Category: repetition

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Christmas musical culture repetition Rhymetime

The sound of Christmas

I’m not religious. I don’t believe in God, despite a churchgoing childhood. Though I lack a Christian faith now, I do have a passion for the hymns and carols that I heard each week. Sunday School ended in time for us to file quietly into pews at the front of the church for the last ten minutes of the service when the congregation and choir sang hymns. Children soak up experiences and learn without trying, and those tunes and words sung week after week, and year after year, entered my brain and my heart, never to leave.

School concerts, assemblies and nativities added other songs to my Christmas repertoire and just hearing Winter Wonderland and White Christmas ignites a Pavlovian response in me now, giving me the urge to decorate a tree and eat mince pies. Since then, I have picked up lots of new carols and seasonal songs, learnt with choirs and groups of singers, or even from the television. Admit it, don’t we all get that festive feeling when we hear Jingle Bells or young Aled singing ‘we’re walking in the air’? Whether you are a believer or not, it’s hard to resist the pull of Christmas music.

Now it’s our turn to introduce these old favourites to our children. Each December, roles are reversed as parents lustily sing these songs to slightly nonplussed children . We’re introducing them to the sound of Christmas, knowing that very probably they too will sing and love these songs  for years and years.

At the risk of making a shameless plug, don’t forget that if you’d like to hear carols and other winter songs, do consider buying my CD, Winter at Home:Chansons d’hiver, recorded with Les Petits Zouzous.

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musical culture repetition Rhymetime

What’s Rhymetime? A musical comfort blanket.

Sharing songs Parents often come to Rhymetime saying that they need to learn new songs, and new verses, but actually I think we all have a memory bank of songs in our brains, tucked away, ready to be revitalised. Those songs we learned as children, with our parents or at school, are usually bursting to get out. Constant repetition of Old MacDonald is wearing, I give you that, but when we sing the tunes that our mothers and fathers sang to us, even if we don’t remember it consciously, we sink into the feeling of being safe, as if we are being wrapped in a musical comfort blanket.

By coming to Rhymetime and singing at home we are rebuilding this musical culture, reappropriating old songs, drawing in the new, and weaving a new blanket for our own children.  As our families grow, these songs, sung together, are musical rituals that bond us. The simple tunes become common currency to smooth our course through the day. We can sing them with different words (“This is the way we zip our coat”), or bellow them to distract a hungry child as we tramp through East Street. These songs become part of our lives, to sing again and again and again and again.

Have a good week!

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musical culture repetition Rhymetime

Again? Again!

repetition“Twinkle, please!”

If I don’t sing Twinkle, twinkle little star at Rhymetime, someone small always comes up to me at the end and asks me to put that right. These children know that repetition is good, and we adults sometimes forget this.

Coming together and singing the same songs, week after week (and again at home) makes these songs part of us all. When we sing the songs we know, we feel safe and loved, and it gives our little ones a chance to shine. When you are very small, predictability is a good thing. When you hear You are my Sunshine you can go off and get your coat, wave goodbye and put your money in the pot. You know what is happening, and you are safe, so you can relax and enjoy yourself.

Of course, with each rendition of Wind the bobbin up our child also learns a little more: first the tune, then the actions and words. I get such a thrill from watching the children master Heads, shoulders, knees and toes, first slowly, a little behind, and then faster and faster, singing as they go. Oh, the sheer pleasure of accomplishing this new skill!

Repetition is a brilliant way to practise speech patterns too. When I lived in Italy as a student, I would trudge the streets of Siena mumbling to myself, mimicking the exclamations and conversational gambits of the people around me in an attempt to make my accent less English. This did, of course, make me appear somewhat eccentric (has anything changed?!) but practising these intonations, or the music of the language, gave me confidence when it came to speaking Italian.  Singing is a far easier way of practising. In fact some children can’t talk well enough to communicate but can sing a song clearly. They’ve made the first step, and singing it with you again and again is the best practice there is.

So we sing these songs week after week to create a safe, predictable place where we can master the songs, singing them again and again. And if I slip in a new tune here and there, we can cope with that.