ABSTRACT
Music has great power to draw responses from us. The ways in which we respond subjectively to music are enormously varied and changeable. Children respond as intensely to music as adults do and this responsiveness needs to be acknowledged and understood. Our responses are not all the same, however. Being clear about which are the subjective aspects of musical response enables teachers to differentiate for themselves and with children between subjective and objective ways of understanding music. Children’s individual responses can then be validated by the recognition that we may all have different reactions to the same piece of music.
