Old Colony Music Together Teaches Music Like Language

Gwyneth Marini has been teaching music for more than 15 years, and now runs the Old Colony Music Together program in Norton.

She said she first started doing the program in East Bridgewater in 2004, and loved the methods of the class.  Music Together is a collective music class for young children first started in 1987 by Kenneth K. Guilmartin, a composer and musician certified in Dalcroze Eurhythmics.

“Music Together is based on the philosophy that all children are musical,” Marini said. “A big part of it is based on Dr. Edwin Gordon’s Music Learning Theory, which basically states children learn by doing.”

The program basically starts as early as possible and they learn with their parents.

“It’s just like learning a language, you start from birth,” Marini said. “They learn from their parents and in the class the parents are doing everything the kids are doing.”

Marini said she had been doing very similar work in her teaching field.

“My professor in college studied under Dr. Gordon and the co founder,” she said. “Everything I had been doing up to that point was the same philosophy.”

Marini said the program comes with a CD and a book of music for the children to start learning on, since they need to practice at home as well as in the classroom.

“You can’t learn music for just 45 minutes a week,” she said. “Having that CD and songbook makes a huge difference for them. All the music is based on the same work from Dr. Gordon.”

Marini said the music has some familiar early learning songs, like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, but many other songs in many different languages.

“It’s all different cultures, languages and tonalities,” she said. “It’s like languages, you don’t just talk to a kid in simple words they can understand, you talk to them in regular words and let them assimilate from there.”

Marini said the students learn the patters of the songs through a verbal association system called Solfeg, which takes the familiar “do-re-mi” syllables and applies each one a specific pitch.

“It’s almost like vocabulary words but for music,” she said. “We’re building up this vocabulary during this time.”

Marini said she is now planning on having a reunion with all of her former students. She said it’s been 10 years since she started and many of her students have gone on to continue their music education.

“My own son is 10 and he’s been doing this with me since he was born,” she said. “We’re still going to classes, but I hear from a lot of families as well. A dad recently commented on Facebook he thinks he boy’s love of music was due to him coming to class every week when he was young.”

Old Colony Music Together is located at 175 Mansfield Ave. and is open by appointment.