Dr Klara Kokas: KODÁLY'S CONCEPT OF MUSIC EDUCATION

Published in Council for Research in Music Education, Bulletin No. 22, Fall 1970

Studies made in Hungarian music education over the past 20 years have shown that children experiencing daily singing lessons in school display better results in their other school subjects than children having only the usual number of class hours of music training. The purpose of this paper is to explore the psychological bases for this transfer[1] effect from musical learning to general academic performance.

The material of music does not carry rational information, but it is distinguished by clear structure and comprehensible form. Perception, recognition and reconstruction of form and structure are essential in music education. In the course of musical training the structure evident in the abstract material of music assumes for the child the form of patterns and models. In addition, music expresses emotions and is at the same time a source of motivation. While engaged in activities connected with music, the child senses and produces these emotions and builds from them emotional models according to the pattern of music.

Melody is the primary indivisible structural pattern within which we analyze out the musical phrase. The phrase can be divided into motifs; we teach the motif as the structural unit of melody, the microstructure of music. Kodály, Bartók, and their associates built their works on the structural pillars of folk songs, and these constitute the material for our Hungarian music education. In the works which these composers created for music instruction they utilized Hungarian folk songs or compositions written in the spirit of the folk songs - that is, using the melodic and rhythmic structure of folk songs.

As they sing, write, and read music, the children collect the microstructure of Hungarian folk songs for themselves. In this way the musical mother tongue, its structure and idioms, assumes the form of a model for the children. It follows that, on the one hand, the musical mother tongue is so deeply absorbed that the children can apply it even in free improvisation, and on the other hand, a transfer effect is apparent in the similar activity of learning a language (the mother tongue or foreign languages).  The words of the mother tongue, and later its idioms, characteristic images, and sentence structures, give a feeling of security to the child because the world and people around him reflect similarity in thought and word.  The musical mother tongue is closely linked to the spoken mother tongue in its rhythm and accent, its logic, structure, and imagery.  If we teach the musical mother tongue early and well, we lay down good foundations for the personality.

The earlier system of music instruction taught the sounds (syllables) first, followed by a certain system of pitches (the scale), and only later the melodies constructed of them.  In our method of relative solmization, melody is the basis, and we divide it into phrases and words, the words into syllables, the syllables into sounds. Relative solmization itself produces important transfer effects. Through it we teach intervals and musical relationships within the unit of a short musical sentence. Constant, identical relations are treated as constituents of a larger unit and are examined in ever-changing contexts. This makes for the realization that constant relationships are possible within changing conditions, a principle which has wide transfer possibilities.

Singing is, of course, the principal means of teaching.  A given work of music will be living reality for the child because he has experienced the structure of the work with its melodic and rhythmic elements through his own singing.  He has absorbed it and stored it in his engrams. The microstructures, so absorbed, constitute the building blocks of the musical mother tongue of the child and at the same time provide the basis for his creative and improvisational ability.  He derives his  first  musical  experiences  from  songs  associated  with playful  movement  and  collective  singing.  These pleasant experiences later bring with them the wish to get to know a larger number of classical works. (Classical is used here not to denote style, but value.) The oeuvre itself furnishes for the child the categories of values that later will be the compass of his orientation.  The basis for his aesthetic judgment is then the knowledge of musical style and form acquired through singing, and reinforced by the practice of music writing and reading.

Training in attention-developing rhythmic exercises produces observable results in mathematics; and a good ear for music helps spelling.  One subject affects another.  But over and above this, music education seems to promote the development of psychological functions of a higher order whose effect goes far beyond the special content and material of music. Musical education provides models of experience on which later the external experiences will leave their imprint.  The basic forms of Hungarian music education - such as singing games with changing performers, choruses, and chamber orchestras where the individual is an important part of the whole - are models of experiences suitable for transfer to many other activities.

In searching for the basis of the transfer effect produced by our music education, we can refer to Allport's statement that if a variety of means are used, the transfer effect is intensified. [2]Allport points out that the term “transfer” suggests a variety of situations rather than a few similar methods. Experiments have shown that a given material, in itself, produces only slight and limited transfer.  A  variety  of methods used in musical learning  - association based on familiar elements, grouping, rhythmic patterns, interpretation, well-distributed repetition  - are effective in promoting transfer. If music is taught in varied ways, then this training of musical abilities reaches a form of generalization and practice going beyond the musical material.

