Beginning with the walking on the line and progressing to other natural expressions of movement, such as running, skipping, and galloping, the child begins to associate certain rhythmic figures with bodily movements. Through daily singing of songs, nursery rhymes an fingerplays, children begin to acquire a sense of pitch. The Montessori bell material affords the child the opportunity to hear musical sounds in isolation - to match, grade, and name them. Work with both the pentatonic and diatonic scale patterns gives exposure to different pitch relationships, which are the building blocks of melody. Children are introduced to the instruments of the orchestra, with their various tone qualities, and learn the names of the instruments and their respective sounds.
Children hear pieces with different gradations of volume, a quiet lullaby, a strong march.
As teachers introduce music, whether vocal or instrumental, its place and time of origin is given so children begin to relate music to history and geography. When the child moves into the Montessori Elementary level, all the above elements are continued in more detail, with the addition of notation. This notation material performs the same function in music that the movable alphabet does in language. Increasingly, music is allied to its cultural roots and is studied as an expression of ethnicity and as part of the fabric of a given culture at a particular time. The children study the heroes and heroines of music and make timelines of composers to discover how musical forms and styles have evolved through the ages.