challenge these assumptions, Ken Guilmartin and Lili Levinowitz leveraged Edwin’s Gordon argument that music aptitude is “normally” distributed. As Ken describes it:

We know from Gordon’s research that there is a distribution of music aptitude, and that that distribution is normal. It follows the same bell curve as linguistic or mathematical or other aptitudes. The vast majority of us are in the middle of the curve. With average musical aptitude you can still do a lot—even play in a symphony orchestra. Everybody has the potential to achieve ‘basic musical competence.’ Everybody can learn to sing in tune and tap in rhythm—and it’s probably all doable by about age three or four, just like with language. However, many never achieve it.

Ken took these ideas further, however, arguing that these cultural assumptions are key factors discouraging parents from getting actively involved in their children’s music making and music development. Parents’ reluctance to engage with their child musically during the critical formative years from zero to three is especially troubling in light of the potential these parents harbored as models of musical participation, a potential left largely unrealized. These factors made it all the more urgent to free them from the cultural assumptions inhibiting them from participating in music making, to the detriment of their children’s music development. In addition, Ken saw that parents and nursery programs were losing a golden opportunity to reinforce their preschooler’s musical learning: “I was struck by how ineffective it was, in my working with the co-op and early childhood applications, to teach a song in class and expect it to live through the child’s life all week long without something being sent home so the grownups could learn it too.” These various strands culminated in the Music Together philosophy, curriculum, and repertoire.

The teaching Ken was doing around this time provided more data for his research, as well as an impetus to take action. But it also led him to branch out from the approach Bob Abramson and Ruth Alperson certified him in 1983. As he put it: “To create Music Together I had to move beyond Dalcroze.” He went on:

I was doing Music and Movement with the three and four year-olds at the JCC in the morning. Then in the afternoon I’d come to the nursing home to visit my grandmother here in Princeton and work with 83 year-olds, 94 year-olds, stroke victims…And I was doing the same lesson plan, but with a different style. There’s a continuity across age levels that made it work. So it wasn’t long before I realized I wasn’t really doing Dalcroze: I was doing some kind of “Ken” thing.

Ken found that the Dalcroze approach he had learned wasn’t working for the little ones he was teaching, in part because they were at an age for which it’s too early to expect them to keep a beat. “You could adapt the approach and do the same kinds of things for them anyway. It’s not as if it’s bad for them.” But there was a deeper reason why the model of Dalcroze he learned from Abramson wasn’t working for him: despite its strong emphasis on process and discovery, at the end of the day it was supposed to make students better performers—especially of classical music. Having experienced his Dalcroze training in a conservatory, Ken understood Jaques Dalcroze’s method primarily as a mode of formal music education for children aged four through grade school to young adult: the age range his Certificate training focused on. As he encountered the training, with its intense focus on classical performance practice, solfège rooted in tonal theory, and piano improvisation based on tonal harmony, it was more an education in than through music, driven by the Performance Model. And, in fact, this is how many Americans think of it, too: as a good preparation for instrumental study—the “real” point of music education.

Understood in this way, the “classic” or “pure” Dalcroze Education he had experienced came into direct conflict with the uncritical Participation Model Ken saw as fundamental to Music Together:

Bob was with me every moment I was teaching in those early years. At least I see so much Dalcroze in what we do, or I did. But we’re not doing Dalcroze. We needed teachers who were not necessarily Dalcroze trained. We didn’t want them to do all that stuff. Dalcroze was not suitable for our goals as it was, because it was formal instruction. As enlivening—as developmental, in its way—as it is, it wasn’t developmentally appropriate for people who couldn’t keep a beat yet. Same with Kodaly, same with Orff, same with Suzuki. They’re all wonderful pedagogies for young children. But they’re formal instruction! They’re after results. Instead of adapting Dalcroze into things, I wanted to throw it all out and start afresh. And then we had to build our organization to support that.

Some Dalcroze educators may beg to differ. When I shared this idea with one colleague, he replied: “When I teach young children, I do not consider in the least that I am teaching them to keep a beat. I am creating an environment in which musical behavior might emerge. However, it’s a common misconception people have that Dalcroze education is only a way of teaching music concepts through movement. Sure, when it is offered as professional training, or serves as a theory course in a music school, it is. But that’s not the whole picture.” One could also quibble that the idea that Dalcroze is not developmentally appropriate for toddlers is at odds with the enthusiasm Abramson felt about giving children suitable Dalcroze experiences from as early as infancy.

