Music Together - Repertoire and Recordings

Repertoire and Recordings

Music Together is noted for a repertoire which emphasizes the use of a wide variety of musical modes (tonalities) and meters. With much of the music of our culture—especially “children’s music”—using predominantly major scales and duple meter, it is difficult for children to gain a breadth of music experience. The Music Together repertoire includes songs in such tonalities as Phrygian mode, aeolian mode, Mixolydian mode, and Dorian mode. Children are also introduced to songs using triple meter and “unusual” meters such as 5/4 or 7/8. In this way, the Music Together repertoire helps strengthen children’s audiation, a termed coined by learning theorist Edwin Gordon to describe the process by which we mentally hear and comprehend music. The ability to audiate is essential to any meaningful music learning.

There are nine non-sequential Music Together song collections, named Bongos, Bells, Triangle, Fiddle, Drum, Tambourine, Flutes, Sticks and Maracas, forming a three-year cycle taught in fall, winter, and spring semesters. There are also three summer collections, named Summer Songs I, Summer Songs II, and Summer Songs III, which are compilations carefully designed not to include songs from the spring collections before them or the fall collections after them. Families receive two CDs per semester, along with an accompanying illustrated songbook, to facilitate at-home family music-making. The recordings are professionally produced and richly orchestrated, and feature a “family” of singers, representing a mother, father, child, grandmother, and uncle.