Wild Child Zone

The Wild Child’s Musical Genius Series

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What is the Wild Child’s Musical Genius Program?

The Wild Child’s Musical Genius Program teaches children music through their wild creative nature.

Most people imagine learning music as sitting in a tidy room with a teacher at your side. Hair combed. Nails trimmed and clean. Not speaking unless spoken to. Attempting to read little black dots on a page. Terrified of making a mistake. No wonder we fail miserably at the process and tell ourselves we or our children have no musical talent.

I teach music by connecting with the child’s brilliant wild nature through nature itself. Their nature. The nature of their bodies. Their voices. Their heartbeat. Their movement. Their imagination. Their musical brain. Every child has one. Every HUMAN has one. A musical brain.

Music is the full spectrum of human expression. As wild as it is refined. As passionate as it is subtle.

The difference between those who call themselves muscial/musicians and those who don’t is a matter of nourishment. That’s it. Feeding and thus growing the musical brain. And that food is a musical environment. That’s it. You want your child to be musical, provide them a musical environment. You want to be musical, immerse yourself in one.

The irony is that the great musical masters whom every classical musician studies learned in this way, through their bodies, actively!  Not ONE of them began by reading notes.

Mozart, the whiz kid was born into a musical universe! We tell ourselves he was ‘special’. Talented.  A genius beyond the norm.  I would agree he was extraordinary.  And I would emphasize his environment was extraordinary.  Without duplicating his early environment we cannot truly say how much was nature and how much was the radical musical environment he was immersed in.

Think about this. While he was in-utero his auditory pathways were already being nourished.  His mother danced and sang and played instruments all through her pregnancy, and so did everyone around her.  And then he was born!  And what was he born into?  A 24/7 dynamic living dimensional musical universe!  Everyone around him played many instruments.  Dancing was constant.  Singing.  He didn’t have plastic baubles to entertain himself with.  He had real instruments he plucked away at.  He was not spoken to… he was SANG to!

Mozart learned the language he was born into. Music.

Full dimensional experiential immersion.

In the over 30 years in which I have taught music to over a thousand children, there is not ONE child under the age of 6 who was not a musical genius. When I say that I mean when a child, any child, is immersed in a musical environment which includes movement, percussion/rhythm, singing, melodic instruments and writing/drawing, every child does it all! and MORE! they explode into their own creativity, their own compositions and musical ideas. They speak the language of music. It becomes their 2nd language. And for some, like Mozart, their first.

Some methods have it right. Suzuki does amazing things with very young children. The method begins when the child is two and they are inundated with music… listening and playing daily, many times a day!

But what is most often excluded in these methods is what I see as the key to unlocking the real genius of the child.  Their wildness.  The wild creative nature of the child.  Which means connecting music with the wild brilliant instinctual animal bodies they were born with!  Allowing their bodies to fully engage in the learning process.  Move!  Express!  Sing!  Body percussion!  Listen to and then howl and oot with the sounds of animals.  Imagination.

Some of the greatest musicians I have taught were the wildest kids in the bunch. No one could control them. Yet the minute they were connected with music through their bodies and their imaginations, these same children in a very short time were transformed into amazing musicians.  In a very short time, they themselves worked hard to control the fine motor movement required to play a keyboard. They themselves demand to write music notes. They demand, they DESIRE to do musical exercises at the age of 3 which most traditionally trained musicians are not exposed to until higher levels of learning.