CHILDREN'S ABSORPTION OF MUSIC AND CAPACITY TO EXPRESS THEMSELVES IN THE VARIOUS ART FORMS:

 Published in a Kodály Seminar booklet in Kecskemét, 1984

 An examination of Kodály's contribution to the education of difficult children

INTRODUCTION

 Kodály’s ideas have spread throughout the various branches of musical education, both in Hungary and all over the world to various cultures.

His method of musical education has gained further fame from its success in developing overall musical abilities. The step-by-step continuity in the carefully built-up method he devised of developing an internal musical ear through singing has proved valid beyond its original musical context of Hungarian folksong when transferred to the folksongs of other peoples.

But strange to say, this renowned method of developing musical abilities, so far as we know, has been applied therapeutically only on rare occasions despite the success achieved by those who have experimented with its therapeutic potentials.

This unfortunate omission must I think be explained in terms of the social background behind the training of teachers. All over the world there are social pressures on education to produce visible results in a competitive sense, and music teachers to conform to those pressures, under which they themselves have grown up. Before they can rest content with the – for the most part - unspectacular work and modest results of “aid through music” the whole target-orientated system built into their training has to be changed. Both in group education and individual teaching of an instrument, teachers are accorded more direct recognition if they concentrate their efforts on success in productions, and so they understandably prefer dealing with children who are musically able, capable of concentration and easy to manage.

But Kodály said, let music belong to all. He himself devoted much care to establishing a musical realm for tone-deaf children deemed unsuitable for playing music, that they might, in his own telling phrase, all enter the little garden of music.

His remark to Márta Nemesszeghy remains an unforgettable warning to us all. Márta was the enthusiastic planner of primary schools specialized in singing and music and herself the founder headmistress of such a school in Kecskemét. At Kodály’s request she had admitted four or five tone-deaf children into every musical first grade so as to prove their ability to develop musically. Once she told Kodály she thought sufficient evidence had been gathered and that they could stop admitting tone-deaf pupils. The teacher, as we called him looked at her and enquired, “And what will happen to them then?”

The path to music must be opened, for music plays a valuable part in the mental development of children, for whom it provides a source of strength and a secure means of grasping the universe.

I.

 Self-expression is something children only achieve after a hard struggle that begins at an early age. In developing their abilities they receive little help from the adult world. The crowding and impersonality associated with group education tires children, who are narrowed by the exclusively intellect burden it places on them and worn out by the domination of their life space by noise.

All over the world it is being noticed that children find it increasingly difficult to find the sources of strength that can help them develop their innate abilities and their relationship to the community.

One of the hazards of a civilized, urbanized life space is that children’s exposure to nature becomes rarer and stunted. Meanwhile their perceptual refinements are blunted daily by the thoughtlessness and ignorance of adults. Children who never move beyond the environmental uniformity of rows and rows of closely spaced buildings and the noises they are accustomed to hear there are barred from full awareness of the multitude and variety, delicate nuances and imagination provoking beauties of natural phenomena. That natural background which supplies the preconditions for existence and growth is perceived by them only in outline: the sky is cloudy, it rains, the sun shines, the wind blows. But out on a stretch of open water the same children might discern countless experiences of the wind, ranging from a roaring storm to a mild breeze: winds steady and strong, lazy, intermittent gusts, a fearful storm, a balmy breeze, winds high and low, playful bursts or roaring gales. They would discern how the wind churned the colors in the movement of the water, on the oily smoothness of the big waves, on the delicate shades of watery texture, on the lustrous sprays of the tumbling crests, at hazy dawns and purple sunsets in crystal-clear starlight and beneath the shade of sullen clouds, in soft rain and under flashes of lightning.

They could perceive the wind as a handy helpmate or an angry foe, as a sensitive friend or an indifferent stranger. They could wonder at its persistent strength, assurance and playful, fickle incalculability. They could marvel at the ease of the air currents fleeting from various directions on the mosaics of the water's surface and at their strength perceived in the steady movement of the clouds.

The clouds, in the views they offer, in the variety in their levels of distance, the stimulation in their breaks and joins, the beauty of their imagination-inspiring changes of form and color, the security of their internal laws and the variety of their individual shapes, provide hope-giving footholds in life.

The perception of delicate distinctions offers important guidance in the development of the child’s delicate organism. In sounds too, nature provides an inexhaustible plentitude of nuances. The reception of those delicate, varied combinations of oscillations provides a veritable therapy for the hearing, guards against bluntness and serves to develop the child’s auditory sensitivity and ability to perceive and create music.

Just as plant life creates itself out of the lights and shades of its environment, so children create themselves out of the beauties and truths they discover. That is why Kodály declared that children should receive intellectual nourishment from the very beginning of their development from the lasting values of the arts, and within them, from the intellectual tradition of their own people.

The traditions of folk music and poetry are the joint creations of generations who have lived close to nature, which explains the profound relation to nature to be found in the finest folksongs both in their texts, in the close internal relationships between words and melodies, and in the pure laws that govern their colors and varieties. 

II. 

Through the universal idiom of music children receive important information about themselves, the world in which they are rooted, and the universal perspectives to which they can pass over their own values in the course of their lives.