There’s little doubt that, having received his exposure to Dalcroze Education almost solely from Abramson’s example, Ken generalized about what it constitutes largely on the basis of that example. So in many ways Abramson bears some responsibility for Ken’s impressions. He demonstrated Dalcroze methods to his teacher trainees almost exclusively with groups of children aged four and older, and never in a parent-child setting. To validate the contributions of non-musicians, he went out of his way to show the formally trained singer and instrumentalists in his classes that dancers and actors could often improvise with more openness and authenticity. Condemning conventional music educators for what he believed was a pinched vision of music and education that lacked a deep commitment to their own creativity and artistry, Abramson often showed them open disdain. Be that as it may, it’s clear in retrospect that, as Ken developed Music Together’s participatory, inclusive, non-comparative, and non-competitive model of early childhood musical exposure, he did so partly as a counter-reaction to the performance orientation he associated not only with music educators such as his kindergarten teacher, but also with Dalcroze teachers whose training in formal music education biases them toward the elitist Performance Model.

Given that Music Together features parent education as a key component, not only of the philosophy, but also of the repertoire and curriculum design, it’s not hard to see how Ken came to prioritize unconditional acceptance of all participant contributions. It’s precisely the element of judgment prevalent in formal music education that can easily sabotage any effort to engage parents. “It can be so challenging to get a parent who brings the child to class to do more than sit and watch. ‘You take my child. I would only be bad for her if I sang. You teach my child. I’ll watch.’” In response to such parent reactions, Ken developed the parent education piece of the philosophy, which equips Music Together teachers to tackle the uphill battle of fighting commonly held assumptions about who’s allowed to make music. And when it comes to the most reluctant caregivers, Ken becomes the biggest cheerleader, only redoubling his efforts to encourage them and validate their participation: To make the point, he reenacts a dialogue with such a participant: “If you really are not going to sing, because you can’t, I’ll bet you you’re dancing with your child. Do you ever hold him in your lap and bounce along with the music?: ‘Oh, yeah, I do that all the time.’”

A key element of the Music Together philosophy is to validate whatever the child and the parent are able to do, regardless of whether it fits a conventional model of musical aptitude. “If the child does something that, to most people would not look musical, or would look like the wrong kind of musical response, at least it’s a response! You have to be quick to validate it so the parent sees ‘she did something right.’” Such validations is also how teachers guide caregivers not only to adjust their ideas about what constitutes “quality time” with children, but also their own self-image, so they can see themselves as models of musical engagement, regardless of how musically talented they really are. “Expanding the adults’, parents’, and professional caregivers’ awareness of what is musical and how they can actually find their own unique way that’s comfortable for them to participate musically is really what we’re about. Because we know that that’s essential for the child’s development. If the children just see the loved, the depended-on, the bonded-to caregiver sitting on the couch watching TV, that’s what they’re are going to do, too.”

It’s a circle. You leverage the children’s natural responses, their enjoyment, and the parents see that and, with some encouragement, and the modeling of other parents and teachers, they find—and we give them—access points where they can actually participate, whether they can sing or not, whether they can dance or not. It’s easy and rewarding instantly—and it’s non-threatening. And you get a feedback loop: music, and pleasure, and development. We call it the spiral of exposure and experimentation…which is play!

And then some new information reinforced Music Together’s justification for its curriculum. “When the NAEYC reviewed their definition of play, they redefined it as ‘developmentally appropriate practice.’ As I was listening, I said to myself: ‘We do that! We do all that!!’ Lili Levinowitz and my daughter Lauren are keeping up on all this. One of the nice things about the integration of our system—we’re independent as a business—is we can teach our own people about that. And so a year or two later we had workshops on that, and we had teachers informing our parents, parent education, about these connections. And it was a delight to be able to do.”

Developing the teacher training took time, however, especially because of the expectations different people bring to it. “We have more challenge getting music educators who train with us to do true developmentally appropriate practice than we do with actors or songwriters; because they’re locked into goal oriented instruction. It’s tied to performance. Even if it’s just playing for grandma, they’re after a performance.” To this day, teachers who come to Music Together harboring expectations formed from a conventional music education have the most difficulty adapting to the non-competitive sharing of music without passing judgment.

In 1985, Ken started working on the Center for Music and Young Children, which gave shape to his vision of a class for children where parents would be present in the classroom. The following year, Lili Levinowitz started working with him to develop the Music Together curriculum and repertoire. Many of the over two hundred fifty songs featured in Music Together’s materials are of his own creation, and all of the arrangements are his. There are nine song collections to provide more than enough material for a three-year cycle of three trimesters, Fall, Winter, Spring, taking a child from, say, infant to age four. Moreover, each repertoire item serves a particular curricular function, providing important contrast for lessons in real time as the teacher moves along from one song to the next, and a rich and varied musical landscape to hold children’s and their adult caregivers’ attention during the week away from class.

