ENCOUNTERS WITH KODÁLY

My first memory of Kodály dates from the time when I was spelling out his name from my father’s scores. I must have been four years old at the time. At fourteen, I decided to follow in his tracks, and when I turned seventeen I gave my first talk on Kodály in Sopron where I attended the gymnasium (secondary school).

After my final examination at that school, my father went to see Kodály and asked him in which department of the Academy of Music he would suggest that I should enroll. The Professor, as we called him, recommended the department which trains secondary school teachers of singing and music. It had been set up around that time and along with music theory and musical knowledge provided the qualifications for a choirmaster. “Send her there,” he said, “that’s the department of the future.” My career has justified his remark.

Kodály taught us folk music. His classes were attended by some fifty students of the Academy coming from various instrumental departments. To many of them folk music was of no interest and they spent the classes chatting and doodling, some even playing cards in the back. Kodály did not insist on receiving attention. What he said was clear and intelligible, but he spoke in a low voice, without much delivery. I sat next to his desk, as close as my awe allowed me to. Once he asked the class to give examples of the tonal response structure of the folksong in Bartók’s works. None of us could. The Professor waited for an answer. He did not speak. We sweltered in a deep silence which became more and more intolerable by the minute. He did not reproach us for our ignorance; after the class we ran to the library to find tonal responses in Bartók works.

I prepared for months for his examination. I made folksong analysis, marking out the folksong categories, keys, cadences and so on in five different colors and their variations. I placed my work on his desk with shaky hands. He did not put many questions, he looked at me, and with his fine, long-fingered hand entered the best mark into my student index-book.

I became a teacher at the Szombathely gymnasium, and as it took three secondary schools to make up my prescribed number of weekly lessons, I was soon dashing by bicycle between the schools. In all three I organized a large choir, and on official holidays, the celebrations in the three schools were held at times that conformed with my ability to reach them on my bicycle.

With one of my chamber choirs we soon won a first prize in the county and a trip to Lake Balaton. On my return home a letter from Kodály was waiting for me stating that Szombathely wanted to set up a specialized primary school for singing and music, and asking whether I would like to teach there. Until then all that I had known about these specialized schools for singing and music was what Márta N. Szentkirályi, their founder, had achieved at the Kecskemét School. At the time, in 1953, there were just a few specialized classes in the country and there was neither an official curriculum nor even a text-book for them.

When I undertook the assignment, I went to Kecskemét, Sopron and Budapest to find out what such classes were doing. I scarcely believed what I saw and heard. The daily singing lessons did not only provide musical education for the students. I met lively children bursting with life in Kecskemét, running and playing in the school yard (in Kecskemét instruction had taken place for years in the city’s most dilapidated school building, the lovely, modern Kodály school was only built later, in 1964), and singing and listening during classes as attentively as little angels. The small chamber ensemble of the twelve-year-olds gave special music recitals for the city’s holiday occasions with a serious sense of responsibility. They carried off first prizes in schools sport competitions; they won the chess tournament, and all the cultural and inter-school contests, both individually and as teams. My curiosity was immediately aroused, which later led to my studying the transfer effects of musical education and after some years writing a doctoral dissertation on the topic. What does this condensed, intensive musical education give to children that makes their abilities so richly unfold?

I had to recruit students for the music class. It was the end of summer, and I went around to homes trying to persuade parents. Most of them showed reluctance. They had never heard about such a thing as a music class and felt that singing lessons were a superfluous luxury. Let the child study some language, or math, but singing  and every day at that was beyond their understanding. In the end, the singing class was launched with twenty-six hard-won students instead of thirty. The children made breath-taking progress. Whatever they learned one day, they knew it with assurance on the next; their musical memory received more a month than a grammar school student in a year. My eight-year-old second-graders gave an independent choral concert at the end-of-term ceremony, singing Kodály’s Bicínia, a two-part piece by Bach, and a Renaissance madrigal, and taking turns at conducting. Eight students in the class could conduct independently. They took up the tuning fork, gave the pitch and the cue, and the rest of them started singing with shiny eyes.