If children’s lives are to be productive and beautiful, they require above all else that adults should show confidence that their individual abilities provide them with a worthy gift they can present to their community. That gift is contained in the way their own values are developed and presented. Parents and educators alike must assist in this development and create opportunities for it to be presented.

In our experience, children are happy to display what they can do so long as there is an atmosphere of confidence and they can count on a predictable reception. In our classes we have often lived through great moments in which significant and genuine manifestations have been displayed, and from these both parents and teachers were able to discover new aspects of the children. Free improvisations in movement could become a means for imparting a message children could have found no other means to transmit.

Compositions in movement, created individually with the help of music, may also resolve paralyzing tensions and so have a therapeutic effect. Both healthy and handicapped children bear concealed grieves and tensions within themselves and these wounds are scarcely ever expressible in words. In most cases it is a matter of their emotions, i.e. themselves. Music, as a true art releases psychological resources that allow the deep-down obstacles to be overcome. When those obstacles have been removed, the child is freed from painful tensions.

The advantage of free inventive movement is that it is easy to elicit and stems from its very nature, without the intervention of conscious learning. The movements learned in connection with music on the other hand (dances and also the handling of instruments), call for extended and concentrated training before they can become adequate means of a child to express himself. Consequently many children abandon the struggle at various phases of such training having exhausted their endurance and physical strength or succumbed to the pressures of circumstances, before they have been able to sample the liberating joy of expressing themselves through active music-making.

If children discover the joy of expressing themselves through free movement, the special, individual element in their display brings real enjoyment to those around them as every child possesses a specific realm governed by specific laws, a specific emotional and intellectual apparatus, system of reactions, set of demands and capacity for expression. It is only natural that every child’s demand for music and the idiom of movement should be specific, too.

For years I have been observing my pupils’ individual preferences in terms of music. Of course, they can only choose between styles with which they are already familiar, but as is the case in selecting pieces of instrumental music, we do not follow any chronological succession and our children are familiar with quite a wide musical range from the early Renaissance to contemporary compositions and the folk music of various continents. (In singing we follow the concept of Kodály and use Hungarian folksongs, principally those contained in the tonal pentatonic realm, without semitones, and employing archaic modalities.)

In selecting the music, a part is also played by the mood of the children. On some days they are better suited for Vivaldi, on others for Stravinsky, but in most cases their individuality is expressed clearly too. Edda was receptive to Bartók, Veronika created her loveliest movement compositions to the music of Handel, Beethoven made Tomi ecstatic, Márta drew the most out of pieces by Kurtág, Anikó could relax best to Schubert, while Orsi adored Bach (because as she put it “His brilliance always contains truth and never falsehood.”), Bulcsu was drawn out of an easy chair after the exhaustion of a day at school by the rhythms of the Egyptian drum. Évi preferred animated, lively rhythmical music, while Kriszti became absorbed by slow tempos. Döme enthused over pieces suitable for clowning to as he liked to make his audience laugh with the splendid grimaces of his plump cheeks. The bright but unmanageable Tamás was drawn out of his long period of passiveness by the “Red Rose”, a beautiful, elaborate Transylvanian folksong. Even if he was on the far-off wall bars isolating himself voluntarily, he would sing all the verses along with us at the top of his voice. Two years after the family moved away, he came to visit us, now a twelve-year-old, and asked for the “Red Rose”.

Attentive parents are pleased to see that their children show individuality, but teachers are usually dealing with children they scarcely know, and dealing with them in large groups too. They are scared by a requirement that they should fall into line with children’s individual needs. Although individual tuition is given for instruments, but the pressures of the curriculum leave them little energy for responding to a child’s requests or even listening to them. To this I ascribe the fact that the therapeutic use of their classes has been discovered far sooner than teachers have recognized their overall educational value.

But the number of “problem children” in kindergartens and schools has grown so rapidly in recent years that every teacher is faced with specific educational problems day by day. It has been discovered that most children recommended for enrolment in remedial classes and appearing before educational advisory boards or for psychiatric treatment are not inherently handicapped from birth but disturbed by their environment.

Mistakes in education damage a child’s self-esteem, narrowing his range of expression and preventing him from finding his mental footing.

How can such a child be cured? The cure for dyslexia may not be more intense reading practice but a return to the forms of acting out by movement where the child still commands ease and assurance. He may open up and relax if offered some form of free creation. It will be easier for an adult to help a child with his problems once the adult has been enraptured and refreshed by things the child has created before his eyes.

We gain a new source of strength by looking into the realm of the child. It taps new resources and encourages further discovery of the plentitude of their emotional realm, and so adults revive through the unfolding of children’s emotions under the influence of forceful artistic experiments, which also help us to identify hidden artistic values to which only children know the way. 

III.

In our programme the key to the manifestation of children is representation, which they themselves call transformation. For this game we usually employ Kodály’s “Songs of Little Men” – “Fifty Nursery Songs”. These songs we are very fond of, and since we have no prior rules for the game, we build them up together with the children. Various openings can be provided by the words of the songs. Let us take an example: 

There’s shade sitting on the village hill

On the leaves of the seven poplars

Between the hills sings a nightingale,

In the vale sleeps the little village.

