I am deeply honored that the American Library Association has recognized my latest CD, Jim Gill Sings Moving Rhymes for Modern Times, as a 2007 NotableChildren’s Recording, the organization’s highest honors for recordings.  I appreciate that librarians from all across the country took the time to listen to this recording, by a truly independent artist, and that librarians continue to appreciate my music play.  (This is the third CD of mine to receive this honor.)

My concept of music play begins with the understanding that young children are not simply tiny adults and therefore, of course, have different developmental abilities and needs than adults. 

Click here to listen! <

My music play is different than most music offered by children’s musicians because, at its creation, the music is meant as a context for a larger play experience.  Most often the songs are designed to create an opportunity for parents and children, or other caregivers and children, to play together.  Interactions in play between caregivers and children are, of course, the fuel of development.  I am honored when I learn, through emails from parents or conversations with preschool teachers or children’s librarians, that my music truly does encourage such playful interactions. 

A great deal of children’s music is currently being produced by former rock musicians who, for some good reasons, have received a lot of attention from commercial media.  They have improved the production quality of children’s music and the style of music they offer can be appealing to adults.  Unfortunately, though,  many of these musicians, instead of understanding and appreciating the specific developmental needs of their new audience of young children, create “children’s rock” for ‘tiny adults”.  Songs are crafted to blues, “indie” rock and even “punk rock” riffs with lyrics about  child-centered themes such as rainbows, sharing or dinosaurs.

 It is hard to see the harm in this.  Isn’t it, after all, just fun?

I believe the harm may be in teaching young children to be consumers of music rather than participants and producers of music.  The beauty, years ago, of Ella Jenkins’ recording of “Miss Mary Mack” was that children would turn off the recording and continue to sing the song.  Mothers, fathers and preschool teachers would join in the clapping and the motions with the children.  In my own music, I often create open-ended rhyming patterns to simple or familiar melodies to encourage children and adults to create their own verses and rhymes.  The best music play may take place after the CD has been turned off!

Instead of appreciating the specific developmental needs of young children, commercial media encourages parents to find music that they, themselves, find sufficiently “cool” or pleasing. The assumption is that music for young children is just the same “product” modified for a different demographic group.  Parents aren’t challenged to understand how young children’s music might serve a need beyond entertainment.   This attitude, in turn, can lead parents to convey a culture of music consumption and collecting to their children.  Young children, by nature, relate to music differently than adults do, but they can be taught to consume.  On the simplest level, the harm is that time spent consuming is time that children do not spend playing…..and creating.

Along with the rock music, some other very obvious trappings of rock consumption have even been exported to the world of children’s music.  Concert t-shirts, music videos and the branding of “celebrities” have been treated by commercial media as newsworthy “developments” in children’s music when they are, in fact, simply signs of more needless consumption. 

Young children are a unique audience with specific developmental needs.  They deserve music that seeks to serve those needs rather than products that are designed to exploit an “underdeveloped and unexplored market”.