To bring the highest-quality music and movement experiences to your child—and children everywhere— and to involve the adults who love them in the magical process of development that only music can provide.

Our Basic Philosophic Principles

1. All children are musical.

2. All children can achieve basic music competence—the ability to sing in tune and move with accurate rhythm.

3. The participation and modeling of parents and caregivers—regardless of their musical ability—are essential to a child's musical growth.

4. Young children’s musical growth occurs best in a playful, musically rich, and developmentally appropriate setting.

The Music Together® Program:

For hundreds of thousands of families worldwide, Music Together is children and their grownups joyfully sharing songs, rhymes, movement, and instrument play, both in music class and in their daily lives. A pioneer in early childhood music and movement education, Music Together offers classes for children from birth through kindergarten, in which parents and caregivers actively participate.

All children are sounders and movers, and their natural aptitude for music blossoms in a sufficiently rich music environment. In fact, when given a supportive music environment, children learn to sing and dance as naturally as they learn to walk and talk.

How is this possible? Children learn differently than adults. They learn instinctively and constantly. They teach themselves through imitation and play, through being immersed in their environment, and through every interaction with adults and older children. The family-like setting of Music Together's mixed-age classes enables siblings to attend together, creating an ideal learning environment where infants, toddlers, and preschoolers can freely participate at their own levels.

Music Together® History:

Music Together was founded in 1987 by Kenneth K. Guilmartin in Princeton, New Jersey. In the 1980s, Ken was a working theatre composer and music educator who was drawn to the field of early childhood music education while working as an associate editor for his uncle’s music publishing business, Birch Tree Group. During this time, Ken observed that the music experiences of the children he knew and taught were usually limited to passive music listening; these children were growing up with little or no opportunity for live and playful music making. Subsequently, many sustained a delay in the development of their basic music skills, arriving at elementary school unable to sing in tune or move in a rhythmically accurate way.

Searching for a way to counteract this trend, Ken had the insight to apply what he learned from early childhood education experts to music education for the very young. In 1985, he founded the Center for Music and Young Children (CMYC) to conduct the early childhood music development research which later spawned the Music Together program. Interestingly, this research was funded by the Birch Tree Group using the royalties from the "Happy Birthday" song.

While attending a 1986 Edwin Gordon seminar on music learning in children, Ken met Lili Levinowitz, Ph.D., then director of the Children's Music Development Program at Temple University and an experienced researcher. Lili was a like-minded advocate for non-formal music experiences for the very young, and soon the two began to develop the unique, musically-rich curriculum that would become known as Music Together.

The first Music Together classes were offered to the public in 1987. Since then, Ken and Lili have researched and developed nine Music Together parent-child song collections, as well as additional curriculums such as Babies, Music Together In-school and Music Together Big Kids®. Both coauthors continue to teach Music Together classes, and they remain actively involved in training others to do this important and delightful work.

The Music Together program is offered in over more than 3,000 locations in over 40 countries. Through its parent-child, preschool, and outreach programs, both at home and abroad, Music Together is dedicated to offering the benefits and joys of music making to as many families as possible.