When learning is music to their ears
SHE was a singer and musician before she was a mother. Fiona Kelleher, wondered how she’d combine being an artist and being a parent.
“Being a parent is full-on, overwhelming and joyous. It’s your space for the rest of your life. When you cross that bridge, your life changes completely. It’s a wonderful change, but a very different life,” she says.
An early-years music specialist, who has worked in that capacity with Cork’s Graffiti Theatre since 2010, Fiona “got tremendous joy from singing a lot and playing games and music” with her children — Jake, Zoe and Sam are aged from 11 to eight.
“Children are so skilled and creative, from birth. Music doesn’t have to be watered-down or simplified. I’d just put on any kind and they’d tell me whether they liked it or not,” she says.
Fiona has now recorded I Am a Little Boat, an album for children aged from birth to three years. It’s a collection of musical ‘pictures’ to give rich, joyful listening experiences and it tracks the moods and changes of energy typical of very small children — sleepy to wakeful, to playful to quiet, to sleepy again.
Acknowledging the “wonderful canon of nursery rhymes and action-led songs for children”, Fiona wanted to create something different — songs and music that would appeal to the child, but that would also satisfy the “listening adults” in the room — parents, grandparents, older siblings.
“I wanted work that would have something in it for everybody. The parents might like a particular voice or instrument. It’s really important that parents have more experiences they can share with their child, rather than it being about putting something on for the child. Children look to our responses. Whether it’s a TV show or a book, if they see us switching off emotionally and intellectually, it’s more of a struggle for them to enjoy it,” she says.
Children aged up to three like complexity and “lots of different elements” in music so, for the first of the 13 tracks in the album, Fiona used “prepared” piano.
“This is using the piano whatever way you want. Lift the lid and you’ll find lots of strings that can be plucked. You can create different sounds by placing coins on the strings and plucking them, and by singing into the piano.”
For the last track, ‘Wind of Winter,’ Fiona sang into the piano. “It created an ethereal sound, almost like the piano singing with you. For a child to see that, it’s like animating the piano, like it’s another one of the singing group,” she says.
I Am a Little Boat is very much in sync with the developmental stage of this age-group. They are, says Fiona, perfect masters of mindfulness. “Just look at them with a toy. They examine it every way — look, touch, chew, smell, roll it. They love repeating an idea they like. They love to enjoy it and stay with it,” she says. Her album responds to that — the title track is a three-line lyric: ‘I am a little boat out on the sea/look at me/I’m in the sea’. “It’s one thought, suggestion, idea — the child sits with this and stays in the moment. Underneath is the music, with all its textures adding to the moment. With repeated listening, they hear different things and are drawn in different ways.”
How parents use the CD (there’s an illustrated songbook with lyrics written in a child’s hand) is wide-open — on long car journeys, at bedtime, or if they want to do an activity with the child. “It’s about free, imaginative play. In our current education system — even at pre-school — play can be quite teacher-led. Yet there’s loads of research on the importance of creativity, innovation and independent-thinking for our young people,” she says.
Fiona hands children the resource and lets them interpret it. A child might just lie there and look at the sky, or play with a little boat, or use it as background music while they draw a boat, sea or a fish.
For I Am a Little Boat, Fiona wanted a slow, easy pace, no time pressure. “These are five-minute songs. Every song doesn’t have to be just a minute-and-a-half long.”
She wanted children to absorb rich messages, like the ones in the second track, ‘Out of the Blue’: ‘Believe in you/trust your heart/out of the blue/good things will come true’.
“It’s about being positive and confident, about self-belief, which is nice to see from a very early age,” she says.
* Fiona Kelleher performs three free concerts, Lullabies of Winter, in Cork’s Graffiti Theatre on Sat, Dec 7 (2.30pm, 3.30pm, 4.30pm). I Am a Little Boat, available to buy at these performances, at www.fionakelleher.com, and at stockists, €18.
* 2012 US research found one-year-olds who took part in interactive music classes with parents smiled more, were better at communicating and easier to calm down, were less anxious about the unfamiliar or when things didn’t go as they liked.
* Michigan State University researchers found a very strong correlation between childhood engagement in creative arts and measurable success in later life. Children exposed to a wide variety of arts and crafts were more likely to create unique inventions, come up with ideas good enough to start a new company or publish thought-provoking papers on science and technology.
* Think creatively with open mind
* Observe, describe, analyse, interpret
* Express feelings with or without words
* Practice problem-solving skills
* Discover there’s more than one right answer and there are multiple points of view
* Collaborate with other children and with adults
* Meet cultures from around the world.
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