To Myself, about Myself
Instead of an Autobiography – Klára Kokas
Do you enjoy writing an autobiography?
No, I don’t. It is difficult to scrape together all my data from memory. Since, however, I had to do it, I put my back into it and wrote it quite properly, as it should be. This piece is added to the end of my books and wherever it is needed, however, now I would write something different.
Why?
The other day I listened to an interview with a famous author on the radio. He said he writes several different types of individual autobiographies and he writes them as he pleases. I felt like giving it a try.
Do you change your data?
Naturally, I don’t change my data, I only relate to them and tell them more personally. I imagine the reader, as if he or she were sitting in front of me on the carpet, as my students do. They can ask questions, too.
Can I ask a question? Is it important for you where you were born?
It is very important. I was born in Szany, near the river Rába. I was christened in the beautiful church with three spires; there is even a popular song about this church: “The three-spires of Szany can’t be seen, there are the waves of the Rába all around, water of Rába, don’t take away my road, even in this way I can hardly see my Love”. This song was collected by my father, he was an enthusiastic collector of folk-songs and customs. What he collected from the elderly, he immediately taught to younger people.
Did he organize dancing groups as well?
Many of them! There were groups for lads only, ones in which there were also girls, and there were children’s groups, too. We, children, dressed up in pretty national costumes dragged “Shepherd Böske” along singing in the dusty streets of Szany. Böske was made of wood, she was dressed up in all the colours of the rainbow, and was spinning on a wooden wheel. We learnt the songs at school, many of them, even the ones sung in the church, because my father renewed the cantor’s job. Lajos Bárdos, Artúr Harmath, and Alajos Werner were his masters. In the summers, he would attend courses in Budapest where these great teachers were teaching village pedagogues. He came back loaded with things to learn. I remember as he sat by the piano practising harmonic progressions, and as we used to say: “Dad is modulating.”
Did you have to be silent at these times?
Oh no. Dad did not even hear us at these times. We saw him rarely in the evenings, most of the time he was rehearsing with the singers and dancers in the school nearby. There was a yard between our house and the school, we could hear their singing. Some years ago, Ignác, an old singer told me about how they loved the evening meetings. “We went even during harvest time, even though we were bending our backs from 4. a. m. till sunset on the fields. We washed up at home, ate, and then went singing.
How did the singers get together?
They say my father went looking for men in the stables. Women and children lived and ate in the kitchen. They kept the “clean room” for special celebrations. Men were talking in the stables in the evening.
Did your father run a farm as well?
I guess he wouldn’t have been able to distinguish wheat from rye, or even from oat. He grew up in Szombathely, he did not know farming work. My mother knew these things, she was a village girl. It was to her that they brought the grain, the potatoes, as most of the cantor’s salary derived from leasing the cantor’s fields and receiving a share of the produce. My parents hardly saw money. But we had enough food, we had the grains ground, pigs fattened, and we cultivated our own garden. My mother dealt with all these things, my father was not interested in grains, or the porker in the sty. He ate what my mother put before him, and then went to play organ, or among his people.
Did he educate you, his children, too?
Our mother educated us. She had time for everything: to make apricot jam and mashed potatoes, to hatch chicks, to make practical little clothes, and to tell evening tales. I never saw her tired or impatient. It was she who taught me to play the piano. She would sit by me even on the great washing day, every blessed day, for a whole hour. She wasn’t disturbed by the phone, guests or somebody speaking. We were playing the piano. I learnt from her to take all my activities seriously, to pay attention to my actions and to people.
Couldn’t your father who was a musician teach you to play the piano?
He would have taught me rhapsodically, whenever he had the time. The basis of my piano-playing was provided by everyday regularity. I was never warned to practice. We sat down by the instrument to play together, and this was always a source of joy even when it was difficult to play the two different parts at once.
Did your mother teach you to sing as well?
