My post:
“ Dearest students I am very happy about the dialogue that took place around the Gordon 'method'.
I’ve highlighted the word 'method' because Edwin E. Gordon, who until  2010 came in Italy to teach every year, was jumping on the chair when someone was calling his work a 'method'. He said during a class I was translating for him: “ Every genial idea dies when it becomes a method”. And he was referring this sentence to people like Montessori, Dalcroze, etc.
John Dewey said in other words: “It may fairly be said, therefore, that any social arrangement that remains vitally social,or ritually shared, is educative to those who participate in it. Only when it becomes cast in a mold and runs in a routine way does it lose its educative power. (J. Dewey, Democracy and education  p. 6, Dover Pub.,  2004, Mineloa N.Y.)

Music Learning Theory has born and it develops trough scientific, empiric and observational research, and if the word “theory” leads people to imagine something closed and immovable, better would it be to call it “Music Learning Theory and Praxis”.

About the Slowness.
Absorption and learning are childhood gifts.
They are ‘secret’ gifts because for a long time the child doesn’t demonstrate what she learned - and this is paradoxically the sign that a deep learning process is taking place.
I could teach by rote to a very young child a sentence through imitation, repeating it thousands of times… On YouTube, for example, you can easily find some odd (in a sympathetic sense, I don’t want to offend anybody) examples that manage to teach the word ‘mama’ even to dogs and cats by imitation. Just imagine what a very young child could do!
We should think about why the human beings behave exactly in the opposite way to let their children learn the most important skill they need - the language.
We evidently have absorbed at a genetic level the behaviors that help our children to learn the language - not so much to teach, but rather, to communicate in an affective way through language, make pauses, listening to their spontaneous responses and receive them with a lot of favor, mirroring and contextualizing them in language.

My daughter is 5 years old, and speaks very quickly, but if we would ask to her to read something, she would remain still in front of the symbols of the language that she knows deeply, but that she had not yet associated to its significant signs. My son is 8 years old and is able to read, but the speed and the accuracy of his reading performance is really nothing compared to what he is able to accomplish in speaking.
Music is a complex language.
When you take your 3 year old child to a foreign language course once a week, suppose German, I don’t think that after 6 months you would expect that she would be able to read, write and even speak in that language. When, instead, you take her to a nursery rhyme or cute songs course in German, then you would have your performance at the end of the course.

I believe that in the educational field it is fundamental talk about purposes first, then methodologies, and it s VERY important to talk to the parents.
I don’t like to be ideological or dogmatic in saying that one educational approach is better then another. Some approaches are more adapt to obtain short-term results, while other approaches more effectively achieve long-term results.

Perhaps I will make you smile but I want to end this post telling to you how was going when, in the past, I went personally to preschools to present our educational projects.
Just when I was passing the entrance of the school I was literally run over with question such as: ‘When will you do the performance? Will you do it at the end of the scholar year or also at Christmas?’
My choice was not to answer immediately.
I preferred to make a brief introduction about our association, Music Learning Theory and then inform them that 'We don’t make any performance.'
An embarrassing silence moment always followed… and then: ‘Do your children make Italian and math performances ? Music is as important as those subjects, and at the age of your children, it would be a shame to focus our entire work to a short-term performance. Your children can reach much better results if, as Edwin E. Gordon said to me in 1999, I manage simply to BE music for them instead of teaching it.”

Andrea Apostoli

Click Here for video.

REPETITION
About repetition: a child who is seated on her high-chair  plays with the mother's keys. She shakes, bangs, and at last the keys flay away from her hands randomly. She will be enthusiastic about the noise of the keys on the floor, and even more if they will hit other objects on the way to the floor. As soon as the mother will place the keys back on his high chair he will repeat the action again and again. Piaget calls these actions circular reactions and they show how much repetition is a natural need of children to learn.
I have in my ears the little voices of children when after a song they say “Again!”.
I teach in Italy and they say “Ancora.” I teach in Germany and the say “Noch mals."
This is a need they have and - because nothing in the child behaviour is without a deep reason - is also something fundamental to the learning process.

VARIETY
For sure, children during their early childhood are also really attracted by variety.
They look or crawl and later walk around, always looking for something new and different.
Dr. Gordon says that “you don’t know what something is until you know what is not”. This is the principle of Discrimination learning. The recognition of differences is a prelude to knowledge.  And again looking to a very young child, a newborn for example, we see focus of her attention to new stimuli.They are not easily distracted. Rather, they refocus their attention.
The newborn body grows with milk; the newborn mind grows with significative experiences and stimuli that are perceived within the senses.
She seems to be getting to know it! She observes, touches, takes to the mouth, bangs against the floor or the table... then she seems to “meet” a new object by chance, and the cycle starts again - observation, touching, taking to the mouth, banging etc.

