Alex Ruthmann, in a blog post discussing music-making with the educational multimedia programming environment Scratch, has this to say:
What’s NOT easy in Scratch for most kids is making meaningful music with a series of “play note”, “rest for”, and “play drum” blocks. These blocks provide access to music at the phoneme rather than morpheme levels of sound. Or, as Jeanne Bamberger puts it, at the smallest musical representations (individual notes, rests, and rhythms) rather than the simplest musical representations (motives, phrases, sequences) from the perspective of children’s musical cognition. To borrow a metaphor from chemistry, yet another comparison would be the atomic/elemental vs. molecular levels of music.
To work at the individual note, rest, and rhythms levels requires quite a lot of musical understanding and fluency. It can often be hard to “start at the very beginning.” One needs to understand and be able to dictate proportional rhythm, as well as to divine musical metadimensions by ear such as key, scale, and meter. Additionally, one needs to be fluent in chromatic divisions of the octave, and that in MIDI “middle C” = the note value 60. In computer science parlance, one could describe the musical blocks included with Scratch as “low level” requiring a lot of prior knowledge and understanding with which to work.
This is a wonderful bit of insight. Music students usually have to start at the lowest level of single notes and work their way up to higher levels of complexity and abstraction. It seems like a common-sensical approach. But it isn’t the way that people learn. Even beginner musicians have a lot of implicit knowledge gained from just living in the world, and most of that knowledge is at the mid-level of abstraction, not the lowest level.
It’s rare indeed to find a human being who’s totally indifferent to music. Every infant I’ve ever encountered loves music, and I’m pretty sure that musicality is a human near-universal, like walking and talking. So why do so many kids wash out of music education? I think it’s because they can’t connect the low-level concepts they’re learning in school with the mid-level concepts in their heads. I’m no exception; I gave up on music in junior high and only found my way back in years later, through the back door of ad-hoc folk/rock/pop pedagogy.
It’s been interesting going to music school as an adult, after many years of informal and self-guided learning. I more or less taught myself blues harmonica, rock guitar and dance music programming. I did get some formal instruction in jazz, but mostly I learned from peers, from books, from recordings, and later the internet. When you learn music informally, you spend a lot of time at the mid-level. You learn tunes, riffs and phrases, chord progressions, patterns. Only at a more advanced stage do you venture down into the fundamentals, and up into bigger structures. Formal music education might scare away fewer kids if it worked in the same order.