Ebből is van már egy, különbség: kérdések számozása, alcím.

Sounds in the Sky

From the Series “With Babies”

1. Q: How do you structure the programmes for pregnant women in the long run?

A: I would like to start a process: parents expecting their baby would come during the mother’s pregnancy, then with their toddlers, then with their schoolchildren. But this is only a dream, and may only come true in a dream.

2. Q: Why?

A: I know only few people who are so persevering in the programmes they choose that they are not tempted by other activities. Then there are the practical difficulties: children have different classes, too: music, languages, computer, sports, dance, such things. It is not easy to choose.

3. Q: How did you manage earlier?

A: Parents were resolute: they brought their children to me, and not only one child but the brothers and sisters too, they could not be deterred. They came regularly until the age of eight, sometimes from faraway, from the country or a different part of town from where they had to take the bus and travel for hours. They anticipated each class eagerly, these were occasions of joyful reunion, not only with me, but with each other as well. Later they came as visitors, they brought their loves and even later their babies.

4. Q: How did you manage to do this?

A: I have been thinking about this a great deal, and have talked to parents and grandparents who became friends. Each and every class was very important to me. I had spent two afternoons of the week there for many-many years, often until late at night if we were talking after classes. I was there after the dentist, suffering from biliary colic, coming from the hospital after a car-accident, even half-dead. If the cultural centre was closed due to some unexpected event, I quickly found another place, swept it clean and mopped it up, since we were sitting on the floor, I left signs for the people to know where to come, and they came.

5. Q: Is it such a great problem if one of the classes is postponed?

A: For those who participate in classes with their emotions, it is a great problem. Something important happened in each and every class, something essential or memorable. “And I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh and I will give you a heart of flesh” as I read it in some psalm or hymn.

6. Q: Do you hope that among your students there will be teachers who will have similar classes?

A: I do. It is such a nice thing to teach from your heart that you don’t even feel the sacrifices you have to make. 

7. Q: But life has changed around us hasn’t it?

A: It certainly has, and it will go on changing. Yet we need our emotions, that is, the security of our sense of belonging together, and the belief in each other. People will still search each other, the places and occasions where they may find stones of flesh, this is the precondition of our future, of our existence. 

8. Q: How do you teach pedagogues to have such emotions?

A: One teaches and does not ask questions about who or how many of them stick around. The number of souls is more important than the number of people. There are wonderful people around me who learn even from my blunders: they build themselves stone by stone, maybe speckle by speckle, perhaps like leaves, from drops of water and sunshine, consistently, since a single leaf takes a long time to grow, and still how many there are on a single poplar tree. And I haven’t even mentioned the flowers which grow in bunches. And their fragrance? They manage to come up with that, too.

9. Q: Do you make a selection among parents?

A: I haven’t tried selecting them yet. And I can’t make a selection of children. In America they organize children-shows: they present all the children waiting to be adopted, one by one as if they were models, so that the prospective parents would choose from among them. The souls of those children who have not been selected will have to be healed after the show, naturally. Only a few children are taken, the rest of them stay in state-care. I can’t think about them without crying.

10. Q: Did you teach children left by their parents?

A: Yes, I did, in a relatively good institution, that is, if you can call an institution good where children live in groups of twenty with their teachers. On Mondays I could hardly do anything with the first graders: Ilonka was running around the classroom with a rubbish bin on her head, others were creeping on their belly or fighting. We were coping with the results of the Sunday visit. 

11. Q: They didn’t have visitors?

A: No, they didn’t. They were sitting there the whole day, waiting. Sometimes they did have visitors, though, but then the problem was that they went away. Will they come again? Children must be reared in security and love.

12. Q: How do you protect your children if they are not admitted to a music school?

A: You would think this is a trifling matter, wouldn’t you? An insignificant event in his or her life? Will he or she forget it? It is not so! There is an ugly blackness in their memory indicating they have not succeeded somewhere. It may have sunk to the bottom of his being which we call subconscious because we have to call it by some name. For me the subconscious is as deep as the sea whose depths I can’t fathom. It may be nice smooth or wavy water on the surface. Yet the other day they caught a shark in it, since then I have been swimming more carefully, and have less difficulty imagining the life going on 400 meters below. The depths of the soul can’t even be guessed, and sunken memories remain a mystery.

13. Q: What should parents do if their child is some way rejected?

A: They should help in keeping the memory accessible, tangible, understandable, that is, curable. We do something similar in our classes, with beautiful music we try to reach that the things buried and suppressed deep below should be accessible by the bye. Children have a wonderful capability of treating experiences, they hide them in tales, transform them until they find out that these experiences are not so miserable after all. 