She provided an example with her song so that I would sing with pleasure. She was singing while she was working, or rolling the dough, or dusting the furniture, or when she was around the chicks, or in the garden: wherever it occurred to her. She sang all sorts of things, beautifully and clearly. Up to this day, close to my seventy-fifth year I sing, when I am doing housework or in the forest, even in the sea, or, at an earlier time, on my sailing boat, anywhere I am alone. I of course sing to children, too. I don’t have to prepare or decide that “Now, I am going to sing”. I just sing and that’s it.
When did you join your father’s dancers?
We played interesting games on the meadow with the children of Szany. Sometimes we performed on stage, I was probably about five when I sang under the spread kerchiefs of four older girls that “I am but little, can’t say great things. Still, I say praise unto God”, and I was throwing petals from my little handbasket. I remember some performance in Budapest, too, we did the “Bokrétások” (The flower-decked ones). Yet I remember best the courts of Szany where we girls went on our Whitsuntide procession. The boys did the Christmas Nativity Plays.
Was it difficult to leave the village where you were born?
It was horrible. I was taken to the city, Győr, in my early teens, to a boarding school run by nuns. There were many of us, and I still feel the nuns’ indifference in my bones. They never told us off, but were simply indifferent. Nine of us attended a different high-school, so every morning we went there, and at noon returned, in double file. High school teachers were called “Sir” and “Madam”, it would have been impossible to call them “Miss Piroska, or Mr. Imre”. We did not even know their names.
Were you afraid of them?
I was afraid of only one of them, the math teacher. She was fat with bulging eyes, constantly reminding me of a frog. A frightening frog, that is, which is strange, because I loved the frogs of the muddy hole in Szany very much. Since I did not know fear in the school at home, although I was sometimes bored at most, here I was frightened by not knowing something and not daring to tell it.
Couldn’t you have asked what you didn’t understand?
It was impossible to ask anything. The unit was taught, examples were put on the blackboard, then we had to write down the homework from which there was an oral test on the following day. It was mostly clear, but once I did not understand some exercise in geometry. The bulging-eyed teacher called me to the blackboard, and I could not answer her questions. She sent me back to my place with an F. The next day she did the same with the same material. The third day the very same thing. Even now I don’t understand why I didn’t dare to tell her that I don’t understand. Or ask someone at the boarding school?
Were you intimidated?
That’s right. For the first time in my life I was intimidated. That was an important lesson to be learnt, a lesson for life. I had always been a good student. Later on I was also one of the student’s whose name was printed in bold in the yearbooks of the secondary school like the president of the school arts society, athletic champion and things like that. I could never have experienced the feelings of the unsuccessful ones, the failed ones, the outcasts without the fear of that experience of the geometry exercise. The teacher would have failed me, but my other marks were good, so they wrote in my term-report: “weak in mathematics”. This evaluation was marked with an asterisk, meaning that they wrote it as the worst possible mark although it would still not mean failure. When I brought this term-record home, to Szany, I could not see or hear anything for my tears.
Were you upbraided?
Oh no. My parents would not stop consoling me and I did dare to tell them of my case with geometry. I had to tell my parents of the story through the window, because my sister was lying at home sick with scarlet fever. I was sent to my uncle’s for vacation and I was longing for a good scarlet fever from the bottom of my heart, which the gods gave me four weeks later. Fortunately, it was my mother who discovered it, and not the nuns. They would have sent me to hospital for six weeks.
How could your mother discover it from Szany?
She came to visit as soon as my sister recovered, and found me in the sick-room. She looked into my throat and discovered that I had scarlet fever. She ran away with me on some cleverly good pretence of treatment. On the train, we sat in a separate compartment, it was a real escape. Six wonderful weeks followed at home, the two of us, mum and I together and learning was a game, even geometry. I understood everything and at the end of the term my record was excellent in almost all the subjects.
Could your father and sister eat together with you during your sickness?
No, they had to eat somewhere else. Those who were infectious had to be separated even back then. I would have had to have gone to hospital, however, mum always found out ways of helping her children,. She was a genius at this.
