Simply Music

Simply Music is a music education institution licensing teachers at over 700 locations in twelve countries. Australian music educator Neil Moore founded it on the core belief that all humans are naturally musical. Simply Music offers programs for students from birth through old age, with the stated goal that "students acquire and retain music as a lifelong companion." Simply Music patterns its approach after primary language acquisition, where speaking comes first. In this it shares some philosophical ground with other developmental approaches like Kodály, Orff-Schulwerk, and the Suzuki Method.

Neil Moore began constructing the Simply Music method in the late 20th century while teaching piano to a young blind student. Since traditional music-reading would not serve this student, Moore designed a program based on his own childhood musical experiences. Instead of reading music, as a child Moore had naturally visualized patterns within the songs and on the keyboard. He explained these building blocks to this student, who learned to play piano himself and began teaching the songs to his four-year-old sister, who was also blind.

This spurred Moore to begin testing his ideas more widely, and he found this approach natural and successful for students of all ages and abilities. Other piano teachers began learning from Moore. When he could no longer personally train them all, Moore founded the Simply Music organization and developed a remote certification program that is currently available to teachers in twelve countries, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Later, Simply Music expanded to include early childhood music education, and also worked with Karen Nisenson to create Simply Music Gateway, an adaptive piano curriculum for children with special needs.

Simply Music's founding premise is similar to Shin'ichi Suzuki’s claim that any child can learn music. But Simply Music extends the concept, like researchers E. McPherson Gary E. McPherson and Graham F. Welch, who write that it is our "birthright" to "be able to communicate and interact musically with others." In the same degree, Simply Music declares musicality essential to human nature. Adherents identify many everyday activities as fundamentally musical because these activities thoughtlessly fall into patterns of rhythm and pitch. As examples they cite speaking, walking, and brushing teeth. Simply Music seeks both to draw on and to nurture this natural ability by distilling musical concepts into simple patterns.

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