In our song collections we have a very intentional mix of tonalities and meters. We use asymmetrical meters, for example, with Phrygian, Dorian, Lydian, Mixolydian modes thrown in, because that’s what gives you an earful. We know from research that children learn more from differences than from sameness. Lots of children’s song collections in the olden days, they’re all written too high, and they’re all in major keys: “happy” songs. Children actually don’t learn the characteristics of something—for instance, they actually don’t learn major—unless they have something to compare it to. They learn from discrepancy. It would be like only speaking in the present tense around your children in the thought that it would somehow be more beneficial in terms of their learning of language.

The first classes were held near Levinowitz’s home in Wyncote, Pennsylvania; and by the next year they launched the Music and Movement Center of Princeton. After a short stint at the Westminster Conservatory, the organization moved into a site on Nassau Street in 1989. It has since become the Music Together Princeton Lab School, a consortium of ten sites that collectively offer a hundred Music Together classes each semester. By the early 1990s the company had approved six or seven other Music Together licensees to offer the program, and it continued to grow steadily over the ensuing decades to its current size.

Growing Music Together

In order to expand the network for marketing and distributing the Music Together program so rapidly, Ken needed to authorize a growing number of registered teachers who had gone through the basic training, who understood the philosophy, and who could facilitate classes with families, with caregivers and children, doing developmentally appropriate practice together. I asked him, “What were the criteria for accepting and certifying trainees? How could he feel confident that the freshly minted trainee could go out and do the kinds of things they need to be able to do?” He admitted it was difficult.

We don’t certify people in the training. The basic training is only an intensive weekend; twenty-five hours of contact time over a Friday, Saturday, Sunday. There’s no way we could certify them then. We have a certification program that you can come back for. But initially everyone has to take a kind of a test. We want to at least know you can sing on pitch and be there for the training. We can make a very good assessment that they understand what we are doing. There’s a ten-minute exercise that they’ve practiced several times during the training. They lead a song with everybody else role playing children and parent in classes. We can pretty much tell from that whether they have the potential.

In other words, in twenty five hours, the graduate is not expected to demonstrate full mastery. Given that the program itself is not especially skills intensive, but more about the philosophy and how to use the curriculum, the trainee just has to show she has basic musical competence—and an underlying assumption of the philosophy is that, simply by virtue of being human beings we all have that, whether or not we had a chance to develop it—and that she could eventually grow to become a skilled facilitator. “Someone who passes the training has demonstrated they have the potential. Usually you can spot the really good ones easily. And market forces do take care of the small amount that we let through that were a mistake.” Parents who have a bad experience eventually fall away. “We wish we could spare them even that.” According to Ken, their research has shown that such experiences have not hurt Music Together’s reputation because parents identify the program with the materials, its repertoire and curriculum, and the philosophy, more than with the teacher. “We did some studies of this early. Parents generally know the difference between the program and the teacher.”

Indeed, a key piece of the program is the distinction Music Together makes between the materials, which consist of the repertoire and curriculum, the guiding philosophy, which all figure in the teacher training, on the one hand, and, on the other, the legal arrangement to offer the program at a particular site. One could say that the focus on quality materials, with gorgeous production values reflected in the recordings’ professional performances, in the audio production of the repertoire, and in the print materials, Music Together has come as close as anyone could to a teacher-proof curriculum. “We wanted the families to know what was going on musically. If they could model music skills as best as they could, then the child would learn. We know the stuff we give families at home works.”

The ease with which an applicant can become a registered Music Together teacher has helped to fuel the organization’s rapid expansion and its distribution network: “We certainly would not have grown the way we did if we’d required the kind of certification Kodaly, or Orff, or even Suzuki require.” Not to mention Dalcroze! Consequently, there is nothing obligatory about becoming certified. For those who show promise, the teaching skill evolves organically from their on-the-job training. But Music Together also offers a continuing education program that gives motivated trainees opportunities to build on their basic foundation.

We give them a lot of support. We provide sample lesson plans (but don’t provide tons and tons of them). We expect them to write a lesson plan and teach them how. And we teach them why it—the way we think it can work—works. So they go away with all that written up. We prepared training materials, thoroughly written stuff, reference material, tapes, now we have videos, things we’d been developing for years. A lot of support. Second to none in our field, I’d say.

An important distinction, then, is that graduates of Music Together’s basic training are not initially certified; they’re just registered. “We have a certification program. We do workshops around the country several times a year: ‘Songs Workshops,’ we call them.” Once registered graduates have had at least a year of experience and have taught a certain number of hours, they can come back anytime at a discounted rate and repeat the training as a refresher. If they’re going for certification, there’s a fee similar to the initial fee. And they have to do preliminary work, observe classes and comment, take notes, write “parent education” logbooks, and teach a class under observation. “When we deem them certified, they can be proud of the plaque they receive, and hang it up and talk about it.”