Did your luck change for the better?
From the second year on, I went to the boarding school of the state-high-school in Sopron where I received a concession from tuition because of my record. My parents could afford this, but they couldn’t take me there for the first year, it would have cost too much. Not only the tuition-fees, but the large number of clothes we had to take along. Twelve pairs of black stockings, twelve canvas shirts, six complete sets of bed linen, uniforms and hats, some things for the spring, others for the winter. Throughout the whole summer mum was embroidering my initials into the many pieces of clothes, she had to sew numbers on everything, even the twenty-eight handkerchiefs. My number was forty-six. The whole dowry filled a wooden chest made especially for this purpose by the Szany joiner with the enthusiasm due the cantor’s family.
Did you like living in Sopron?
Very much. It was a strict institution, but they paid attention to us, and cared for everybody. Five women teachers were living with us, along with the nurse, the check-lady, and the kitchen attendant. It was a complete adult team for fifty students. True, we had to speak in German, always and with everybody in German, except when we had classes. Subjects were taught in Hungarian. In German lessons, the group was divided into beginners and advanced ones. A part of our fellow-students who were from Sopron and lived at home were German or half-German native-speakers, they were taught on an advanced level. We who came from the country and lived in the dorm were mostly beginners, even the richer ones who were trained at home by the Fräulein. I never saw a governess in my childhood, and stammered along as the beginner of beginners, but not for long.
Why not for long?
Because there were excellent teachers at the boarding school. At every meal, we had to say a German sentence to the teacher sitting and eating at our table. Thus, before meals we ran to older students for German sentences. What they said we regurgitated again and again until we reached the dining hall. There we stuttered our own sentence, and of course listened to the others, and even the teacher’s answer.
Was this the whole trick?
Yes, and it was a surprisingly successful trick. Speaking in German was difficult at first, but, since they took it very seriously, and slacking it cost us our once-a-month Sunday leave, one did not dare say anything to the others in Hungarian, not even in a rush to the toilet. We had two extra classes per week where we translated simple short stories with the help of a dictionary. Had it not been for the war, the coal-breaks coming with it, and the changing of our boarding school into a military hospital, we would have spoken our first foreign tongue fluently by the age of 15. Older groups started the second language, French or Italian, by that time.
Where did you study music?
In the music school. I had a special permit to leave the boarding school to take piano lessons. It was a great indulgence, since those living in the dorm had their own piano-teacher, the nice Miss Ella. Yet my parents managed somehow to convince our directress that I needed a music school to lay the foundations for my musical carer. It was an excellent school. We played concertos accompanied by orchestra. Of course, not always like the then ten-year-old Karcsi Botvay, but on stage nevertheless, on celebratory evenings.
Do you have any bad memories related to studying music?
None at all. I was not a genius, and loved everything. My teachers were kind to me. While I was studying it did not became clear that some day I would teach differently than the way I was taught. Neither did it come to light that I am always the one who challenges teaching methods which to be sure is to be on the less popular side.
What kind of singing do you remember from Sopron?
On every Sunday mass, we sang on the choir of the tiny Holy Spirit church, conducted by Alajos Halmos. Mr. Lojzi was small, round, busy, and full of love. We followed him, loved him, scribbled scores for him, and sang the chosen songs enthusiastically.
What about folk-songs?
We sang folk songs, too, we learnt them from him at school, the first flower-ornamented folk songbooks were published around that time. The great experience, the unforgettable one was when on Színház (Theatre) Square hundreds of us sang folk songs revised by Lajos Bárdos. I don’t even know now how many school-choirs gathered there, I recall the heart-piercing harmony, sometimes I hear it in my dreams as it is followed by flying, the flight of birds. We sang the canon “The world is boiling” there, too, that was the first Kodály work in my life.
Didn’t boys sing you a serenade?