At the beginning of the third school term, we had to select the thirty new first-graders out of 95 applicants. We did not know whether to admit those at the beginning of the list of names, to draw lots, or what. I hate entrance examinations. The term “musical ability” is familiar to many but there are few who really apprehend what this complex, mysterious thing actually means, woven as it is of so many threads and appearing in countless forms among children. Some feel the rhythm but stray between pitches, others do notice their own faulty notes but their voice does not obey them. It is a rare gift when someone’s internal hearing is ready to receive music and his or her voice is ready to reproduce it exactly. But what should happen to those who were not born like that? To those who have not brought with them a sure ear or a receptive musical memory, and yet are bursting with a taste for singing and a desire for music?

Upon Kodály’s request, every year we admitted a few “tone-deaf” first graders who could not sing. The loveliest memories of my career as a teacher are linked to the musical and individual development of those children. Their touching; almost fanatical love of music helped them over all obstacles. „There is no such thing as a tone-deaf child” wrote Kodály. „Every child has to be taken to the little garden of music.” Márta Szentkirályi used to tell us that once she asked Kodály if she could be exempted from admitting some four to five tone-deaf first-graders. „They make a special problem for our teachers. We have already provided sufficient proof,” Márta said, „we could stop taking them on.” The Professor looked at her and asked, „And what should happen to them?

The paths leading to music open up because music, valuable, good music is no luxury but an invigorating force. No child should be chased away from its vicinity. Every lesson raised some new question. Why are children with musical education better spellers? Is their sense of equilibrium really better? Do nursery-school pupils used to singing really control their breathing better? Does a better auditive observation make itself felt in visual tasks? What kind of tests could we use in our examinations? I was looking for means to verify whether what I felt, had experienced among my students was really true. At the Academy of Music we were not taught psychology. In those years psychology tided over hard times anyway. Which volume should I take from the library? Which one tells the truth, which one will give me a lead?

In 1964 we completed our first survey, I took the material to Kodály. He was sitting at his desk, examining the papers and putting questions. „You’ll have to speak about that at the Budapest conference of the International Society for Music Education,” he said. The program of the conference had been printed months in advance, but upon the Professor’s request, the chairman of ISME reserved half an hour for my report at the plenary session. At that time I spoke no English and gave my report in German.

On the closing evening, Kodály said on Hungarian Radio: „For me Klára Kokas’ lecture was the most valuable as she also demonstrated the influence of musical education through examinations.” And to me he said: „Learn English. The next ISME conference will be held in America in two years’ time, you’ll have to lecture there.” On my way home I bought a text-book of English and records for beginners. I studied from records, without a teacher. But the ISME conference in America was still far away. First I had to look for a post in Budapest where we could carry on with our examinations. Finally the educational head of the Budapest City Council asked me, „Would you take on something difficult too?” „By all means!” „Even something very difficult?” That is how, through the personal intervention of Kodály, I found myself teaching in a boarding school for orphaned or abandoned children in state custody.

That they had not taught us at the Academy. We had learned to read scores, to construct a fugue, to memorize melodies, harmonies and choral works. We had attended countless singing lessons and choral rehearsals, we had sung Monteverdi, conducted Lassus and Bartók, and practiced the methods of teaching singing in school. We had been given a many-sided, valuable musical training. But we had not been told what to do if desperate, lonely children sit in the benches in front of us and turn their back on the teacher.

When I entered the first nursery school pavilion, I was surrounded by a group of twenty well-combed, nicely dressed four-year-olds. Two of them asked me at once, „Are you my ma?” And they flared up at each other, „No, she’s not your ma! She’s mine!” I stood among them with a heavy heart while some eight or ten small hands clutched at my fingers. My students at Szombathely had enthusiastically played the folk games accompanied with singing, and during the breaks also walked round singing in the courtyard. Here I was scarcely able to introduce any singing game as they did not keep in step, did not hold hands; indeed they often tripped or kicked each other. To organize a ring-game was a Herculean task. All the schools where they had taught me to teach and those where I myself had taught, invoked the help of the parents. We called on the parent, we asked the parent... No-one had told us what to do when there is no parent.

