‘It broadened their horizons. They had access to an experience outwith their normal lives. Also, it was fully accessible to all – regardless of academic achievement – a real plus point.’ P7 teacher, Prestonfield Primary, Spring 2005

Connecting to Music approaches the idea of listening to music as a more right-brain activity in that it encourages children towards reverie, imagination, intuition and feelings, rather than logic and analysis - more left-brain traits. The psychiatrist and writer Anthony Storr writes in his book Music and the Mind (Harper Collins, 1992) that listening to music ‘…permits the same kind of scanning; sorting and re-arrangement of mental contents which take place in reverie or sleep’. He goes on to say, ‘Listening to or participating in music can restore a person to himself’'.

This is not to say that there is nothing to be gained from a more formal and technical approach to music. Nor does it mean that listening to music is a completely free-form or chaotic experience. Connecting to Music does not teach children about music, it teaches them to listen, and make meaningful connections with the music for themselves. Connecting to Music deliberately does not offer lessons on styles of music or analysis of music. Rather it is designed to ignite the spirit of the child in their own journey of exploration through music and art, while providing a safe vessel within which this exploration can begin.

The ethno-musicologist John Blacking in his book How Musical is Man (University of Washington Press, 1973) says, ‘music is humanly organised sound’. In other words, music reflects that which is ultimately human. When we listen to a piece of music we enter the sound world created by that particular composer and stay within it until the music ends. Within that world we discover other realms of possibility within ourselves and the music.

However the intent and active participation of the listener is essential to this process and this is often a difficulty that we, and children, face - how to switch off from the daily pressures of the external world and enter our inward looking world; how to free ourselves a little from the impatient desire for the next.

Music is a temporal art and requires time and space in which to be heard. The musicologist Julian Johnson says in his book Who needs Classical Music? (Oxford University Press, 2002), 'The music’s content is not heard immediately but rather as a product of its unfolding through time'.

We must create environments that allow children to discover, experience and express their own personal creativity; spaces that help to awaken in them feelings of aliveness and presence. Connecting to Music creates these spaces by exposing children to great works of art as well as a sense of their self. '‘Temenos’ is a Greek word meaning sacred, protected space, psychologically a personal container', Daryl Sharp,Jung Lexicon (Inner World Books, 1991). The special nature of the external physical space can help create the conditions where we can access our own internal space.

A piece of music was written to be heard, a painting to be seen, a poem or novel to be read. These great works are handed on to us, allowing us to inhabit their world, igniting our imaginations and pushing us in new and different directions as we feel them echo around the most intimate parts of our being.

'I was very impressed. We can continue to use these demanding tasks in class e.g using music to inspire emotions, to create abstract arts, linking music and art to emotions, use of music in meditation exercises, discussion of thoughts/ feelings inspired by music and works of art.' P7 Teacher, Wardie Primary School, Spring 2007

Connecting to Music helps children to take this profound experience, both concrete and abstract, and explore it. It helps to stimulate their imagination, enabling them to reach beyond the everyday. It helps them to invent, to realise new possibilities and new ways of being. As Rilke said in his poem, ’Everything beckons to us to perceive it’, and once we are awoken to this realisation we must act, we must not ignore this.

Read the whole of Rilke's poem.