Music is My Partner

A movement coming freely into being is flying on the uncluttered paths of the imagination. Such moments of enthusiasm were called metamorphoses by my children. A tiny example can be recognized in an experience of Márti E. (aged 6). 

“There was a flower, by accident it forgot to close its petals and dreamt that it would become a snail, then a bird, then a flower. Then it closed its petals and slept on. In the morning it rejoiced in being a flower.” 

“How did you change into a snail and a bird?” 

“My leaves became wings, and the petals became many-many little feathers.” 

“What about the snail?” 

“I was turning around slowly, the music was turning around, too.”

 Imagination works in the depths of music, it reaches beyond knowledge. Knowledge is merely seeping to the surface.

Imagination is the most beautiful of all human capacities. It is born in every child and children access it easily in their world. Albert Szentgyörgyi, the Hungarian Nobel laureate, in his bright late age, expressed to me that imagination is indispensable in science, too. It should be recognized as a creative force in any phase of the human life.

Imagination is the source of the arts. It is important, therefore, in the teaching of the arts it should precede the communication of knowledge. It should precede it, complement it, and pervade it. Imagination – mine as well as my students’ – is present in all our learning. 

As the river rolls the sand and the pebbles, it also washes the roots of the trees and shapes the banks. It cradles the leaves, provides shelter to delicate, nimble fish and fat, shambling frogs, it chats with the beams of the sun and sends messages to the stars.