When we lead musical meetings (I really don’t like to call them “classes”) for very young children with parents we know that variety is also very important to maintain the attention on our singing. If I sing 3 o 4 songs, all in major/duple and with a similar tempo, I will see the children look for other interesting stimuli in the room. If we sing in different tonalities (modes) and meters their reaction will be really different in attention and focusing.
When I lead the special concerts addressed to very young children (0 -2) I follow exactly the same philosophy. We play real music for them but I keep it brief (often cutting long pieces in a musically significant way), and varied.  Variety is crucial to keep the attention of hundreds of babies and children. Sayng “to keep” I do not intend that they could “loose” their attention but just that they could focus it to something else (visual or tactile).
Instead of having them exploring the space around them, looking for “differences” to discriminate, we are changing the the music frequently to keep them listening. 

This video shows some of what I have in mind.

Thank you
Andrea Apostoli

This is a big mistake that consists in the underestimation of the huge absorption and learning possibilities of a child in her early years. The fact is that adults look at the idea of complexity from an adult point of view. For us, what is complex is complicated.

When we are exposed to a speech or a piece of music that is complex we approach it with the instinctual attitude to understand it. To understand means for us to be able know the meaning and, for example, to be able to explain to someone else what we’ve heard. In other words to keep it in our minds, ready for making comparisons and links, and for being a part of our active vocabulary.

Complexity = Richness

I instead believe that for a young child complexity is richness. Yes, only richness and opportunity. The force that pushes a child to be interested in complex objects or music is just curiosity. Understanding and comprehending requires thinking, with an analytic look (or listening) that works as a “filter” between us and the object. Absorption requires only openness and curiosity for something that is merely new. And for a child the whole world is new. This openness is a childhood gift.

The word ‘complex’ comes from the Latin complèxus, past of complector that means “comprehend” or “embrace.” The word is compound from com  (“together”) and plècto (“plot”), and it means a compound of different parts linked and dependent from each other.

When Gordon says that is important for very young children to listen to complex music, he intends that it should be a syntactic compound of different parts. That is generally true for music that is not written for commercial use. We know that the music played from the radio or television every day tends to be syntactically poorer. In the USA, the sociologists talk about a rapid, recent “dumbing down process” throughout media. 

A teen ager not interested in classical or jazz music, during the 60’s and 70’s could listen at the radio music from Frank Zappa, Genesis, Pink Floyd and many other musicians that could sell millions of disks with music that was richly challenging – rhythmically, melodically and harmonically. Turning on the radio or the television, today, means to listen to music that lacks that same type of rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic challenge – conforming mainly to standards that insure the labels will sell many CDs.

Children's Music Today

If we take a look of the music material produced for children the situation is not so better. Duple meter and major tonality are the king and the queen of a big percentage of songs the children listen to and sing in preschools and schools. The rhymes and the texts are complex and change at every ritornello, but the music is usually very poor.

Every time, during workshops, I ask the students to tell me their relationship with the music. I often hear: “I like everything,” meaning, for me, that it means nothing, or “I like the Italian singers,” meaning that they follow the texts and not the music when they listen. Typically, one or two out of every 25 tell another story. (And they smile while the tell it.) “I have to say thank you to my grandmother because when I was very young she always played the piano for me and listened to classical music with me. I am thankful to her today because I enjoy so much to listen to classical music.”

When we can listen to complex music during our childhood, it will sound not at all complicated when we become older. Through listening we develop our audiation that let us comprehend and so appreciate good music when we grow.

The same thing happens with reading. If we read to our children real books and not only childish fairy tails they will read with understanding, and appreciate complex books when older.

Enrich your children by filling their lives with music that is rich.

To conlude this (perhaps too long) post, I would like to say that brevity could be compared with the concept of “tactile learning” or “touch”.
During the first months of life, children attend to, and comprehend, things that they can manipulate. Children explore their own body and the small objects that can be grasped with their hands. They don't even look at the other objects.

I remember that many years ago during a class with 5 and 6 year olds, I used a big ball (more the 1 meter diameter). The class after that one was a newborn and toddler one and I forgot on the floor the ball. I was worried. I was imaging that 10- to 12-month-old children would go and put their hands on the ball and that they might fall down dangerously.

My great surprise was that the newborns did not give any attention to the ball. It was it in fact so big that for them that it became a part of the room - a part of the structure of the room - and not an object in the space.

I think that this type of "tactile listening" is the key to helping very young children to listen to art music.

Thank you
Andrea