What every infant should hear

So Boston Globe staffer Jeremy Eichler has enlisted his infant son Jonah as a test subject for early musical perception and education. Why limit the kid’s choices to Mozart and Schoenberg? How ’bout some good ol’ American prime Louis Armstrong, introducing the concepts of improvisation and swing?Â

There’s nothing wrong with turning children on to European classical music — I spent the weekend at my cellist-daughter’s music camp, profoundly proud of her pace-setting role in a conductor-less rendition of Mozart’s Symphony 25. But to raise a child without letting them in, early, on the evidently still-secret pleasures and powers of jazz is a shame.Â

While Mr. Eichler finds that two-month-olds develop preferences for consonant and dissonant music, that eight-month-olds can appreciate Balinese gamelan scales, and that University of Nevada, Las Vegas researcher Erin Hannon believesÂ ” infants start life with the ability to perceive complex rhythms but that they lose this skill unless it is called upon in their environment,” he needn’t go so global as Bulgarian wedding clarinetist Ivo Papasov (who is excellent) to locate a variety of boldly unfurling melodic phrases and meaningful variations, employing compelling rhythmic complexity in digestible narrative structure, performed with sweetly impassioned joy.Â Armstrong’s “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” is another great example.

As Smithsonian National Museum of American History music curator John Edward Hasse has written:

“From 1925 to 1928, bandleader and trumpeter Louis Armstrong led a recording group, known as the Hot Five and Hot Seven, through nearly 90 recordings. These tracks are now considered among the most seminal, enduring and influential recordings not only in jazz but in American music . . .His big, beautiful tone; his rich imagination as a soloist; his perfect sense of time; his deep understanding of the blues; his projection and authority; and the force of his musical personality. . .The essence of jazz–making something new out of something old, making something personal out of something shared–has no finer exemplar than Armstrong.”

Armstrong had a great fondness for young people, and even recorded a entertaining album of Disney themes, but that’s not the point. His music is delightful, engaging and enlightening on many levels, not least the “purely” musical. I believe kids don’t need only repetition in their music, but do enjoy singable themes that they can take off on, given that freedom. I think kids like the forward-tilting propulsion, syncopated and driving, that marks so much great American vernacular music — jazz, blues, bluegrass, Western swing, rock ‘n’ roll, soul, hip-hop and other popular forms. I think it’s wise to introduce children to America’s cultural icons, and the notion that real-life people, rather than untouchable artists from a hallowed canon, produce music.Â

Besides Armstrong and Fats Waller, my daughter heard music across genres from an early age — records by Bob Marley, the Beatles and early Billie Holiday, live concerts by Andrew Hill and Sonny Rollins, her mother Kitty Brazelton’s chamber music and avant-garde rock band Dadadah, works performed at the Bang on the Can Marathon, Bernadette Peters in Irving Berlin’s “Annie Get Your Gun” and even Charles Wuorinen’s 12-tone opera “Haroun and the Sea of Stories.” That last one didn’t move her: “Dad,” she protested after 15 minutes, “this is not music!” Would an exclusive listening diet of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg given her better entry into that rarefied sound world? Perhaps — but then what she would have missed!Â

Eichler reports, in his article, on this conclusion of Henkjan Honing of the University of Amsterdam: “Mere explusre makes an enormous contribution to how musical competence develops. But it’s the variety that counts.” So toÂ stimulate the very young’s listening skills, Â Bach is good, yes, Beethoven too, certainly Stravinsky (watch your toddler dance to “The Rite of Spring“) and even Wuorinen has written suitable pieces (I’m thinking of “Grand Bamboula” and maybe the electronic Time’s Encomium). But if you’re responsible for helping a tyke hear what’s possible, pleasurable and prophetic, don’t stop (or necessarily start) with the symphonic, and be sure to give ’em at least a dollop of Pops.

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