Carousel specializes in publications for the classroom as well as musical instruments from around the world. Instruments which your students can actually play. Our main focus is on generating interest among your students: interest in sound; interest in making music; interest in where music comes from and how other people make and perform it. For instance, when a student plays a tambourine, where did these jingles come from? Did someone recently have a brainstorm to add them to a frame drum, or are they the descendants of an instrument which is over 5000 years old, called a sistrum? We see these instruments depicted in ancient Egyptian wall paintings. What your student holds in his hands is a descendant of an instrument that was sacred in the courts and temples of ancient Egypt The program which helps to generate this interest is World In Tune.

World In Tune Hands-on curriculum for K-12

This global music curriculum includes all materials for an interesting class excusion into World Music. It comes complete with a teacher' s handbook, laminated time-line charts and instruments from around the world. The first in this series, Music of the Ancient World, is now available. The instruments included in this program show a remarkable similarity to those played in ancient times.

Ancient peoples understood the principles of sound and how to make music. Music has a long history: before Beethoven, before Mozart, before Bach, before Palestrina, before Machaut, before Gregorian chant. And the interesting fact is, that the farther back we go, the more important music becomes in the life of the people, in society, government and education. In fact, in the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Sumer/Babylon, China, India and Greece, music was considered to be the microcosmos of the cosmos. Back then, Man lived in a Musical Garden of Eden. Studying music in these civilizations of long ago, we come across the integrative approach which we are looking for today.

A  Musical Garden of Eden

An area where most music teachers lack confidence is the music of the ancient civilizations. And why not, our music history courses have concentrated primarily on Western music of the last 300-400 years. With a heavy teaching schedule who has time to go on musical archeological "digs" and with only a few musical fragments, is it worth the effort? And yet music teachers are being asked to integrate music with ancient history lessons. One teacher, with a bewildered expression, told me she was asked to teach an ancient Egyptian song to her students!

Strangely enough, the farther back we go into the history of music, the more important music becomes. In medieval universities, the higher division of the seven liberal arts was the quadrivium (from Latin, the place where four ways meet), which included music, geometry, arithmetic and astronomy. A few years back many schools "chucked the music program", but when we go back to ancient China, we find that the minister of music was housed in the Royal Palace. In fact there is an interesting legend which comes to us from the China of 5000 years ago :The Emperor of China believed that his reign would be good only if he could find the sound which was correct. His first duty as new Emperor was to send his minister out in search of the yellow sound. When the minister found the sound, a set of panpipes was fashioned with that sound as the fundamental. The entire set of panpipes sounded what we call today a chromatic scale.

 The Greeks tell us that music was a key to the cosmos for the ancient civilizations. The Pythagorean mystery of "the music of the spheres" has puzzled scholars for over 2000 years. It. s no accident that this great mathematician of the "right triangle" also discovered the ratios of musical intervals. In the creation myths of India, from one sound comes all creation. In fact, in many of the myths of the past the gods create by sound. Is this so far from the Judeo- Christian belief that "In the Beginning was the Word" (vibration)?

The myths of all these cultures give music a central position, not only in relating music to the cosmos but as a means of developing a person. s character. We. ve moved quite a way from music as a core for education;  the minister of music is no longer in the Royal Palace. We. re no longer living in that Musical Garden of Eden which our ancestors once inhabited but we can still tell their story.

The Spirit of World In Tune