Barkoczy and Putnoky interpret the transfer effect as a generalized adaptation to a given situation. This adaptation takes places not only on the motor or intellectual level “. . . but it means a certain active readiness, an emotional set, the type of tension characteristic of curiosity and interest, of dealing with new tasks and being confronted with problematic situations.” [3]

Musical training in combination with movement, rhythm, and active singing serves to create an optimal balance of cortical and subcortical activity.  Physiological research has shown that cortical and subcortical activities must be in balance for maintaining the organism in a state of relative stability. Today’s children, especially those in cities, receive an overdose of cortical burdening because they have little free time and free ground for movement, and an increased school load. The school requires cortical activity during nine-tenths of the time spent there. Taking in and absorbing - comprehending, systematizing, and keeping in memory - auditory and visual information are almost exclusively cortical activities not affecting in any way the subcortex. The fact is, however, that small children are too young to subordinate their subcortical activity to cortical control regularly over a long period of time.  A steady one-sided stimulus reduces cortical activity, and while this reduction is generally not noxious to the stable adult, for the growing child the one-sided early overburdening of the cortex may cause irreparable damage.  The increasing percentages of childhood hypertension and neurosis warn about the need for much more active recreation.

Intellectual activity is influenced by the limbic system charging impressions from the outside with emotions, and also by the centrecephalon supplying energy for intellectual activity.  It is our hypothesis that the combined activity of singing and movement charges the limbic system of the subcortex with emotional content and at the same time through its varied stimuli (auditory, visual and motor) activates the formation reticularis centrecephalon.  Combined singing and movement enables the child to react to his subcortical impulses in a socially desirable manner. The ample emotional content of singing, and especially of collective singing - an experience of catharsis and multiple stimuli together - provides the physiological foundations for the kind of transfer described by Barkoczy and Putnoky: the creation of an active readiness for dealing with new tasks. Stagner calls “expectancy” the state of readiness for response that is produced by the stimulus.  Emotional content and active recreation refresh cerebral activity and give rise to a readjusted set, a new “expectancy” for the reception of new stimuli.

Kodály’s programme specifies the role of music education for every age group, but emphasizes the importance of laying the foundations at the most receptive age. From observing his pupils and associates over several decades, he concludes that all normal people who can hear and speak are capable of developing an ear for music if they begin to receive musical training in kindergarten or the primary grades. The receptive period is the experimentally determined phase in ontogenetic development when the organism is particularly sensitive to certain types of stimuli.

In answer to the question when music education should begin, Kodály said at a Paris conference: “Nine months before the child is born,” indicating his belief that a mother who “lives on good music,” by her way and rhythm of living, and happier attitude will influence her unborn child favorably. Later, he said that music education should begin “nine months before the mother’s birth.”  Kodály was serious about the importance of musical culture of the family.

The infant gets his first musical impulses through the mother or her substitute.  The smile, mimicry, gestures, and voice of the person who is most often with the child provide him with experiences of warm, happy feelings. The baby’s initial relationship to the outer world is established by contact with the mother figure. The active contact with the adult is characterized by the first-year, pre-speech stage.  Positive emotional response to the adult shows the emergence of a new social need, the need for contact. The speech that accompanies the actions of adults is of great importance for the child, for he listens to it and begins to understand its general emotional tone. Pleasant sound stimuli, the ringing rhymes and rhythms of songs and poems, together with the attending smile and movement, are important factors in creating a sense of physiological well-being in the child.  The first impressions of sound and rhythm (lullabies, cradle songs) reinforce the intimacy of interpersonal contact.  Joy and animation are at first addressed to the adult, but later the play itself begins to be a direct source of joy.  This early period of music education produces lasting impressions; order and evenness are very important here. In rhythm we use regularity of pulse, in melody the ever returning pattern.

The music education of children between ages one and three is still based on passive absorption. According to tests conducted by Katalin Forrai Vikár, the small child reproduces only a fragment of the melodies heard, but the characteristic motifs and favorite rhythm patterns unexpectedly crop up later. This means that the child should get a wealth of good musical and rhythmic stimuli. These can be rhythmic sayings, nursery rhymes, perhaps of folk origin, combined with rocking or some other type of rhythmic motion. Children should grow up in an atmosphere of music, in the kind of environment where they hear folk songs, nursery rhymes, and singing games. For this age group, not even the best machine music can substitute for the personal singing voice of the mother or nurse.  The small child needs personal contact to absorb musical experience.