Oh yes, they did. Students from the college of forestry and mining sang love songs to us, they sang under our window in the quiet Lővér district. Those who knew me sang folk songs to me, the “Spring wind” or the “Jasmine-bush”. They were not taught such things at college, so they practiced in the evenings. According to custom, we had to light a candle for them when we woke up to their song so that they would see through the curtain that we received their serenade. On the first occasion we didn’t know about this custom yet, so we did not light anything, just hid behind the window. Poor boys were singing out their souls in front of us, more and more beautiful songs, all in vain, there was no light. My loving gallant was singing sadly, he thought I did not like his song. He knew me as a severe critic with high musical standards.
Did you have to choose among several possibilities to continue your studies?
Never, not for a minute. Ever since I can remember I have always wanted to teach singing and study music. This hasn’t changed, now, at the age of seventy-five I want and I do the very same thing. My retirement merely changed the places, as did my contracts abroad. Teaching is not my career, not my job, not my profession, it is my being.
Were you admitted to the Music Academy at the first try?
Jenő Ádám said to me at the interview: “Klára Kokas, sing us a good Szany song, please!” For me all the teacher were precious acquaintances from my father’s tales. I could still admire my teachers, I had models, I did not even ask what they are like. One could believe in them without questions.
Did you get to know Kodály at the Music Academy, too?
Yes, he taught us folk music. We could sit scattered among the many rows of seats in the enormous “little room”, he did not check who was there and who was listening. He was not disturbed if those who were not interested in folk music solved crossword puzzles, or occupied themselves with something else. The Teacher was speaking quietly, he did not stand on the pedestal. I sat on the seat closest to him, and crouched there, absorbing his voice even through my skin. It is not what he taught but what he aroused in me that I remember. He aroused my soul’s secrets, I felt him, and started to understand myself.
Was he old already?
I did not feel his age. It was not important. I often think about what feeling it would have aroused in me to sense Beethoven from a similar closeness. Meeting the genius has been a lifetime-experience, it is still alive today, never worn, never crumbling.
Isn’t this enthusiasm childlike?
To be sure it is. I thank God for it every day. Is this perhaps from where my blazing enthusiasm – that has been ridiculed so many times – derives? My enchantment, my devoted admiration lifts me to the skies, and with the wrinkles crisscrossing my face…, well, it certainly is not a state proper to my age.
Did you feel good at the Music Academy all the way through?
No. It was in my third year when Russian, Marxist-Leninist philosophy, anxiety and terror were introduced. I was cramming these unintelligible things, I beat them into my head hard, but in the exam the young teacher – who knows where he came from – did not ask about the subject, but rather such things as “What is your opinion of the secularisation of churches?” He could well have asked: “Do you approve of imprisoning Alajos Werner? Or that we made Lajos Bárdos retire?”
Did this teacher in Budapest know your father was a cantor?
Only a young man of this age can ask such a question! The basis of communist dictatorship is that they spy everything about people, especially those things with which they may be attacked. A Catholic cantor father who is well-known to be a believer and a propagator of church music is a sure weapon in apt hands.
Were you scared?
To my marrow. I tried to run off as soon as possible, to escape and to disappear. Later my father was slapped into my face in Szombathely when I applied for a teacher’s job. “You understand, comrade, that only reliable comrades can count on teacher’s positions”.
Can they look into people’s heads?
That is what they asked me later in Holland and England when I was lecturing in several places of the world. I didn’t say a word about politics, I have never been a member or the advocate of any party. Still, they asked me how our opinions could be silenced. They did, they asked such things!
What did you answer?
At home even two-year-olds knew what they shouldn’t tell about their parents, grandparents or godparents in the kindergarten. I remember the silence in the grand auditorium of Göteborg University, the screaming silence, I may have screamed it towards them with my simple sentence.
Did the Swedes and Danes know what a great problem compulsory secrets are?
I devoted my life to making Hungarian children, my students and their parents forget their forced silence. To be silent is a joy. To be forced to keep silent is horrible. To get used to it, to grow into it is a constant bleeding, a gaping wound with torn sides.