(Sándor Weöres) 

In the middle of the ring, the first child evokes a thatched cottage, a poplar, a green hill, a bird’s nest, or anything else he feels like representing. He himself selects the subject and of course the movements he makes as well. We never correct his representation, nor do we criticize it; instead we wish to join onto his concept with the loveliest possible individual variants. After the song has been sung again any other representation may follow. While singing we walk around the village, and to make the village grow those in it can choose new persons. Those joining in may latch onto one of the existing representations (for instance, they may turn into a feather or a bird’s egg for the nest, a jasmine bush or a pole well for the house or a rasping leaf, a thick root or a watering cloud for the poplar).

Or they may choose to add a brand new idea. If Marci, for example, turns into a lion, it is up to us to transfer the village to India or Africa, and the game expands further with Indian animals or African grass huts. The number of variants is endless.

The unity of the game is ensured by the permanent framework:

 l. There is the song, which is like a theme in a rondo in being repeated always in the same form.

2. There is the circle, with which we define the space.

The over-mobile ones are calmed down by the recurrence of the song. The sounds of singing grow out of silence, and that is how the children like it to be. Communal singing calls for a different kind of attention from dramatization, and the periodic alternation of the two provides a fortunate combination. The circle is an ancient way of turning people towards one another, uniting them and bringing them together.

The therapeutic value of inventing motions lies in the fact that the children’s imagination coupled with the physical experience of reality in representation transports them into the reality of another being or phenomenon, leaving behind the momentary burden of their own reality and perhaps oppressive tension. If the experience of catharsis in the transformation and the joy of relaxation leave a lasting memory, those in need of it will return to it as a healing source.

The transformations the children create are mostly linked to nature: animals, birds, insects, trees, plants, brooks, lakes, the sun, clouds and stars. They only find relief in a transformation they have created in their own imagination out of an individual composition of movements, doing it themselves or with chosen partners. If one ensures them free choice and appreciation for their individual ideas, they soon abandon the schemes learnt from adults and begin expressing their own selves.

Of equal importance to the structure of the game are the security of the supporting elements (children require traditions, repetition, and the safe handholds of a permanent form) and the unrestricted freedom for imagination in the transformations (into which they can insert their own images and internal motifs, without the restrictions, conceptual obligations and critical revision of others).

It is of great significance that the enchantment of transformations brings the members of the community closer together. The forms of connection are reinforced if the walls, windows, doors, thresholds, reed roof, chimney and stork's nest of the house touch, in the roots, trunk branches, boughs and leaves, hollows and bird's nests of the tree are linked, and if the water, stones and pebbles, fish, wild duck, reeds, reed-grass and water lilies of the lake indicate their togetherness with links of movement.

The activities of these ensembles of adults and children are particularly suitable for supplementing their joint creations with experiences in a specifically created closeness of sound. Above the heads of the children who huddle in the little sheltered hollow beneath the giant tree, which by the end of the game has grown into one, the arch of touching human arms guards and enriches the ringing of soft voices. Above the water castle in the reeds, the densely waving hands shape the mist in which the ringing song sounds out of a fairy tale. The reed roof of the house is sometimes covered by an imaginary thick blanket of snow through which the voice filters only as if from a distance, and so on and so forth.

The communal joys of transformations also pave the way for displays by individual children. Those full of inhibitions, who secluded themselves in our community for several months, would creep into the resounding water castle to be transformed into goldfish or the youngest son of the Frog King.

Strange as it may sound, the paucity of experience of nature often mentioned in connection with Budapest children does not necessarily seem to have narrowed down the scope of their dramatizations. We have witnessed beautiful presentations of moonlight and stars by children who have never been out of doors at night, and reed and water variants from some whose experiences of water have never gone beyond a noisy, overcrowded Budapest swimming pool. Children’s imaginations seem to soar to greater heights, reach down to greater depths and spread over a wider area than is covered by their daily experiences of reality.

But in creating sound compositions that start out from an imitation of the sounds of nature there are then striking differences between what children from outlying farms will produce and what Budapest children will. The pupils at the country school in Orgovány-Kargalapuszta walk or cycle several kilometers a day to reach the school they enjoy so much. The realm of their daily sound experiences is so abundant, and finely differentiated that if led by their teacher, Mrs. István Tóth, they can arrange uniquely beautiful joint compositions of sound from the sounds of the birds, animals, trees and other natural phenomena among which they live.

This specific offshoot of our complex aesthetic programme has now been nourishing our experiment with its singular beauties for seven years. These children, who live close to nature and to their leader, incorporate those beauties into their school programme on the basis of their joint aesthetic experiences. 

IV.

THREE PORTRAITS 

Tamás

Even his kindergarten teachers could scarcely tolerate Tamás, with the single exception of Miss Vera, whose excellent sense of empathy allowed her to love him very much. This frail, pale, puny little boy with bad deportment inspired antipathy and dread in school. In a single class he became involved before my very eyes in eight situations of conflict that ended in tears. I wrote to his mother, and invited Tamás to come to our musical group.

For two years we accepted his eccentricities, extraordinary excitability and incalculable aggressiveness with patience. But we were dazzled by the flashes of talent he showed. I remember being amazed particularly by his memory, as I had never noticed him listening attentively. He would keep crawling under pieces of furniture, climbing on the window-sill, swinging on the wall bars and getting up to mischief behind the vaulting horse. When did he learn the songs? For he knew them all far sooner than anybody else.

