Founded in 1987, Music Together® is an international, research-based music and movement program for infants, toddlers and their adult caregivers , which began as an educational project at the Center for Music and Young Children in Princeton, New Jersey.
Early childhood expert and composer, Mr. Kenneth Guilmartin is the founder of Music Together, and co-authored the program with Dr. Lili Levinowitz, one of this country’s leading researchers in early childhood music development. The program is based on the premise that all children are musical; that it is in fact as natural to be musical as it is to walk and to talk, that it is just as much of a birthright, and that all human beings have the same innate ability to learn music as they do to learn language and movement.

The four basic principles of Music Together are:

1) All children are musical.
2) Therefore all children can achieve Basic Music Competence. (Music Together defines Basic Music Competence as being able to sing in tune and to move in time to a beat.)
3) The participation and modeling of parents and caregivers, regardless of their musical ability, is essential to a child’s musical growth.
4) This growth is best achieved in a playful, developmentally appropriate, non-performance-oriented learning environment which is musically rich yet immediately accessible to the child’s (and the adult’s) participation.

Albert Einstein once said that “Experience is knowledge. Everything else is just information.” In Music Together, children and their adult care-givers are treated to a live, playful, interactive musical experience, singing, moving, chanting, dancing, playing instruments, thus being given first-hand knowledge of music.

Each child plugs into this rich musical environment and takes out of it what they are ready to learn, each in their own style, at their own level, and at their own pace. Our focus is on the learning process, participation and fun, not on performance.

South Coast Music Together began serving the Orange County community in the spring of 1999 with 3 classes and 11 families. Since then we have grown, and primarily through word of mouth have brought Music Together into the lives of well over 10,000 families. We continue to blossom and our expanding schedule of classes includes locations in Newport Beach, Irvine, and Palm Desert. It is our privilege and delight to bring the gift of music into the lives of children, and our satisfaction is greatened in seeing their adult caregivers rediscovering and nurturing their own innate musicality. Our mission at South Coast Music Together is to rejoice the hearts of our families through making music, to bring out the music that is already there inside each individual, and to spread this sense of harmony and joy throughout our community.

To learn more about Music Together, please visit the national website from our home page or enjoy reading these articles about early childhood music development:

Early Childhood Music Education in the New Millennium

by Ken Guilmartin

For more articles, visit the Music Together National Newsletter section of the national Music Together website.