I had to fight every day. Often the best planned ideas did not work out. I learnt always to have others in reserve. At every lesson I fought anew for the silence needed for common attention. These children lacked the mental basis for internal concentration. They could easily be forced to silence by coercion but I could not use that rejecting, retreating silence for anything. I had to use all possible means to penetrate deep down to the layers where emotions responded.

It was very hard to foretell the mood they would be in the next day, how they would tolerate the presence and actions of the always distracted trouble-makers. We could work together only if the community did not react to the provocations of the peace-breakers and failed to notice them. By so doing we could for the most part disarm them, as they were usually only out for some extra attention. After a short while they slowly learnt that they could receive personal attention from me without forcing it, out of affection, and that they did not need to resort to violence. But on bad days, particularly at times when they were still under the after-effect of a Sunday visiting day, all my long-cherished beautiful plans were frustrated.

At that time I learnt that I had to create teaching methods day from day as an operation designed for individuals, I could make no use of the well-proven methods of group education. Every child was a separate world that could be approached only by an individual path. They woke up and went to sleep without their mother kissing them good-night, telling them stories or singing at their bedside. To put them to sleep with stories and songs, to awake them with cheering ditties and to find the time to touch and stroke each of them, at least once a day, became more important than the material of the singing lessons.

Even while in good health and physically fit, this work took up all my strength. But soon my health also deteriorated and I had to learn to live in constant pain for years. I had a spinal operation and was in hospital for several weeks. I kept a tape recorder at my bedside and learnt English. Much later, when I had recovered, I learnt what the doctor had said to the organizer of the ISME delegation: „You just take her to that American conference. That’ll be her last trip anyway. Soon she’ll become paralyzed.” In America I was able to see much of the Professor. We met the Kodálys in Chicago. There was an airline strike, and the next day the three of us were taken to Interlochen, Michigan, by car.

I had lunch with the Kodálys in the hotel. We had to wait in front of the restaurant as our hosts were late. The Professor asked me about my pains and explained what exercises I ought to do. He did not believe that I was threatened by a coming paralysis. And he demonstrated right there, at the door of the Chicago restaurant, how I should do leg-swing exercises. He swung his leg easily, high up above his head. His ease showed how practiced he was in gymnastics and with what balance and what flexibility he moved. I learnt from Sárika, Kodály’s wife, how he had regained full mobility after a heart attack seven years earlier. When the imminent danger had passed, he started by moving his fingers, until gradually he returned to a daily one-hour gymnastics routine exercising his whole body.

It took me three years to learn a leg-swing of the same ease, and then with the help of a teacher who employed Kodály’s principles in developing his method of teaching locomotion.

During the few days until the opening of the conference, we went to see the summer courses at Interlochen. I could not move much as every step felt painful and I could hardly rise from a sitting position. Sárika had a straight wooden bench made for me on the balcony of their wooden cottage, where I lay and looked at the lake. I was making plans on how to go on if I had to live all my life in a wheelchair. I could no longer envisage my existence without pain. I kept thinking how to get accustomed to permanent pain and immobility. One morning the Professor stayed with me. We were silent for hours. He too was looking at the lake. Once he got up, went into the house and brought out a glass of cold milk for me. If I were a painter I would relate it in a picture what the white, sparkling glass looked like on that wonderfully narrow, long-fingered Christ’s hand, stretched out without a tremble.

The next spring he died. I heard the news during a singing lesson, among my students, and it came as an unexpected, unavoidable lash. It was unbelievable, inconceivable. A few months earlier I had seen him wading into the lake at Interlochen without a second’s vacillation, with young people around him carefully dipping their toes in the water and hissing how cold it was. The over-loaded daily program of the conference had exhausted everyone, but he had shown no sign of tiredness and had taken part in everything.

For his 84th birthday we had prepared a domestic surprise, taking our own children to congratulate through song. Helga Szabó’s tiny little daughter sang the shortest song, with the bigger ones coming up with more and more difficult ones, and finally my two children singing a long and difficult piece from the 15 Two-Part Exercises. I am glad they were old enough at the time to have kept the memory of that hour fresh in their minds.

