Active music listening: Promoting music and movement in early childhood music education

This article’s premise is that listening can be an engaging and important way for children to interact with music, using movement and their entire bodies, leading to music learning. We present the concept of active music listening defined by different authors, as a strategy for working with music appreciation involving a completely active attitude of the listener – linking a cognitive process of interpretation with the fundamental use of movement to reflect musical aspects of a determined piece. In the first section, we propose that listening is an important part of music learning, examining Swanwick’s and Boal-Palheiros and Wuytack’s works, presenting active music listening as an appreciation mode that involves high levels of attention, intention and activity from the listener. In the section that follows, we introduce active music listening as a part of the music class, reporting Zagonel’s as well as Wuytack and Boal-Palheiros’ approaches, defining musical structures that can be activated with listening exercises by more than twenty ways of activation. We discuss our way of locating these exercises on a music lesson plan. The mentioned strategies are illustrated in four ideas of active music listening exercises directed to children, selected from our daily practices. Finally, we discuss the main concepts and practices presented, with concluding remarks and implications for early childhood music education.