In the takes of our first video programme one can only marvel at his absorbed movement composition to old-style Hungarian folksongs. He follows the turns and ornamentations of the parlando-rubato melody with his fingers, arms and trunk and the movements of his lean knees. His movements are jerky, as if he were fettered to one spot; his lean little body wrestles to display what he wants to express. Later he modeled the experience of the song in clay, working on it for hours in obsessed silence.

Even seeing the film for the hundredth time I am unable to resist tears. The text of the song runs like this: 

“For my father, for my mother, what is there I wouldn’t do

I’d scoop the froth off the sea with a spoon

I’d gather pearls from the ocean deep

For my father, for my mother I’d tie a spray of pearls.” 

Tamás had never seen the sea, nor even a lake. He lives in a grey, multi-storey block of flats in one of the capital’s noisiest streets. His father abandoned him when he was a baby and has never been to see him since. Once (and this scene has been immortalized in our television film) he modeled two splendid wolves, a big one and a small one. He told us that the big one was the strongest in the pack. He could howl wonderfully and everyone was afraid of him. The small wolf always followed the big one, which was his father, he said. The two of them together were wonderfully strong.

Once we made recordings on video tape in Veszprém, in a lovely park with shrubs. Tamás hid under a laburnum bush and played at being in a cave. He kept frightening the other children with his wild sorties. His matted hair stuck to his forehead, and in his agitation he broke live branches off the lovely shrub. He turned a deaf ear to the gardener's warning and kept running in and out of his cave, letting himself go completely. I was called away from the recorder to take him to task. The children poured out their complaints one interrupting the other.

Breaking boughs off a live shrub, was he? Perhaps I should send Tamás home. But then I took his two hands in silence, until the veins in his lean neck stopped wildly pulsing. Then we lay on our backs, sticking our heads under the shrub, and conducted a whispered conversation with the laburnum: what long roots it has and how much it must work to provide sufficient food for all its boughs. And what about the broken boughs? It had worked for them in vain. They were destroyed, that’s the end of them. We touched the leaves with the tips of our noses, swept over the flowers with our eyelashes, and caressed the trunk with our fingers. We appeased it. Will it outgrow it? Or will it always remember its broken boughs even after it has grown a hundred new ones? We walked slowly back to the recording, and put a nightingale song on the tape recorder. Tamás followed every vibration of the bird’s song with his fingers, his eyes tightly closed. His absorbed attention was rapture itself. He turned his face towards the sky, received it within himself and moved with it. That is how he later danced to the last movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony too, with eyes closed and face turned to the sky, his legs stiff as if held down by the ground.

Tamás’ family has moved some distance away, but he still comes to see us sometimes. He has grown into a big boy now. His arrival always counts as a special occasion. The children run to receive him. He asks for clay for modeling, he asks for the folksong “Red Rose”, he sings, and tells story after story. We love him.

Zsolt

Zsolt does not resemble Tamás at all. He is tall, strong and sturdy. In his games he wrestles wildly with dragons and fierce Red Indians. Of course he defeats them, but when they ask for mercy, he pardons them.

At first I was concerned for the little ones in case Zsolt should tread on one of the little hands (because little hands can be anywhere with us: in dances and presentations anyone can get into quite unexpected positions). But he did not collide with anyone, although his boundless energy left us panting. When he set a game off, he would not leave off until he was out of breath. He placed foxes in our favorite fairy-tale wood, loads of foxes. Every child turned into a fox. Galloping foxes ran riot all over the room, and Zsolt the leader of the foxes stampeded them into adventurous scenes, with beads of perspiration on his forehead. It took five of us to wipe the excited foxes dry, and they only returned to being quiet after the end of the second calming farewell song.

But Zsolt would often become immersed in a passive sullenness. One could see he had something on his mind which he could not express. All times like that he did not like dancing and considered it a ridiculous childish thing to do. He eyed the dances others did, particularly the fine movements of his little sister with utter contempt. His drawings would be restricted to penciled sketches, and the clay never took a shape to his liking under his hands.

On one of his desperate days he deliberately offended me. We were just forming ourselves into records: gramophone records great and small were rolling about and calling the name of music on them. Suddenly Zsolt jumped up, pushed the little ones aside with dark face and shouted “W.C.” There was a paralyzed silence; the children gazed at me. “The only ones who say nasty things are the ones who don’t know anything lovely” - I said softly. Zsolt was beside himself and bellowed out: “I don’t care. I’m not interested. I only know about nasty things, so there!” “If that’s the case today, ask one of the others for a lovely idea. Next time you can give back something lovely of your own” - I said meekly, because I was very sad. By that time I was already very fond of Zsolt. Zsolt would not ask for lovely ideas from any of the others and retired grumbling into his solitary corner. Our game had been spoilt, so we left off and asked for music by way of consolation.

