How to Develop a Musical Vocabulary (Music Education Basics)

Field Notes on Music Teaching & Learning · May 25, 2021 · 11m

Welcome back to Music Education Basics!Today, we’re talking about what it means to develop language skills in music—namely, the importance of building a vocabulary of tonal and rhythm patterns, something you’ll hear me describe as the building blocks of music.Tonal patterns are short, 2- to 5-note groups or phrases. Think of them like words: instead of reading and focusing on the individual letters that make up a word, our eye recognizes the group of letters together; we understand the letters within the context of the word.The same is true in music: instead of focusing on individual notes…