A SHORT AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF DR. KLÁRA KOKAS
compiled in the early 2000’s
Klára Kokas was born in Szany (Sopron County, Hungary) in 1929.
She received her degree in Choral Conducting and Music Education from the Liszt Ferenc Music Academy in 1950.
She completed her doctorate in psychology and pedagogy from Eötvös Lóránd University in 1970.
At Kodály’s personal request, she participated of founding and organising the music specialised classes in Szombathely, where she lived between 1954 and 1965. She was a teacher; she founded the music kindergarten; she led choirs in primary and high schools and at the teacher training college.
She organised therapy sessions for children abandoned by their parents in Budapest between 1965 and 1970.
She led the research programme of the first American Kodály Institute (Kodály Musical Training Institute) in Boston, MASS, USA for 3 year from 1970.
After returning to Hungary, she joined the faculty of the newly established Kodály Institute in Kecskemét , from where she retired in 1989 as an associate professor.
She took part in a school reform experiment organised by the Hungarian Academy of Science for 15 years where she led the complex aesthetic education experiment between 1973 and 1988.
After the Revolution of 1989, she was the one of the firsts to establish a foundation that was registered in 1990 under the name of Agape Music – Joy of Life Foundation.
She became more and more focused on groups requiring special attention. She led a music therapy programme for blind children in Budapest for 6 years between 1990 and 1996, then in 2003 she started classes for expectant mothers and mothers with small children, also started family music sessions with parents and grandparents. She also started organising through the foundation her ever so popular accredited teacher trainings.
She launched an unorthodox museum pedagogical experiment in 2006, named the “Shawl waving” concert. She started a collaboration with the “Smile Foundation” for children with cancer in 2007, where she held sessions for recovered children and their families. Then in 2008 along with healthy children, “Smile” children joined her first “house painting” camp in Zalaszabar.
In 2009, she continued her novel concerts, the “house painting” camp, working in her latest book. Also, she was working on her old dream, a thematic summery of her films when she passed away unexpectedly in her son’s home in Texas in February 2010.
She received five awards in Hungary, an international one, and one in Greece for her achievements in the field of music education and therapy. She held lectures, presentations, and courses in four languages in Hungary, numerous countries of Europe from Scandinavia through Italy to Greece, in Australia, Canada, USA and Iceland. Nature was her lifeblood; therefore, her passion was nature conservation. She enjoyed not only her breaks and relaxations but also her creative activities outdoors.
Her disciples, colleagues and admirers have completed the works she started and tirelessly have been carrying on the spirituality of Dr. Klára Kokas through sessions for children, accredited teacher trainings, courses at the Liszt Ferenc Music Academy. As of today there are a few dozens of Kokas Workshops in Hungary.
Five books, nearly a hundred publications, an oeuvre DVD ROM, forty films and their thematic summary try to represent all that Péter Nádas described as follows:
“The admiration of human personalities guides Klára Kokas in her teaching work. She helps unfolding, getting to know and strengthening the personality. She cultivates this complex process through music and dance, that unmistakable essence of being everybody owns since birth.
Klára Kokas is an educator in the most ancient sense of the word. She is a wizard, an ascetic, a saint who imparts not only her knowledge but also herself and her full, educated personality. The children, who she teaches to the freedom of motion and the love of music, probably catch a glimpse of this secret of hers. How a self-contained person can reach out to another self-contained person. How they educate each other, how their bodies and souls speak through Arts.
The deep and responsible knowledge of freedom flows through her writings.”