Zsolt sang the farewell songs huddled up to his mother’s shoulder. He asked for his own favorite song as well, so we sang it for him. I smiled at him and we were reconciled. He has never offended me since. Slowly he tamed down to us. Sometimes he brought us drawings and made us up Red Indian stories. He did the drawings in school, where he was terribly bored. His teacher did not mind welcoming everything that kept the child occupied, since Zsolt’s mere presence exhausted him completely. He could find no words to express his complaints about Zsolt’s behavior. At first he tried to head him off onto a remedial class, saying the child was unable to listen attentively or keep silent, and so distracted the attention of the other children. But Zsolt was a brainy boy, quick on the uptake and extremely teachable. Of course he did not fit into the traditional educational order as he was far quicker at picking things up compared with the average speed of learning in his class. What should he do with his superfluous energies? He hated to sit around doing nothing.

One day he was sitting among us in a mood of real weariness with the world. Then he was given some African music which was to his liking and started a wild war-dance. Draw swords! Guns and cannon and arrows! He organized battles with warships, submarines and planes in quick succession, carrying whomever he could with sweat; they kept shooting and falling, rather than dancing. In their great excitement they forgot about silence. (It is a rule with us that every scene must be dramatized only with silent gestures as every single sound of the music to which they do it has its true value.) There were battle cries and shouts. But the quieter children in the group became bored with the succession of war scenes, and some children asked for something different, with a quiet insistence. We took a vote: who wants war music and who wants some other theme? Zsolt was voted down; even most of his fellow-warriors opted for new themes. We became immersed in a wonderful story about Veronika, with green vines tangling in the jungle trees and nimble lizards running in the dark foliage.

Zsolt was furious. He went out, put on his clothes and was standing in his winter coat and boots behind the glass door. Sometimes he would peep in through a split in the curtain, then he turned his back on us. When his beloved Miss Emmi called to him he came back and sat down in his coat, cap and boots. We had already sung the farewell songs and were preparing to go home. Suddenly Zsolt said “Miss Klári, I’ve written a poem. It’s a rotten poem; it’s no good at all.” “Whisper it to your sister, she’ll tell us.” Petra anxiously held out her ear, and Zsolt whispered it. Petra’s face brightened as if lighted up by a sunbeam. She smiled encouragingly. “But it’s a really beautiful poem!” Zsolt’s blue eyes sparkled, he unzipped his coat, bent forward and began to recite:

“Oh life, oh life, stay with me while I’m alive.

Just so long, just so long, please. Just so long, just so long, please.

Because life is beautiful to me, so stay with me just so long, please!” 

Everyone stopped their bustling preparations and looked at Zsolt. It was as if we were seeing him for the first time. There was a stunned silence. I was sitting on the ground struck by the light of the flame from the burning bush and words failed me. Zsolt sensed our admiration, sprang up, threw off his coat, boots and cap, and started to speak. His words tumbled out one after the other, pushing and blocking each other. “I wrote it during the maths class.” “You wrote it?” “No, I only made it up in my head. First I pictured it on the piano. I heard how it would sound on the piano.” They do not even have a piano.

He ran to the upright piano and looking them over carefully, showed what deep notes he had imagined for his poem. He improvised with many soft notes in deep absorption. And he kept explaining. He told us how he heard notes in the maths lesson: “I don’t have to pay attention anyway, I know it already.” “Why do you hear your poem precisely on the piano?” “That’s what I like most. I’d like to learn the piano. But we don’t have one.”

Finally he took his farewell by saying, “I’ll write one tomorrow, too. Every day.” And kissed me solemnly.

On Tuesday he said his new poems into my little tape recorder in secret solitude. Even I was not allowed to hear it. I would have to listen to it alone in the evening. Here are the poems:

Pitch

The city’s black, the street’s black.

The cars dash along, and their smoke’s not grey but black.

In the houses the radio shouts and the people are grimy:

They wear black.

Birds

Oh, the birds up there in the sky, how finely they fly!

Oh, if I had wings too I’d fly up into the sky, far away,

and take down the sun, the sun and the moon.

I wish that could happen!

Clouds

The clouds sail along up in the sky.

Let them sail, I, Zsolt, want them to. I, Zsolt, want them to,

and anyway I’m preparing to be a poet.

The Wanderer

I see a ski in the mountains.

Not even a ski, but a man with a rucksack on his back.

I’m a wanderer too, but I don’t have rucksack, just a carrier bag.

At the end he added, “I like Miss Klári better than all my friends. I say that, me, Zsolt.” Then the inspired confession is followed by uproarious laughter: “Magilla gorilla”.

Edda

Edda lives in a harmonious family; her parents love each other and have built their lives around their two children. But the little girl’s upbringing often gave rise to arguments. Her father said her mother gave the child too much of her own way. She was allowed to decide for herself in the majority of daily situations: about eating, dress, study, and entertainment. The mother had grown up in a boarding-school, away from a family environment, and she said she would like to save her children from the suffering of never-ending restrictions and adult guidance.

Edda entered the kindergarten at the age of four and the event marked the beginning of a grave ordeal for the kindergarten teachers. The little girl would not conform to anything in the community order, and would tolerate no restrictions. She scribbled all over the wall of the room and just laughed when she was told off, because at home she could draw wherever she liked. Her meals and after-lunch nap were always a struggle. During the compulsory group activities she would turn her back. Sometimes she would even walk out of the room or start playing. Her behavior day by day consumed the energies and patience of her teachers and nurses.