A few days before his death we gathered in his home for our Saturday afternoon singing session. No-one dreamt it was going to be the last one. And yet it so happened that we were singing Kodály choruses one after the other. (On other occasions we tended to sing Bach and pre-classical composers.) After the closing chord of the Hymn to King Saint Stephen, I felt a sudden dizziness when I put down the score and all at once felt it impossible for the composer of such a work to be tangible and living amidst us. The world has become empty and defective, Kodály had been 84 years old, but we had not sensed his age, we had not been prepared for his death.

Later I spent three years in the American Kodály Institute and wrote a book on it; I followed the story of the adaptations of the Kodály-method in the specific linguistic, musical, social, educational, and psychological environment of English-speaking peoples and those of Latin origin. My experiences reinforced my faith in all that I had received from Kodály. I owe it to him that I have been able to preserve my childish qualities, the joy of discovery, wonder, delight, and contemplation, a revival of cathartic experiences and a love for people.

In their good moments, my students demonstrate it with their own compositions of movements what music has aroused in them. They discover that their bodies, their limbs move to music. They may have responded to musical resonances with some such instinct in their mother’s womb, in the warm medium of the soft liquid that surrounded them. Young mothers speak of this, and I myself lived through it, with my own children. How many memories can the child preserve in the deep layers of his mind from that stage of his life? What can his experience of motion be like in there when his mother is singing and the vibrations arising from her vocal chords diffuse in her body, in the soft tissues, the circulating body fluids, in the blood, the hormones, the bones, the viscera, the layers of the skin? When a mother sings, it is the body in which the child is living, breathing, resting, strengthening, developing, and growing, that is making music. At such times the world surrounding the child resounds and becomes arranged in harmonic sounds.

In 1929, the year I was born, Kodály, at a conference in Paris, answered a question by saying that musical education must be started nine months before the child’s birth. Decades later, medicine discovered the functional development of the embryo’s hearing from the sixth month of intrauterine life. I had been working along Kodály’s path for nearly thirty years when at last the idea he added to what he had said at the Paris conference became really clear to me: „The musical education of the child must be started nine months before the mother’s birth.”

A cellist from Australia has told me that in the months before her daughter was born, she followed in the womb the performance of one of Beethoven’s trios with even, almost gentle, rolling movements. Sometimes she indicated motion during other pieces of music, too, but that particular work always prompted her to particularly pleasant movements. Later, when the little girl was already living in this outside world, she reacted to that piece of music with quickening attention, motions of joy and sounds of joy. Did the Beethoven work give specifically pleasant combinations of vibrations with the re-sounding of the cello that was so close to the mother’s body? Or did the cellist herself enter into the spirit of that particular piece with particular depth?

Nowadays I have met a growing number of parents who live through the development process of the fetal life of their children, and the father is also present at the birth. In the Hungarian Kodály Institute we have made plans with Noémi’s father to sing for their keenly awaited child already before its birth. Upon the sound of the deep, resounding voice near the mother’s body, the child began a softly undulating motion and continued it until the song lasted. By now Noémi is two years old, she loves singing; she receives music in her father’s arms, their relationship is interwoven by music.

Old peasant women, grandmothers, great-grandmothers in villages and remote farms used to rock the little ones in their lap, hushing or cheering them with songs and ditties. Their body warmth and the rhythm of their motion transmitted music. How can some of all that be preserved in the conditions of group musical education? I have tried it and have succeeded. Even my nine-year-old students settle gladly in my arms if I teach them a new song in such a motherly position. And I teach the parents together with their children. At our joint lessons we sit on the ground near one another and sing like that. Such a personal closeness in the transference of music is feeding on the deep roots of our primeval inheritance.

My mother used to sing often and beautifully, while working for us, her three children. After all these years I clearly remember all her songs, the timbre of her voice. I clearly remember where she inflected the melody and where she drew breath between the musical sentences. My musical education began with my mother’s birth or even before. I wonder whether my grandmother had sung to her, her twelfth child?

Kodály once wrote: „The mother not only gives her body to her child, she builds his soul too, out of her own.” Out of what music should the soul be built? That, too, is the mother’s responsibility. In that uniquely intimate relationship, when she provides with her own heart action for the child who still relies on her in all its vital functions, she can also give music with the greatest intensity.

Published in The New Hungarian Quarterly, 1982, XXIII. No. 88, p. 57-62