From a rented studio to a 15,000-square-foot building, Music Together has grown into an internationally acclaimed music education program with parent-child classes, a preschool program, and thriving outreach initiatives. Join us as we celebrate some of the highlights of our twenty-year journey.

Twenty years ago this fall, my coauthor Lili Levinowitz and I offered the first Music Together classes to the public. The family materials would be unrecognizable today—just some photocopied handouts and a cassette tape with Lili singing the songs—but the essence of the program was there: a mixed-age curriculum featuring a rich variety of tonalities and meters and stressing the importance of parent and caregiver involvement in the child’s music-learning.

I’d been working on this vision for several years. In 1985, I founded the Center for Music and Young Children in Princeton, NJ, to research and develop early childhood music programs for Birch Tree Group, Ltd., publishers of the Suzuki Method®. My goal was to explore ways to support young children musically, even before they were ready for lessons.

As I traveled and met leading educators like Howard Gardner, Joseph Chilton Pierce, and Lilian Katz, I felt more and more convinced that, although all children are musical, their environments weren’t supporting their music development. Participatory forms of music-making were fast disappearing from our culture, and children were growing up in homes where parents passively consumed music rather than making it themselves. Lacking models for live music-making, children simply weren’t developing basic music skills such as singing in tune or moving in a rhythmically accurate way.

When I met Lili, she was a doctoral student of learning theorist Edwin Gordon and the director of the Children’s Music Development Program at Temple University. I hired her as a consultant, and together we began to develop the curriculum which would become known as Music Together®.

Over the years, we’ve worked here at the CMYC lab school to research and develop new song collections as well as preschool, babies, and “big kids” applications of the program. We’ve also developed a comprehensive training program to teach others to do this important and delightful work. Music Together teachers now serve over 1500 communities worldwide—something we couldn’t have imagined back in 1987. I’m proud and happy to have reached this milestone, especially in the company of such wonderful teachers and families. Come join us this semester as we celebrate twenty years of making Music Together!