When Edda was five, her kindergarten teacher Auntie Zsuzsa brought her over with eight other children to our music group. The nine-member band soon filled the whole group’s life with music, singing, melody and dance improvisations. Edda found a leading role. She was ingenious, active and enthusiastic, and adapted herself more and more to the other members of the group.

Edda’s first school year started disastrously. Her mother listened with perplexed alarm to the flood of the teacher’s complaints. She was described as an inattentive child, unsuited to community life and completely indifferent to her studies. Edda was suffering in school. She could not understand why she was being scolded and punished. She received the reproofs with a heroic pretence of indifference, and only tried to ease her tensions at home by crying. Later she told me she had talked a lot in school at first. Her teacher had silenced her remarks comments and questions with strict telling offs. She had to learn to keep what she had to say to herself and to put up her hand if she wished to speak. She made great efforts to do so. Time and again she put up her hand, but in most cases the teacher questioned someone else. Edda obviously lacked the persistent spirit of children who can break through every obstacle. She labeled her unsuccessful attempts as final and wrapped herself up in indifference. From that time on she regarded her school work as a grim duty and would only go to school under pressure. She concealed her heart, zeal, creative activity, ideas and desires so successfully that her teachers never learnt of them at all.

Now Edda is a clever girl, and she finds learning easy. She is very good at sports, and her results at competitions have won her a good reputation. She is well thought of by her class-mates too. Later she told me how careful she is not to say a word at school about music or her experiences in studying music. “I never tell them if I play the violin or go to a concert. Nobody knows about it when I play music with Miss Klári.” “But why, Edda?” “They’d laugh at me. They’d make fun of me. The people there don’t like music.”

Edda attended our classes sporadically. She would not even undertake the regular commitment of two afternoons a week. If she happened to be absorbed in a nice game at home, she would never leave off for our sake. She was often passive in the classes, munching a roll or lolling in an armchair chewing gum. She mostly took part in our singing, because she was fond of the communal farewell song. At that point she would join us on the carpet and sing wholeheartedly, leaning against one of us. She ordered her favorite songs one after the other, and we sang them as she asked for them. (This is no exceptional privilege. In the intimate moments of the farewell singing, everyone asks for their favorite songs.)

She only composed dance improvisations to music she was really fond of, but then she did so with real inspiration, often producing several variations in succession. She mainly chose her partners from her old friends from kindergarten, most often Krisztina. She indicated with the sensitivity of the finest seismograph if our classes were attended by an indifferent audience or by people with an objectively critical eye. At our performance at the Kecskemét boarding school, for instance, she would not dance a single step. After she had taken a thorough look with her big blue eyes at those present, she withdrew into passive silence.

Edda never started dancing out of consideration for me or someone else. She paid no attention to the little ones who awkwardly tottered around us. She did not teach and she did not help. To her music meant a means of self-expression to which she gave herself whenever she felt the need for manifestation and could be certain of an emotional reception.

By the end of the first year Edda spent with us we made our first videotape recording it the SZÁMOK studio, but she scarcely appears in the pictures. She could not tolerate the airless heat of the studio and the exertion of the recording. She drank raspberry juice and kept running about outside, not even returning to us. Next years she joined us on a cooler day during one of our recordings. Together with Krisztina and Emőke she did enchanting movement compositions to the third movement of Stravinsky’s Trois piéces pour clarinet seul. In one of the compositions they chased some miraculous bird to the music - and the bird was Edda.

We have also preserved one of the solos she danced, with a picture-book in hand, to an excerpt from Mozart’s Concert Rondo in D major. She had found the Mickey Mouse book somewhere outside and she did not bother to put it down. She kept on reading it as she danced to Mozart. She turned the pages in time to the music, and at the end of the theme she lay down with a soft, graceful movement, leaning her head on the book.

The following autumn, on the first day of our videotape recordings in Szombathely, Edda kept walking about outside, watching the operators at the cutting machine and munching an apple. But she would not dance. On Sunday we made an excursion to Velem. We were playing out of doors, and baking apples on spits over the fire. Every detail of baking apples was an exciting novelty - laying the fire, carving the spits and the baking of the apples all brought warm experiences.

The following morning Edda turned to me in the studio: “I’d like to perform the apple”, she said. She was squatting with crossed legs, her head bent in silent introversion and deep absorption. Then she asked, “Somebody make sounds like an apple when it’s baking.” The children did so enthusiastically and they all composed their own sound poems, with their lips and tongues, in the wake of their memories of baking apples. Edda improvised movements to each of them. She remained in the same crossed-legged position throughout, but her arms, trunk, head, features and fingers followed the volume of the sounds, the dynamic changes, ascents and descents, tonal colors and motivic relationships with engaging variety. She was sitting in the same position for nearly half an hour, even when at times turning aside, with slightly bent shoulders and bending head. By her position she rendered the apple’s roundness, and by the variations of her movements she followed the changes in sounds. Her transfiguration was intimate and to the point. She personified the baking apple, adding all the characteristics that to her were important.

