Miss Friday's Room 101 - Kids' Music

I hate kids' music.

I know, I know.  A music teacher is not supposed to hate music.  But I do, and for a very good reason.  There is literally a metric shit-load of outstanding music out there.  Folk, rock, jazz, classical, you name the genre, and there is great music.  But kids music is all too frequently written for teaching purposes.  And it's written badly.  Really, really badly.

First as a point of comparison, let's look at a high quality traditional folk song:

Now to assist the casual observer, I marked up the song a little.  The boxes show examples of how the important words of each are placed on the beat.  Important words are also set with quarter notes which are twice as long as the eighth notes prevalent in the piece.

The unimportant words, and the unstressed syllables of polysyllabic words, are places off the beat.  I've highlighted a few of those with red circles.  These unimportant bits are always set with the short eighth notes.

Lastly, each line is comprised of full measures.  This makes the rhythm and meter simple to understand and read.  Learning this song is easy, as is teaching it.

Now let's turn to a song written specifically for kids.  For the sake of politeness, I've redacted the composer and lyricist.

Now instead of emphasizing the important words and syllables with longer notes, this song does the exact opposite.  Look at the examples in the circles.  The words "the" and "so" get the longer quarter notes.  As do the unstressed second syllables of "bongo" and "player."  Granted these quarter notes are in metrically weak upbeat positions, but the rhythmic accent overwhelms the note's position.  The result makes the song hard to sing.  The words you naturally want to lengthen and accent, you can't because the unimportant words are instead.

Particularly awful in this song is the treatment of the word "the."  In the places I've circled, it is accented, which is about half the time.  The other half of the time, "the" is treated as it normally should.  In those underlined spots, "the" is set with a short note in an metrically unaccented place.  The inconsistency adds further difficulty in performing this song.

The last example of poor writing is a purely visual one.  At the plus signs, the measures are incomplete.  The use of partial measures is supposed to highlight musical phases, making them easier to learn.  Okay, I can see that, but what about phrases that end in the middle of the line?  Again inconsistency.  Plus, a nightmare when trying to teach the concepts of meter and time signature.  You can't teach the rules and the logical design when your music breaks them.  I would never put this sheet music in front of my students.

From here on out, I won't teach them the song by rote either.  It is a piss-poor song setting.  There are plenty of other short, peppy songs which use syncopation properly.  And if I want to teach Latin music, I'll reach for the traditional songbooks on my shelf.  The ones with the well-constructed tunes that have passed the test of time.