14. Q: For example?

A: In my green book, whose proper title is Music Raises my Hands, there are lots of stories called metamorphoses by my children. One is changed into something as he or she is moving to the music and composing a scene. He or she finds out the story while running around or making somersaults; alone or in a group, as he chooses. As the musical piece is repeated, the children have time to form their story. Nobody interferes.

15. Q: Would it be a problem if you interfered?

A: It would be very stupid to interfere. It would be as if I grabbed the thread of a delicately flying web and tried to fix it to some branch instead of letting the spider fasten it wherever it intended to. The web would surely break, wouldn’t it?

16. Q: How do you recognize memories resurfacing from the subconscious?

A: You can never be sure about this, such memories can resurface at any time. First they present it in dance and then, if they want to talk about it, they can, and we record it.

The eagle and the beavers

24 January 1989 Maiden Pinks

Bartók: Microcosmos Vol. VI: 2. 

Dance in a Bulgarian Rhythm

Csilla – Borsi – Petra: The three of us were beavers, we were collecting all sorts of things on the meadow. Then the eagle came and we tried to flee. We went into the water to swim away. The eagle fell into the water and we saved it. 

Luca: I attacked them because I was looking for food, and they ran into the water and I thought I would be able to catch them in the last minute, but I didn’t succeed, and I fell into the water.

K: Borsi, were the three of you similar beavers?

Borsi: We were different, but we were friends. We were collecting things together, and understood each other.

K: And how did you understand the eagle?

Luca: Well, we couldn’t make friends so that we say: “Hi, we are friends”, but the way we looked at each other made it clear that I don’t want to eat them anymore and that they won’t hurt me, and are no longer afraid of me. 

K: Luca: when you are dancing with the Norwegian guests, you understand them, don’t you?

Luca: It is very easy to understand them.

K: Why?

Luca: Because they look at you in the right way, that is why.

17. Q: What kind of stories do they have?

A: Those who have not heard them can’t even imagine how varied their stories are. They are often about animals, but very different animals. For example, three beavers are playing in the water, the eagle would like to snatch one of them for dinner. But the eagle misses its target, falls into the water and it would drown if the beavers didn’t save it. They danced this to a Bartók piece to a sixth Bulgarian dance of the Microcosmos. When you listen to it you can see the beavers you have never seen before.

18. Q: Have the children seen beavers?

A: They haven’t, we don’t have beavers in Hungary. Some of them may have seen pictures of beavers in a book. Children are extremely convincing: then and there they were beavers and the eagle really fell into the water and the three beavers really saved it with a joint effort. When they tell the story they talk in first person, for example, the eagle says: “I attacked them because I was hungry”. She wasn’t acting the eagle, she was the eagle, because children are capable of such metamorphoses.

19 Q: Aren’t adults capable of this?

A: Adults can only play and perform according to their acting capabilities. That is different, that is one of the branches of art. Children, on the other hand, are capable of undergoing metamorphoses, and they do, if they are allowed to. They live in metamorphoses, the four children were naturally beavers and eagle, since they themselves invented this. If adults tried to teach them these roles, totally different things would come about.

20. Q: Why is this important? It is not reality. Shouldn’t they be educated about real life?

A: If I taught them real life, would the eagle in trouble be saved by those three beavers whom it wanted to kill initially?

21. Q: You would like them to forgive their enemies?

A: I can’t explain this as well as András Györkössy in his wonderful book did; I can’t explain the gospels, but through my long life I have found great pleasure in the fact that my students make peace and forgive in their metamorphoses. The eagle could be left to its own fate, couldn’t it? They could have let the river take it, couldn’t they?

22. Q: What do beavers and eagles have in common? They are enemies. Initially the eagle wanted to eat the beavers.

A: Is it possible that mercy and forgiveness in children is instinctual? Those in trouble must be saved even if they are enemies. However, such things maybe only be inspired by really great music. Had they danced to some worthless trash, the story may have developed in some other direction.

23. Q: What other direction?

A: That the three beavers have a joyful dance celebrating the accident of the eagle. The music was danceable enough for that.

24. Q: Then it is not how danceable the music is that counts?

A: No, it is the music’s content that counts. It is from where the ultimate values arise.

25 Q: Would you expect children to behave like this in other places and at other times?

A: I would be greatly surprised if they did. It would be a pleasant, what’s more, wonderful surprise. According to my experience, however, it takes long months and years until children dance their metamorphoses so easily and pleasurably, especially with partners. And it is the highest level of their development – if we think about a tree, it is the branch and the fruit from the height of the tree’s crown – that they saved their enemy in their scene.

