About my music books
The
Musical Treasure Chest http://yol33.livejournal.com/530.html
Simplification of musical note reading was the main idea of my first book, The Musical Treasure Chest. But why change the method people have used for hundreds of years? Because it will help a lot and our society has now reached the level when it is possible to do so. I will explain from the beginning.
The first steps in reading music are really critical. How would a child find the connection between written music and keys on a piano keyboard? Notes are all alike and the pattern of their distribution on the staff is different from the keyboard pattern. For some children and even adults this is so difficult to learn that they never enjoy playing music. If you play and are always looking for which keys to play, it is not fun at all! You need to speed up the reading to enjoy it.
In order to help to solve these problems first of all I made a small but at the same time very helpful change in how to write notes. I colored them.
Everybody knows that it is much easier to differentiate things when they are colored differently. Now, when colored printing is not a problem I think society can let itself switch to colored musical writing. But how can understanding the notes’ location on the keyboard be made easier? I thought about this when I started to teach my two year old daughter how to play the piano. And here I made second little but also very useful innovation. I made a band with colored notes on the staff, located them exactly in accordance with the piano keys and placed it vertically on the keyboard. I found it to be very helpful.
But how is it possible to help to memorize the notes’ position? I decided to use the recommendations described in the books of the world's most respected memory-training expert Harry Loraine. He wrote that for good memorization it is very important: 1) to use visual associations to improve your memory, 2) not to use simple but ridiculous and funny images, and 3) to pay attention to details. Based on all these principles I created The Musical Treasure Chest and immediately got a result: my daughter understood everything and was able to find the notes on the keyboard.
In The Musical Treasure Chest I created a silly story with ridiculous names. I made associations between the names in the story and the names of the musical notes. I colored both my characters and their corresponding notes the same color in order to ease the connection. I connected the characters in such a way that you could easily remember their order. In the book I often describe the position of the characters in connection to the notes of the staff.
The book is very simple, one new note appears on each page and is seen as a note of the staff and also as a key on the piano keyboard so you can look at it and better Describe its position, which is necessary for visualization. The length of the book with opened pages is about the size of four octaves on the piano keyboard and it includes notes from the great octave in the Base clef to the two-lined octave in the Major clef. Also I have to mention that in the book I described the two most popular names of the notes used in the World: English and European (Southern and Eastern). Working with my daughter I came to a conclusion that for very little children it is better to read the book step by step by playing with it, finding some funny and silly features together, or by paying attention to the details or looking at how cute the little dragon is… I asked her to tell me the story, to find the little dragon (he is the easiest to find - always between two black bars). Then, based on the story, I asked her which notes are located to the left and to the right from the dragon - as far as possible.
Even while playing musical pieces from the second book The Musical Fairy Tale I remind her the story to ease the finding the notes on the keyboard. Please do not press too hard. The easier and funnier the play is, the faster you will reach your goals. For older children and for adults I think reading the book a few times will be enough for good memorization.
The Musical Fairy Tale http://yol33.livejournal.com/862.html
This book is a fairy tale about a fairy Dili-Don who introduced music into her forest. You can find here different funny animals learning how to sing, the well known piglet brothers, dwarfs, and a story about a scary witch. At the end the musical fairy will host a party full of music and songs. This book has 21 original tunes with songs and 42 original colored pictures. It is recommended for children up to ten years old.
The purpose of this book was to impart to my daughter love to music and singing and to teach her how to play the piano not in the classical rigorous and boring form, but in an easy and exciting way. I believe that the more pleasant and interesting primary education is, the greater and stronger the knowledge will be, and so more benefits will come out of it. Many of my friends have spent years learning to play different instruments but stopped playing as soon as they left the tight control of their parents and never again touched the hated instruments. I hope that my children will see friends in music and musical instruments who could make their lives happier and support them in their hour of need.
I started my lessons with my daughter when she was two years old. First I taught her how to recognize the notes and find them on the keyboard using my first book The Musical Treasure Chest. Then I started to read this fairy tale to her and play and sing songs from this book. Later, in a game form, I started to ask my daughter to help me play some of the tunes. I showed her where she should play and sometimes asked her to help me to find some notes. During the lesson she sat on my lap so it was easy for me to help her. We tried to have fun, taking different toys with us and having them sing along with us. We did not play every day but a couple of times a week. Recently my daughter turned four and she can play all the tunes from the book. She even started to create her owns.
The music in the book is pretty simple so it can be used for beginners. At the end it has some explanations about how to read music. The books are protected by copyright law. Please do not use enclosed materials (or the files you can get from my web site) for your own publication. This is against law.
