I am so glad you noticed this; I am delighted to have this opportunity to explain it to you. It isn’t just for fun, even though it really does feel great to move to music.
I am really going to show my age here – but that’s ok! I am proud to be a baby of the late 1960s – and moreover a baby brought up by much older parents (for the era) and in a fairly unchanging community (Cornwall, UK)
In my upbringing, I was taken occasionally to a play group in the next village along from mine and there were times when we did “music and movement”. And when I was old enough to go to kindergarten (2 years and 10 months), we did music and movement there. And when I moved up to primary school we still did music and movement.
The research and knowledge that now exists about the importance of music and movement wasn’t available during my childhood. But early years educators, community members and families of that era just understood how deeply music and movement are connected and how they are an essential tool for our youngest people to help them to grasp music, to literally embody what they are listening to, so that they can make their own sense and develop their own understanding of the music they are hearing.
In my years as a parent and a music educator, I have watched children and babies spontaneously respond physically to music. My anecdotal observations over three decades had already convinced me of the value of moving when listening to music – and the research completed by Dr Edwin E Gordon and his peers is a fantastic validation of something that most of us instinctively understand.
I believe that there is a fundamental drive to move the body in response to music.
In my Music Play with Trish classes, I ALWAYS move when I am singing or listening to music. I do this at home, too!
I only started doing it intentionally when I started studying Music Learning Theory (a fantastic side effect of living through the Pandemic!) and now I find it pretty challenging to stop myself from moving to music.
Movement is an important part of music education. Children should experience continuous fluid movement with flow and weight before they learn to focus on beat movement and before they experience movement focused on space and time
https://giml.org/mlt/applications/
Musicianship with Trish 