At the same time she attentively adapted herself to the sound compositions her friends were making. This adaptation at times rose to the level of common creation. Edda did not look at the child who made the sound. She kept her eyes to the front without turning her head, perhaps because the permanency of the position was important in the process of transformation into an apple. There was perfect contact between the transmitter and the receiver of sound: Edda intercepted the improvised sounds and responded to them immediately with her movements. The timing of her spontaneous responses must have been the outcome of an unbelievable auditory attention and a perfect concentration.

The alignment in these duets was wondrous and we all watched spellbound. In the personification we lived through the drama of the personified apple, in various moments of its transformation.

The apples baking in the wood comprised a complex experience. We sensed the colors, forms, sounds, scents, radiations and tastes of the live fire and the apples baking on the pits. This complexity of experience was even complemented by another important component - that of community. Baking apples was our joint discovery, a shared joy, which turned into an intimate feast when companions took part. We had been singing, keeping silent and talking in a peaceful calm around the open fire. The children made comments about the sputter of the apple juice dropping into the fire the glow of the sparks, the blazing wood and the collapsing of the logs, the color and warmth of the ashes, the loosely flying ashes, the shrinking of the peel of the reddening apples on the spit, the taste of the baked apples, and so on. The apple became the symbol of our joint joy, and Edda’s personification raised it to an artistic experience for us all.

Towards the end of our three-day recording session, when we were almost ready to leave, we put on, by way of farewell, one of the Bulgarian dances from Bartók’s Microcosmos.

The children are very fond of the alternate pulsation of Bulgarian rhythms, and the little studio was teeming with merriment. Everyone was dancing. Edda nestled up to me and said, “I’d like to do a solo.” “Solo” with us means an individual, paired or small-group production, in which the children freely select their pairs for dancing. The solo in most cases carries and individual message, but it can also be a joint creation of a pair or a small ensemble. The performers discuss the theme among themselves, but only tell of it after the dance has been performed. “Why don’t you tell us about it beforehand?” I asked them once. “Because it might change while we’re dancing it,” they explained.

“Do you want a solo all by yourself,” - I asked. “No it will be with Kriszti.” “Are you going to discuss it with Kriszti?” “This doesn’t need discussing.” Kriszti was a little surprised, but she immediately agreed. “Okay, I’ll keep looking at you.” She nodded and fixed her yes on Edda at once drawing near to me as she did so.

On the videotape recording the first section of the scene shows only Edda, but I always see both of them before me: Edda, as she begins her scene, kneeling before the cameras, and Krisztina, as she hangs on her pair’s face without stirring, squatting beside me. Edda did not turn in Kriszti’s direction and yet we strongly felt their affinity. The two children, one dancing and the other watching without a stir, were in close connection from the first moment on; they created jointly.

We watched Edda’s drama with bated breath. Her look, mime and gestures all expressed her internal tension, the grief of the experience she was conjuring up. A desperate child was struggling there with some adversity unknown to us. The sincerity of her manifestation has remained an indelible experience for me.

When did Kriszti get up and join in the scene? And why did she join in just when she did? I have repeatedly tried to observe the signals the children make to guide and notify each other during their dance, but in most cases they exchange such delicate signals that even the most attentive observer will miss them. I did not take my eye off Edda for a moment, and yet I could not see when or how she signaled to Krisztina. Krisztina later said “I felt that she was in great trouble, and decided to be her mother and help her.”

And she did help. She walked around her with a compassionate face and commiserative gestures. She danced close to her, and expressed with her movements and features that she shared her grief that she was with her, that she felt for her and wanted to help her by giving her affection. She also expressed that in her role as a mother she was able to bring her comfort.

“I decided to be her mother.” Why her mother? Why not her friend, as she was in real life? After all, she could have given friendly help too. But Krisztina must have seen the signs of a grief that called for a mother to mitigate.

She took the role of a mother because that was what she felt was the most effective. The mother role gave her sufficient strength to intervene and help the sufferer. At the end of the scene she embraced the kneeling Edda, who covered her eyes but found in the comforting embrace her calm and rest. The two children’s position in that closing movement recalls Michelangelo’s Pieta. They did not know the sculpture. Might there possibly have been an internal relationship between the artistic presentations of eternal human sentiments and a child’s intuitions?

After the last sounds of the piano died away we remained in alarmed silence. “Will you tell us Edda?” - I asked when at last I found my voice. Edda set up on the table cheerfully, swinging her feet and related with childish ease:

“I did it like that because,” - she shook her bent head, so that her short fair hair fell in her face, “because I could not believe, I could not believe that my father had died.”

When and why might Edda have feared that her robust and healthy father might die? She had never spoken of it to her parents. Why was it precisely that piece of music which called forth her dread, or the memory of a fearful dream? I found no explanation. Nor do I know how the girls could follow the sounds of the Bartók piece in such a way that the music could virtually be read from their improvised movements. When analyzing the videotape recording, we saw the attunement of their motions to the harmonies and frictions of the piece its rhythmic relationships, the ascents and resolutions of the phrases, and so on. Mrs. Zsuzsa Négyesi Pásztor writes:

“As the recording begins, Edda is waiting for the opening of the piece squatting on the ground, her face calm and clear. As she hears the bright pentatonic melody between 2 + 2 + 3 eight ostinatos or perfect fifths, she is getting up and with her arms stretched high up in the air, her face lifted, bowing, she is turning round and round, smiling to herself. The stresses and changes of her movement almost fully coincide with the openings of the three bar ostinato passages and melodic lines, respectively.