26. Q: Do you deal with such thing from the very beginning, even with small children?

A: Yes, from the very beginning I help them hide in the music’s content and reach music’s core. We cherish the gift of complete attention every minute of our being together. We don’t let it crumble or fade away. We kindle it, polish it and protect it.

27. Q: You said it was difficult for group scenes to develop. Why is that?

A: Think about it: how many activities such a scene involves. What are the things they have to pay attention to? To music, to every single note, since it is to these notes that the scenes are developed: the scenes are being created as the music is playing. Inside they must pay attention to the story, which exists in their imagination and has to be unearthed from there. To these add the partners with whom they have some sort of agreement on the outline of the content. They have to pay attention to one another constantly as they are dancing, without words, with the help of the eyes or some signals. They have to understand, react to and reconcile with the others’ signals and the situations. Which of the three beavers decided that the eagle in the water must be saved? How did she communicate this to the others? Obviously very well, since all three of them were saving the eagle. These are incredibly complex tasks, at present I can’t think of a similar school exercise. A written essay is much simpler.

28. Q: Is this the reason why they have difficulty choosing a partner?

A: No. It often happens that children who otherwise like to dance with partners dance alone. For some reason they need an individual solution, There was, for example, Viktor’s beautiful scene about the spider, to the music of Bartók’s Divertimento. The spider was walking on the road when he “bumped into a junction”. He could not decide which road to take because one direction meant life, the other, death. How did you know? “Someone told me in my dreams.” Did you actually see these roads? “Yes I did.” Few of the teachers I know suppose that their seven-year-old children must cope with such dilemmas.

29. This might not be the teacher’s task, though.

A: Don’t you think this consideration is pathetic? What is then the task of the teacher? What does he or she have to do with children? Teach them the set material? Don’t you find it extremely important to get to know what your students are intrigued by? I devoted my life to this.

30. Q: What did you get to know from Viktor’s story?

A: We choose between life and death, constantly, you and I and children too. Babies might be dealing with questions of life and death, we may have to help them choose the road to life. How can we help? We set before them a carpet woven from the sounds of creative artists. Read Viktor’s story together with my questions patiently. 

31. Q: Is it difficult to put up good questions?

A: It is not if you are not asking out of curiosity but from the midst of your soul. 

32. Q: How do you explain to your students which are the right questions?

A: Now you got me. I don’t know. They may learn from examples. The live recordings of hundreds of our classes are transcribed, now they have to be retyped into a computer so that they could be organized for comments.

33. Q: In your green book you published some of these, didn’t you?

A: Yes, one from each group. It is very difficult to explain on a live recording what is happening, and to choose which event must be described in detail. That is why the written comment is necessary, provided by the teacher him or herself, if possible. 

34. Q: Would you like to write these down?

A: What do you think, would it be worth it?

Sounds in the sky

28 February 1989. Maiden Pinks

Bartók: Divertimento

Viktor: I was a spider. I was walking on the road, and at some point bumped into a junction. I could not decide which way to go: to go in one direction meant death, to go in the other meant that I would stay alive. I had to choose the direction. In my first two dances I chose the good direction, but in the third dance I died because I stepped on the other path.

Klara: How did these two directions exist for you? Did you see them?

Viktor: I did. There were two identical roads. I had to choose which one I would take, because on one of them I would have died, but on the other I could go on. 

K: How did you know you would die on one road and stay alive on the other?

Viktor: Someone told me in my dreams. 

K: What has music got to do with this?

Viktor: Its beginning is so happy, and then towards the middle it starts to sound empty and vague, because he did not know which road to take to stay alive.

K: Was the spider afraid of the music?

No, he wasn’t afraid of music, but of one of the roads.

K: What did the music do to make him choose one or the other road?

Viktor: It acted as it were like a prop.

K: How could music become a prop?

Viktor: It helped the spider find the right road, but the spider did not find it right away.

K: And if the spider found the right road, was it at some point in the music?

Viktor: Yes, at the end.

K: Why at the end?

Viktor: Because then the music is happier. The spider goes away.

K: Was the happy music on the road? Were the sounds on the road?

Viktor: No they weren’t

K: Where were the sounds then?

Viktor: In the sky.

K: How can music be in the sky?

Viktor: Somebody puts it there.

K: Can you see it?

Viktor: Yes. You can hear music from the sky.