Key Stage 2 music · Appreciating music

KS2 music from different traditions: a guide for parents

In Key Stage 2 children are taught to appreciate and understand a wide range of high-quality live and recorded music, including music from different traditions. Appreciating means listening carefully, describing what they hear with the right vocabulary, forming and explaining an opinion, and learning where the music comes from. It does not mean liking everything.

Music from different traditions, explained

The National Curriculum does not name any particular tradition. Schools choose, so one child might spend a term on West African drumming while another studies Indian classical music, Indonesian gamelan, Brazilian samba, Caribbean steel pans, Irish folk music or the blues and gospel traditions of the United States. Many schools pick traditions that connect to the children in the class or to places they are studying in geography or history, so your child’s experience will differ from a friend’s at another school.

Whatever the music, the skill being built is the same. Children listen more than once, notice details, and describe them using the interrelated dimensions of music: pitch (high and low), duration (long and short sounds and the steady beat), dynamics (loud and quiet), tempo (fast and slow), timbre (the character of a sound), texture (how many layers are playing) and structure (how the piece is organised). They also learn that traditions work in different ways. In Indian classical music, for example, a raga is a set of notes and melodic ideas for performers to explore, a tala is a repeating rhythmic cycle, and a drone often sounds underneath throughout. In many traditions music is learned by ear and passed from person to person, with little written down.

Children are also taught to perform, so listening often leads straight into doing. They might copy a call-and-response pattern on drums, learn a song in another language, or layer several short rhythms to build a group piece. Learning even a little of the music from the inside helps children understand why it sounds the way it does and gives them respect for the skill involved.

The aim is for children to review and evaluate. They are asked what they notice, what they feel, what they think the music is for (dancing, celebrating, worship, storytelling or working) and how it compares with something else they have heard. A good answer uses evidence from the music, not just ‘I liked it’ or ‘It was boring’. Children do not need to like every piece, but they do need to listen with an open mind and say why.

Words your child will hear

Tradition: A style of music and the habits, instruments and ideas that a community has passed on over time.
Call and response: One performer or group plays or sings a phrase and another answers it.
Texture: How many layers of sound are heard at once, such as a single melody or many parts together.
Timbre: The character of a sound, which tells you a drum from a flute even at the same pitch.
Rhythm cycle: A rhythm pattern with a set length that repeats, as in the tala of Indian classical music.
Drone: A note or notes held or repeated throughout a piece, often as a background.
Appraise: To describe, explain and judge a piece of music, using evidence from what you hear.

What the National Curriculum says

The programme of study for Key Stage 2 says:

Pupils should be taught to appreciate and understand a wide range of high-quality live and recorded music drawn from different traditions and from great composers and musicians
Aim: pupils perform, listen to, review and evaluate music across a range of historical periods, genres, styles and traditions, including the works of the great composers and musicians.

Objectives from the National Curriculum in England, © Crown copyright, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Try it: describing a piece of music you have never heard before

In class your child hears an energetic piece of drumming from a tradition the school is studying and is asked, ‘What did you notice, and what do you think the music is for?’ How could a strong answer be built?

Listen first without writing. Let the whole piece play once so the first reaction is a real one, not a rush to find the right word.
Listen again with a dimension in mind. Ask: is the tempo steady, and is it fast or slow? Is it loud all the way through? Are all the drums the same sound, or are there high and low ones? Is there one pattern or several at once?
Use the vocabulary to build sentences with evidence. ‘The tempo stays fast and steady, which makes it feel like dancing. One drum plays a pattern and the others answer it, which is call and response. Several different rhythms are layered together, so the texture is thick.’
Say what it makes you feel and why: ‘It made me want to move because the beat never slowed down, and it got louder towards the end, which built excitement.’
Compare. Ask how it differs from a piece heard earlier, such as a quiet slow song, and what connects the two.

A strong answer uses several musical words, backs each one up with something heard, and makes a comparison: ‘The tempo is fast and steady, there is call and response between the drums, and the layers build to a loud ending. It sounds like music for dancing or celebrating, which is very different from the quiet slow song we heard last week.’

Common mistakes and how to help

Treating ‘world music’ as one type of music

Music from outside Europe is often lumped together as if it were a single style, when it covers thousands of different traditions with different instruments, scales and purposes.

What helps: Name the specific tradition and the region it comes from whenever you can, and find it on a map. Ask your child what makes two pieces from different places different.

Thinking unfamiliar music is wrong or out of tune

Western ears are used to a particular set of notes and chords. Other traditions may use different scales or tunings, so the music can sound odd at first.

What helps: Say ‘different’, not ‘wrong’. Try describing what the music is doing instead of judging it, and listen again a few days later. Familiarity changes reactions quickly.

Equating appreciating with liking

Children (and adults) assume the point is to say they enjoyed something, so a piece they do not like gets a dismissive answer.

What helps: Praise the reasoning. ‘I did not enjoy it, but I can see the drummers were exactly in time and the pattern was hard’ is a better answer than a quick ‘I loved it’.

Believing that music has to be written down to be ‘proper’

School teaches staff notation, so children can come to think music without a score is less serious.

What helps: Point out that many great traditions are learned by listening and copying over many years, and that this takes a great deal of memory and skill. Notation is one tool, not the definition.

How to help at home

Follow your family’s connections. Is there a place, language or community that matters to your family? Ask relatives about songs and dances they grew up with and listen to recordings together. This is often the most meaningful route in.
Listen for one thing at a time. Play a short piece three times and give your child a different job each time: follow the beat, count the layers, then notice the loudest moment. Short focused listening teaches more than long background listening.
Join in with the beat. Pots, a wooden spoon and a cushion make a drum kit. Copy a rhythm back and forth, taking turns to lead and to answer. Call and response is a quick way to feel how a lot of traditional music works.
Look for live music. Community festivals, libraries and places of worship often hold free performances. Going to one together, with an adult, shows children that these traditions are living and played by real people.
Compare two versions. Choose a song and find two different versions, such as a folk tune sung unaccompanied and then with a band. Ask what changed and which version suits which occasion.