Can music heal this?
I am collecting music that heals.
How do you collect it?
With my soul’s attention. There are many kinds of attention: compulsory, forced concentration, and attention deriving from the inside, fed by our inspiration. I collect the music I bring to my children and my students from the latter source.
In your childhood, did you listen to symphonic music in concerts?
In Szany? Not even in Pápa or Csorna could people listen to symphonic concerts at those times. We travelled to these two towns sometimes, to go to the dentist, or because we had to. In my mother’s tales kittens also travelled to Pápa where they got milk in a little plate at the confectioner’s where we used to get ice-cream in a cornet.
Did you have ice-cream rarely?
Rarely, it was a special occasion. Sometimes the bell of the ice-cream man was ringing on the Szany high street. He rode a tricycle pushing his little box full of ice-cream in front of himself. He put the ice-cream into the cornet there in the street for the pennies of the children running up to him.
Was ice-cream you experience of sweetness?
No, my experience of sweetness was the ripe apricot from the tree in our garden, the plums with their yellow inside. Today, also, fruits are what I crave the most. And the light of candle is the real lamp. We didn’t have electricity for a long time in Szany, we brought drinking water in cans from the bore well. The favourite tales of my American grandchildren are the true ones I tell about my village. “Really, Granni? You didn’t even know the phone? You never saw a tap? And what about the ceremony of baking bread?” It started with preparing the flour in a wooden tub so that it would get warm before the kneading at dawn. My mother let me get up early for the kneading, and I got a little piece of dough which I pressed into a round little basket, and which became my own bread. Father ate it, as all the other dough we made, because we were enthusiastic cooks cooking mostly barely-edible things. I was about five.
Do your grandchildren believe these things?
I have no idea what they believe to be reality and what they think is a tale. The reality of my tales is vivid in me, I have precise memories of details, too, for example, the hatching of chicks. We took the hen off the eggs to let her eat and drink and poo. We covered the chicks in a warm flannel cloth while they were drying in a basket. They were chirping quietly. The joy of my tales is reality, but the rainbow, too, the spring rainbow in whose colours I hid on the banks of the river Rába. No child has ever asked me whether this was true. They may have asked whether the lilac colour I hid in was warm, though.
Are you transported by your imagination?
I wish I were transported as children are. Let me keep my feet on the ground, but let me never doubt my rainbow clothes. In teaching I receive my childlike faith. But in life I struggle with the obligatory tasks of reality. The fridge goes wrong, the shades of the window gets torn off, the tap starts dripping. I am pulled back to the ground, and start my struggle with the repairmen.
Do they take you in?
Sometimes, exceptionally, I hit on honest craftsmen with whom I make friends and whose memory I cherish. I can walk whatever distance to a market vendor who once served me honestly, did not throw a rotten apple among my apples. I like to believe in people. It is a very delicious feeling.
Don’t you want to prepare for bad things?
I don’t. I’m for the message of the Pastorale Symphony. Beethoven put into music how I should live.
What do you do with tragic pieces of music?
When I talked about the Pastorale’s idyll, I didn’t mean that I only choose artworks that delight. Arts have their effect through their cathartic, cleansing power. The source of catharsis is mostly tragedy. The stories my students invent and dance often relate to death. The frightening periods of my life are among my most vivid memories. I had not experienced trauma in my family until the death of my parents, but history provided some terrible events. I also tasted the bitter side of things in choosing a partner. The force of the Pastorale means that enormous powers help recovery, never without suffering, but safely.
Are you never mad at people?
As I grow old, my potential for forgiving grows warmer, thicker, more personal. I work on the warm-springs of my soul, I constantly dig them up, or scrape them together: if, occasionally, one of them bursts to the surface, I am delighted in wonder, like I did once in Iceland looking at the geysers. I read and read still more, passionately, curiously, rare words, fragments may help, too. I can forgive now. But it is hard to forget. I can scrub off my hand the stains of varnish in a washing basin, and I do scrub them off, even though the dawn light in the Bay of Galatas is enough. It washes down everything without ado.
