Music has always been a part of my life since early childhood. Being blind, it is a stereotype that I would be musical [that’s another story]. I was one of the lucky people in this world to be musical and blind.

Originally I planned to do an audio series with interviews of pedagogues from the different methods. But that fell through so I am writing a text blog as part of my musings. In the following entries I will be talking about the four main methods of music education: The Suzuki method, The Kodaly Method, the Orff approach and the Dalcroze method. As it has been about 7 years since these posts were first published, I am updating them with additional links and references.

I hope this will give a general introduction to music education for the person who doesn’t know very much or wants to know something, or is trying to decide how best to educate their child. At the end I will talk about my personal philosophy that I have used when I have had piano students as it has facets of all the methods and some stuff about Simply Music.

There will be about 5 posts on this so stay tuned over the next week to read them all in sequence.

Meantime I want to share with yu where I got my knowledge of each method as this is important so you know that I am credible and not talking rubbish.

  • Bookss by Lois Choksy, The Kodaly Method I: Comprehensive Music Education, The Kodaly Method II: From Folksong to Masterwork, The Kodaly Context: creating an environment for Musical Learning
  • Choksy, Abramson, Gillespie and Woodward, Teaching Music in the 21st Century
  • sources on Suzuki method too numerous to name