English

Mini Mozart provides opportunities for children to encounter music at the earliest stage in their lives. I interviewedClare Louise-Shaw, the founder of Mini Mozart, about the background of Mini Mozart, how she started it and runs it, and the philosophy behind it.

Interview: Clare Louise-Shaw :
Founder and manager of Mini Mozart

Clare Louise-Shaw

What's inside the case?

I started it about 7years ago, when my first son was nearly one year old. It started with my friends from my antenatal NCT (National Childbirth Trust) group. Nine of us were meeting up regularly, and on one rainy day, I said, 'Come out to my house to have some fun', and I played the piano and got the violin out in this very room.

Every mum knows that when we go out with eight other mums, some children are always crying or acting up, so it was incredible to see that while I was playing the piano, the violin and the clarinet for an hour, they were all, like, 'Ha-!', just transfixed! It just hit me and I thought, 'Wow, this is what I want!'

It was very organic development from there. A few extra friends came and it became too crowded, so we moved to an arts centre, then other people came to ask, 'Can we come?', 'Why don't you do it in my area?', and we added some other dates and venues, and it grew bigger and bigger.

Mini Mozart is a sort of culmination of the three parts of my career. The first part is, of course, my academic degree and experience as a musician. Throughout my music education, I was always part of orchestras and bands, and sang jazz and sang at Disneyland as well. I have a rather rich and broad musical experience, and had lots of fun through those experiences. The second part is my experience as a parent. It gives me more and more ideas and new perspectives as my eldest child grows up. The third part is broadcasting experience, as a presenter of music programmes on the BBC. When I was the event manager of the BBC Young Musician of the Year, I was asked if I could present and produce its documentary programme, and since then I have presented many BBC music programmes including the Proms and several operas over five years. These experiences also helped me very much in producing and managing the class.

Having fun with musical exercise

There are lots and lots of music classes where they play music on a CD, and I think this is also great, as any mother can do this at home. What is different about Mini Mozart is that we do it all through live music, which allows children to interact with live music and musicians. That is what recorded music cannot offer, and it leads children to actively 'listen' to the music, not just to hear and forget. Our teachers are all music graduates and good at their instruments, and I think their real passion for the music is conveyed to the children through the class. What we want for the children is to get a sense of real passion for 'live' music, and I think you can only get that if you have great musicians playing it. That is the extra thing on top of the benefits that any other music class can offer.

We are surrounded by music everywhere, whether at home or outside, so babies are already accustomed to blocking out much of what they hear. Also, if nobody plays musical instruments in their family, music is something they hear from a box plugged in to the wall. Babies learn how things work when they push toys and see them move, or press a button and see something happes, but hearing music from a box just doesn't make sense! When they actually see the violin played by moving the bow, or the clarinet making a sound by being blown in front of them at Mini Mozart, it makes sense to most of them for the first time, and they start to understand, 'Oh, that's how music is made'. Interacting with live musicians encourages children to 'actively listen' to the music, and helps them to process what they are hearing, which aids their cognitive development.

Exactly! They start to want to be involved in what is happening, and then they want to do it themselves. That is all we want, actually. It motivates children to listen, play, and make music by themselves.

Yes. Music is a whole body experience. It is very important that live musicians are there and babies can see, feel, and touch them or their instruments if they want, which was a key part of the programme when I started Mini Mozart.

Be prepared to be touched while you play

It takes a very special kind of person to be a Mini Mozart teacher because they have to be great at their instruments, of course, but also have to be a good communicator with both adults and children, and very comfortable with letting stuff happen in the class. The children might come up and grab your bow when you are playing the violin! So you have to be able to juggle that kind of thing.

Our teachers are skilled musicians, so they will never start a song without knowing exactly how they are going to sing it, what the dynamics are going to be, and what they want to teach the children through it. That is a big difference between having professional musicians and people knowing some nursery rhymes. 45 minutes is a long time for a baby to concentrate, so they easily get bored half way through if many songs are sung to them in a similar tone. It is important that each exercise and song is approached in lots of different and exiting ways with lots of different textures and dynamics to spark their interest all the way through the class.

Dive for maracas!