Can you say that God has distributed a valuable measure unto you?
This is my favourite part of the Scriptures. Of all the characteristics that my Maker has endowed me, I value one missing feature the most: he forgot to put the passion of competition under my skin.
Don’t you feel sorry if others go farther than you?
It is easy for me not to feel sorry. The measure allotted to me is completeness itself.
Did you feel like that when you were young?
I was certainly walking indifferently on the field of competition. I was sailing for decades, and when someone wanted to overtake me, I loosened the tension of the clew line. Any other sailor would have reacted in just the opposite way.
What about the profession? The success in music?
I wasn’t born a genius. My talent isn’t exceptional either: I have a knowledge of children. Who would like to compete in that? And if we were competing, who would judge, and in what kind of compulsory numbers?
What would the world become without competitions?
It is not my task to judge other people. It is enough if I try to discover my own soul, the round wood in which I don’t even know those trees that have been growing there for a long time, but merely go around them touching their bark, staring at their branches swaying up high. There are hardly any branches, you see, that my hands can reach.
Don’t you want to accomplish something?
Oh yes, I do. If I could, I would lift parents and teachers up with all my fingers so that even the tips of my fingers would radiate courage into them.
Courage? To do what?
To deal with their children. They would believe they could get on well with them. My mother used to believe in love as a creative force. She believed in her children, and trusted them. I had never heard her warn me about how I should behave when I live far away from her, in a strange, remote city.
Doesn’t one need warnings?
Warning won’t save you if you are balancing on the edge of a precipice. The warm gown of love will cover your shoulders no matter how far away you are and perhaps by a pair of wings.
A pair of wings?
Can you imagine that protective love needs warnings? Even the greatest painters paint angels’ wings with goose feathers. Feathered wings for an angel’s flight. Bach’s Hosanna doesn’t need a painted or drawn wing, it flies without it.
Did you fly with the Hosanna?
Yes, back then, and ever since then. I was in love with the world. I am in love with the world now. In the old days my body spoke about love, nowadays it is the wrinkle on my face that does. Isn’t this completeness?
Do you have friends?
I do, real ones. I may not see my old friends for decades, but when we meet again, we are aglow in the encounter. Really good friends help me in those things which, they know, mean life to me.
Don’t you tire your friends with your intensity.
Sure, I do. I know what is too much for them, and when they have had enough of me. At those times I take a deep breath, fall silent and think about flowers. White violets from Szany. In this way I don’t become sad if I am not understood.
Did it hurt you earlier if they didn’t understand you?
It threw me into despair, and stirred me up to the bottom of my soul. I was at pains to explain what to me are the most important things. I had so many things to say, even my fingertips were bubbling with them. If patience had been prevailed, I would have failed.
How did you learn patience?
Without noticing it, as my character was forming. I understand and accept people more and more. I don’t take offence at being hurt or left out. My wonderful and beautiful human relationships compensate me thoroughly. Once Péter Nádas came to my flat to watch my Duende film on a videotape. He understood the film so thoroughly, so immediately, without asking questions that I have always remembered it. If the Duende is not understood somewhere, this memory always helps.
What do you learn with pleasure?
Oh, all sorts of things, I love to learn by ear. The radio is my favourite, it is everybody’s university, all the interviews with scientists, writers! I often sit down to write letters to people whom I first heard on the radio, and I search for their addresses, because the programme-editors never answer when I request the addresses from them. Such requests must be unusual. I always hear an unbelievable number of new things, since I don’t know about biology, medicine, architecture, or gardening, or astronomy. I listen and wonder. I am, however, interested in environment protection the most, as my children and grandchildren are. My grown-up grandchildren protect or cure birds, take underwater photographs of fish, or of hundred-year-old oaks in Umbria. My little grandchildren get ladybirds and tree-frogs for Christmas, they have such things there. The ladybirds first get some raisins as they swarm in a little house with cellophane windows, the whole family admires them. Then they fly out to the garden and away to the world.