What motivates graduates to return for further training? Consistent with its laissez faire approach on this front, Music Together does little to incentivize the behavior; so the degree to which each teacher pursues professional development is left up to her. As Ken puts it, “I’ve always felt it was important to make these kinds of things voluntary—to provide a ladder of development—a ladder of opportunity, if you will; and have people enthusiastic, as much as possible, as much as their lives allow, and climbing it, and be present for group reaffirmations of our work together.” But people are human; some don’t follow up. “I think there’s a certain acceptance (more than what we might need to have) for what that is.”

This stance may explain why Music Together puts a lot of faith in on-the-job training. Ken admits that there are some teachers registered to teach Music Together classes who may not be its ideal representatives. “It’s a community where lots of people find out about us by word of mouth. We have people who do Music Together and it works for them. They’ve got congenial personalities and so forth. But their actual teaching is not where we’d want it to be.” Rather than intervene directly to ensure the quality of the teaching, however, Music Together’s model leaves that aspect to market forces. “Our quality control is in the licensing arrangement or agreement. You don’t have to be trained to be a licensee, but you do have to employ a registered teacher, a graduate of the training program. It’s not going to be in your business interest to employ somebody who’s no good; and you can see that pretty quickly.”

Unlike Dalcroze or other teacher training programs credentials, which authorize the programs’ graduates to practice the method, the Music Together license is strictly a legal arrangement. It merely grants its holder legal permission to use the trademark and marketing materials to promote the program, and to distribute the copyrighted repertoire in the songbooks that parents buy as a part of their enrollment fee. In this regard, the license is somewhat akin to the arrangement trainees made with the pre-instrumental program Kindermusk, which in superficial respects could be seen as a precursor to Music Together. “Another aspect of being registered is that you have to be actually working as a teacher. And then we know for the most part that you’re working under a licensee–that an authorized licensee who has a program up and running is mentoring you. In other words if you want to do Music Together, you do have to start up a little business or a practice.”

If any factor has impinged upon Music Together’s growth it has been this requirement rather than constraints on who can claim to teach the curriculum. In fact, some graduates’ reluctance to engage with the program’s entrepreneurial aspects has proven problematic. “If they don’t want to do that—if they just want to teach—we find that limiting. (Because, even though we really help you manage the business side of things, if that’s not your thing, then what can we do?) Well, they can get associated with a community music school or something like that. But then they have to get the administration to come on board with the licensing.”

Staffing licensed Music Together sites entails recruiting a self-selecting population of those who want to get into the Music Together network. The program then leverages whatever musical skills they bring to the table, even if those are not such conventional musical skills as reading music or playing an instrument with great proficiency. Open minded about whom to take in, Ken points out that “good theater people are brilliant at galvanizing emotional and other kinds of attention.” While this decision is not motivated by business factors, such factors are not entirely left out of the calculus behind it.

I wasn’t interested in the business side. But we had to build the business to get the work out. I think that’s the true use of business, the true function of business: it distributes. To make it viable; to bring in enough revenue so you can do what you want to do. Money is good for that. It’s energy. If you get it flowing and invest it in ways that get people interested, responding—and responsive—and active, actively passing things on, then it keeps flowing. So we had to create a structure that would support that; and the principles were the same all the time: What is developmentally appropriate not only for children and their parents, but for us as an organization for our teachers?

Having recently stepped down from his roles as CEO and CFO, Ken now has professionals taking care of the business side of Music Together. He’s still Artistic Director, and is thrilled to be back in the recording studio, revisiting the song collections, working on a new thing, something he referred to as the “Rhythm Kids” curriculum. “I’m a composer before all else. I’ve composed this organization. But it’s time for others to take that over. I’m no longer involved with the details of running it.”

I hope it’s apparent how Ken’s story of making Music Together is relevant to us Dalcroze educators beyond the human interest story of a Dalcroze colleague making good in the world. Because our practice is another form of music-and-movement education—indeed, the originary form of it—and because we face many comparable challenges of promoting it, including the same cultural assumptions that Ken is seeking to subvert, we in the DSA can benefit mightily from studying the example of a well-distributed music-and-movement program Music Together gives us. I look forward to reader responses and hope that this article prompts a robust discussion about the various ways Ken has incorporated elements of his Dalcroze training into Music Together, as well as the ways we may disagree with some aspects of his model. Ultimately, we are all working to address the urgent need for the personal and social benefits people can glean from making music together, each of us oriented toward a particular segment of the population. I’m thrilled that we have in Music Together an ally in this effort.