No.　All our 18 musicians run Mini Mozart in conjunction with some other musical activity. I believe that it is important for them to have a rich artistic life in order to lead the class. We try to get other parts of their lives into the class to add originality and make it fresh. So while I write the scripts, I keep them flexible to leave some space for their creativity, which makes the teachers get the sense of ownership of the class.

We have a great range of musicians covering all the different sections of an orchestra. There are some instruments which we work with a lot because of their visual aspect, like the violin and clarinet. With string instruments, you can actually see how the music is being played by moving the bow up and down, while the other hand presses different parts of the string. It also helps to tie the visual and hearing aspect of music making when you see the bow moving slowly when playing a long phrase, or jumping on the string with the jumping sound. Wind instruments also work very well because you can easily see the idea that, as you lift your fingers up, the pitch goes up, and as you put your fingers down, then the pitch goes down as well.

That is something we want to teach children from very young age, that there is a specific relationship between each note, high and low, by visualizing it. Other instruments are also attractive to children, and it is down to the musicians' individual creativity. When I audition musicians, I don't give them specific tasks, but let them inspire children with their instruments in five minutes, and I choose people with great ideas, good delivery, and good communication as our teacher.

Dance, dance!

One of the things I thought hard about when I was programming the class was whether or not to write our own music for the class, and I decided not to. Because even if we make up own music, the participants may familiarize themselves with the song, but they cannot sing it with their family, their grandparents or their friends, and they won't keep singing it when they grow older. However, they will remember the songs, such as, 'Row, row, row your boat', 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star', and sing them together at home and they can still sing them when they become parents themselves. All the songs I chose are the songs my mother sang to me, and I sing to my children.

I really like the idea of musical tradition, the idea that we can share music across generations. We are trying to enrich the whole family's musical life, not to give a didactic music lesson which only lasts in the class. That is why we don't use songs which can be enjoyed only in the class, or include too much variety that we cannot remember. It was a conscious decision to rotate about 60 well-known songs per term. Instead, we bring variety within the classical music through listening to the sound of the clarinet or the piano, through paying attention to the tempo and dynamics in the activities, and through enjoying the music during the bubbles and parachute activities.

That is another reason why we keep our songs consistent. Babies develop a great sense of confidence towards music in every class. As they learn the tunes of nursery rhymes, they start to enjoy expecting what is going to happen next: jumping, clapping, or being quiet. It gradually helps them to predict musical structure. Nursery rhymes are based on the same structure as classical music, so harmonies and melodies are easily predictable: tonic, dominant, and back again. When children feel comfortable with following musical structure, it gives them real confidence in expressing themselves musically.

Whereas the content is quite similar, we teach them differently. The Toddlers class is much more about children interacting with teachers, rather than parents interacting with babies in Babies class. We ask questions, such as, 'What's this?', instead of saying, 'Here is my violin'. There is more interaction, such as, 'How many strings does the violin have? Can you count them? One, two...', encouraging the children to remember things and find out answers. They use the same percussion instruments like maracas, but we expect them to be able to shake and stop the instruments according to the music or instruction, while babies just wave them and feel their parents shake and stop. We introduce musical gestures like conductive gesture in the Toddlers class, so they become used to seeing and following those gestures. We expect toddlers to sing the Hello song, paying attention to the simple relationship between the two notes at the end of the term.

Having interest and passion for music is important

The philosophy behind Mini Mozart is that we want children's first interaction with live music to be very professional, but also most importantly, to be fun. People tend to be too earnest for their children's education and as a result can be very didactic about everything. Actually, in my experience as a child and also from what I see through my children, children do their best with their musical education when they find it genuinely fun and are personally enthusiastic about it, and when they know they are getting something from it. We want to get them to really join in with music, we want them to have a sense of ownership over it, and we want them to have the confidence that it is something they can do themselves.

That's why I wanted to have excellent musicians who can give them a sense of awe and wonder, and at the same time, I wanted to make it very interactive so that children think, 'Oh, yes. That's a violin. I know it, I've heard of it, and I've touched it' with confidence. That way, we want to ignite their discerning ears and passion for music from the very early stage of their life, and cultivate their sense of entitlement over it, so that they can think music is something they know about, they can do, and they want to do. We are dealing with the very early years of musical education, so it is our mission to give them the foundation of enthusiasm for music so that they can build on it when they go on further musical education.

Report: Chigusa Futako