How did you learn languages?
I always learn languages. In the old days I used to put the list of English or Spanish words in a nylon-folder at the end of the swimming-pool and was swotting them as I was swimming back and forth. I was listening to and repeating tape-recordings of poems while I was walking. I loved French poems very much. They consoled me in one really miserable year of my life.
Do you like talking to strangers?
Yes, very much. I am interested in what they say. It doesn’t really worry me if I make grammatical mistakes, I am not a bit ashamed of that. That is how I met great people during my lectures abroad. Their addresses are piled up on my table, I’ll still have to go through them.
Which is the the most difficult language for you?
Modern Greek. It is a hopeless love-affair. I am struggling with it, but I could not even reach a basic conversational level. I never give up, though, I would like to teach Greek children, this is my fondest dream.
What if you don’t succeed in something?
I despair. I try again. I can’t sleep. Then one of the mornings I wake up joyfully: some other solution has come about. It is brought before me! Not on my merit, out of mercy.
Do you rank things you would like to achieve?
Of course I do! There are huge gaps in the rank though.
Do you imagine death, your own death?
If I don’t look into a mirror, I can’t even believe my age, nor my wrinkles, even though the recently I haven’t been asked for my ticket on the tram, the conductor looks at me and goes on. It is obvious that I am past seventy. And my nice doctor who used to sing in my choir as a high-school student has raised objections against my blood pressure lately. And the shop assistant in the corner shop with whom I discuss his progress in guitar-playing, is the same age as my older grandson.
What if you do imagine it?
It would be impertinent to ask for a death without suffering. Fortunately, that is not my job. My Maker will arrange this, too, as he has arranged so many things around me.
A SHORT AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF KLÁRA KOKAS
Klára Kokas was born in 1929 in Szany (Sopron county, Hungary). She received her Teacher’s diploma: from Ferenc Liszt Hungarian Academy of Music, in 1950. Klára went on to study at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, and obtained a PhD in psychology and pedagogy at in 1970. Her teaching career included positions as a choir master at both elementary and high school as well as at teachers’ training college.
She founded a musical elementary school, then a musical kindergarten from 1954-1965 in Szombathely. Klára organized therapeutic activities in Budapest from 1965-1970, for children left by their parents.
She was the first to lead an American research program for the Kodály Institute from 1970-1973 in Boston, Mass., USA, and was an associate professor at the Zoltán Kodály Music Pedagogy Institute from 1973-1989 in Kecskemét. Klára has also led innovative aesthetic-education studies for a school reform project organized by the Hungarian Academy of Science from 1973-1988.
She initiated a therapeutic program for blind children from 1990 to 1996 in Budapest. Since 2003 she has run a special program for expectant mothers and mothers with babies, and a family program where children can enjoy Klára’s teaching together with parents and grandparents.
In 2006 she initiated a novel approach for introducing music to children in a museum.
She is the founder of Agape – Joy of Music, Joy of Life Foundation (in 1990 in Budapest) and has received honours for her achievements in musical pedagogy and therapy from her native Hungary and has also been distinguished for her work in Greece.
She is still active in teaching and presenting in four different languages throughout Europe and Scandinavia, as well as the Mediterranean, Australia, and North America. She is running accredited courses in Hungary for school- and kindergarten teachers. Throughout Hungary more and more of her former students use the Kokas pedagogy while teaching various age groups of children with different background.
Klára’s work is published in four books and almost a hundred articles. A great many of her documentary and video films have been requested and shown for professional presentations.
Klára has two children, five grandchildren and a great-grandson. She continues to live in Hungary, where nature is her life-giving element and she happily spends not only her free time but also her creative activities outdoors. She is passionate about protecting the environment.