In bar 16, where the throbbing musical texture continues in scales whirling up and down, the girl kneels down, falling forward, then rising according to the two-bar phrasing, as if she was following with her eyes Bartók’s ties that the composer used to mark the relatedness of sounds.

From bar 20, the movement of the child reflects growing tension. In the increasingly frequent waves of motives surging higher and higher up with each degree, Edda presses her hands against her temple, her bowing speeds up following the bar stresses of the four-tact sequence. Her face is worn, her strained eyebrows point down starting out from the vertical furrows on her forehead.

In bar 24, at the point where the painfully hammering augmented fourths and sevenths reach their highest point, she hides her eyes with her fist, throws her head to the right and then to the left, arches her body back, reaches up with her palm and when the music comes to the deep “F sharp” organ point in bar 31, she falls to the ground and remains still through four bars during the harshly clattering ostinatos of minor second.

Meanwhile, her companion, Krisztina enters the scene. Flitting behind her like a shadow, pressing her two hands to her face and shaking her head in regret.

In bar 35, when the “C” based melody opens, Edda raises her suffering face, her arms still hanging limp by her side, turns towards her companion on her knees and the other caresses her with compassion. When the music reaches another melodic wave beginning with a “d” (bar 40), Edda raises her hand in despair to the climax of “D sharp”. From this point, they draw the throb of the groups of eights of the three bar ostinato alternating with each other, their wrists held high like fluttering birds in the air.

The melodic lines accompanied by broken chords (from bar 45) trigger of further waves of excitement. Kneeling, Edda is swaying her head in despair, burying her face in her hands. She indicates the exposed “F” organ point of bar 51 with the sudden movement of opening her arms wide. Meanwhile, Krisztina is bending down to her first from this, then from that side, adjusting the rhythm and changing the direction of her fleeting steps to the throb and melodic lines of the music.

At the end of the last melodic line, the tension begins to be released at the murmur of the “C”-based ostinato (bar 55). Edda lifts her forehead from the ground, bends over to her companion, touches her eyes with flowerlike fingers, lowers her arms and for the final quiet thump of a “C” sound, drops her head on one shoulder. Kneeling down by her companion holds her gently, looking at her with her head lowered.”

Whether in the near or distant future a further regular and detailed analysis of video recordings could lead to a science necessary for the future of music education we do not know. One thing however, is clear: children respond to music from far greater depths than we have assumed with a traditional knowledge of education.

These indications of children’s self-expression related to the arts are real handholds for the teacher. The Bartók interpretation of Edda and Krisztina helped me to an incredibly intimate closeness to Bartók as well as to the two girls. Their interpretation opened up new sources nourishing my soul for a better understanding of children. 

CONCLUSION 

We have learnt from Kodály’s teachings and life that we can gain the experience needed to balance our life in the intimacy of the experience of nature and the values of art. The closeness of nature’s phenomena and the reception of the values of art together protect the child against the dangers of dull futility, hopeless narrowing down, senseless frittering away and uncertain vacillation.

Children who are deprived of the deeply revealing experiences of nature and art will more easily mistake their real footholds and lean upon wretched supports. They can become traumatic, and the traces of their traumas will need treating with a long course of therapy. Or in their emptiness they will, instead of expanding, be immersed in destructive stupors. But the children’s inborn talent and attunement help them to live intimately through the experiences of nature and the arts.

These experiences intensify one another and are inseparable in education. The scope in them points far beyond the methods used in education so far. Educational systems, cut up into subjects and branches, will have to undergo a basic change so that children can receive an education in connected experiences that better suit their natural, complex receptiveness and manifestations.

How does the child’s sensitive constitution assimilate the experiences of beauty, which are of such a great importance to his development? We know little of that, because the process, although sometimes spectacular, is at other times concealed and can only be registered by fairly remote indications. Like the growth of a tree, the life of a child builds not for our age but for the one that follows and is beyond the grasp of our senses. We can only sense the achievements of their lives in our imaginations not with our fingers. We can only open up paths for them so that they can easily find their way to the life-giving strength of nature and art. Their place in the world, their adaptation to the community, their productivity, their family life and their social impetus all depend on what use they make of them.

If, from the messages of songs, music and arts, children can absorb truth and conviction, they will nourish the cells in their brains that react to truth and conviction. If, while receiving and experiencing music they learn to love and esteem one another and develop a sense of responsibility, those qualities will become part of their personalities, together with their musical experience. Their later experiences of music and artistic forms of expression will draw forth these qualities either consciously or from hidden depths.

Artistic talent, creativity, and power of expression will not in themselves build man’s inner strength. Life’s radiation feeds on a qualitative surplus, the responsibility shouldered for others - just as in a tree the roots bear responsibility for the trunk, branches, boughs, leaves and fruit, and these depend upon one another in a voluntarily undertaken, endless effort for the growth of the whole and for its fruit.

That is the way in which Beethoven could write his Ninth Symphony and Kodály his Psalmus Hungaricus.