, was born of love, instinct, and a lot of research. Founder and director Kenneth K. Guilmartin and his coauthor Lili Levinowitz, Ph.D., examined the field of music education and then reached beyond it into the realm of early childhood learning, because they realized that even the best song material they could discover or compose would miss the mark if not presented in ways children can receive and process meaningfully.
The fields of neuroscience, psychology, and early childhood learning all offered valuable insights into how the brain processes and organizes musical material, how children learn, and how the surrounding environment can support this learning. Guilmartin and Levinowitz distilled their findings into four basic principles, which remain the cornerstones of Music Together's philosophy today:
I. All children are musical.
II. All children can achieve basic music competence.
III. The participation and modeling of parents and caregivers, regardless of
their musical ability, is essential to a child's musical growth.
IV. This growth is best achieved in a playful, non-performance-oriented
learning environment which is musically rich, yet immediately
accessible to the child's—and the adult's—participation.