The first musical impressions also play an important part in speech development. The special linguistic receptivity of the small child is well known. Through the age of three the child is developing an orientation to the phonetic shape of the word. Most children begin to be fond of sounds between the ages of four and six. The proper pronunciation of words develops in the interaction between the phonemic perception of sounds and the motor skill of speech. There is a good physiological reason for the practice of combining singing, nursery rhymes, and rhythmic sayings with active motor conditioning.

The Kodály programme takes its cue for the selection of the learning material from the children themselves. Many children’s songs and nursery rhymes are practically phonetic exercises. At the same time, harmony of form and content make these rhymes and songs genuine masterpieces.  The kindergarten-age child (three to six) can train his developing sound organ, aesthetic sense, and musical ability on many “artistic works” of this kind.

Passive absorption is still very strong at the beginning of the kindergarten age, but gradually the joy of collective play replaces it.  Movement and song, therefore, belong together in this age.

Rhythmic movement shared with companions, experiences with  the  words  and  music  of  the  songs  connected  with dramatic games, the choice of partner by the child in the centre of the circle in round games, and the touch of each others’ hands are all emotional factors for the kindergarten child. In the rhythmic movement of round games, proprioceptive awareness of one’s own body is combined with the exteroceptive sense of the external world.

The singing games are learning games. The children observe and imitate the movements, voice, and tone of the adult and the other children, and this takes active effort. At the same time each child adjusts his own movement, rhythm, and elocution to that of the others and this also takes active work. He has to follow the group in step, posture, movement, rhythm and intonation. He does this happily because he finds pleasure in collective singing and movement. In the meantime he is full of emotional expectancy: when will he be chosen as white lily, velvet violet, ugly duckling or fairy princess, when will the “gate” be shut in his face, who will choose him for partner, and so on.

The kindergarten-age child learns primarily by imitation. The songs and dances which he masters by imitation are suitable for becoming digested as personal experience.  This collection of experiences at a highly receptive age is the basis for further knowledge later.

For grade school children, the movement patterns in the singing and dancing games promote the motor development. These age groups play a large number of games which involve rocking, squatting, turning in and out, spinning and reeling, running in and out, and climbing through, and in this way help to develop coordinated movement and a sense of balance.

Singing games promote perceptual and motor learning and at the same time develop intellect in the manner described earlier. If through such games we give our children the living patterns of play and dance, collected from the children of the villages, we provide them with models they easily fill with their own personal meaning.

“The child remembers the tune of the singing game together with the joyful experience of movement and later the tune alone recalls the totality of the experience.”[4] The relationship between stimulus and response is strengthened by the emotional relationship to the melody which the child establishes as he plays singing games. This joyful relationship is attended by autonomous (vegetative) and external expressive relations which also become associated with the engrams of the singing game. In this way the engrams of auditory and rhythmic perceptions become attached to movement, play, dancing, and laughter. The linking of the material of music to such emotional reactions provides the proper basis for the development of musical concepts.

If the musical patterns are absorbed through auditory, motor, and visual training together with the above-mentioned emotional reactions, then the associated solmization sequence or pattern of notes alone is able to recall the emotional reactions attached to the songs and games.  This furnishes the motivation for the activities of writing and reading music. Through frequent association the pattern of solmization syllables takes over the earlier memories of the tune and so the melody itself becomes integrated with solmization.  Consequently, solmization in our method is not a system of symbols imposed from the outside to reinforce the memory of tonal intervals, but an association based on the melody.

The unknown melody shut into black notes awakens the child’s interest for the new. With his ability to write and read music, he is able to solve the problem independently: he is, again and again, able to turn the dead symbols into living music.

[1] Dr. Kokas uses the term transfer to include (a) the direct transfer of mental habits from music to other subjects, (b) the effect of music upon the child's mental and physical readiness for learning, and (c) the effect of early musical experiences upon later musical growth.

[2] Allport: Pattern and Growth in Personality, New York, 1937, p. 268.

[3] Barkoczy and Putnoky: Tanulás és Motiváció, Szeged, 1967.

[4] Ujfalussy: The Musical Image of Reality, Budapest, 1962, p. 22.