p For the child with a sensitive emotional nature the world around him sharpens his capacity for emotional involvement and experience. Children endowed with such natures are unable to be indifferent to the grief, suffering, or misfortunes of others; their conscience obliges them to come to the help of their fellow-men. This sensitivity can be fostered by music and song.

p The quality of emotionality which characterises the child with a well-developed sense of morals and aesthetic taste is reflected in the fact that the child’s heart is highly responsive to kind words, exhortations or advice. To put it another way, if you are anxious for words to teach children how to live and for your charges to aspire after good then foster the sensitivity and emotional responsiveness in young hearts. One of the numerous means of influencing them is music. Music and morality: the relationship between these is a subject requiring profound investigation and study. (10, 165)

p The quality of the education work carried on in a school is to a large extent determined by the degree to which school life is permeated with musical activity. Just as gymnastics keeps a child’s body straight so music keeps a child’s heart straight. (14, 6)

p Music is a most miraculous and subtle means for conveying the appeal of what is good, 241 beautiful and humane. Man attains knowledge of himself as he listens to music, he realises that he, man, is a splendid creation born to be splendid and that if there is wrong within him, it must be vanquished; music helps him to an awareness of wrong within him. (14, 6)

p Music enhances man’s awareness of what is noble, splendid and beautiful not only in his environment but also within himself. Music is a powerful instrument of self-education.

p Many years spent observing the intellectual and emotional development of one set of pupils from their early years and right through school convinced me that the overwhelming unorganised impact on children of cinema, radio and television do not further but rather undermine correct aesthetic education. Particularly detrimental in this respect is an abundance of haphazard musical impressions. It seemed to me that one of the most important tasks involved in educating children was to make sure that their exposure to musical works should be alternated with exposure to that environment in which man is best able to understand and sense the beauty of music—namely the quiet peace of fields and meadows, the rustle of leaves, the song of the lark in the blue sky, the whisper of a corn-field rippling in the wind, the buzzing of bees. All this and more make up the music of Nature, that source from which man gleans his inspiration when creating musical melodies.

p Vitally important in aesthetic education as a whole and musical education in particular are the psychological principles which the teacher takes as his guide as he strives to introduce children to the world of the beautiful. For me the most important principle was education of the ability to respond emotionally to beauty, and the need for impressions of an aesthetic character. I regarded as an important goal of the whole system of education teaching man to live in the world of the beautiful, so that he becomes unable to live without beauty, so that the beauty of the world created beauty within him.

p In the “School of Joy" particular attention was paid to listening to music—works of music and the music of Nature. The first task which this involved was stimulating emotional response to melody and then gradually convincing children that the beauty of music is rooted in the beauty of the surrounding world. Musical tunes should be used to compel us to stop in our tracks and listen to the music of Nature, to delight in the beauty of the world, to protect that beauty and multiply it. Long years of experience have shown me that man attains command of his native speech and the fundamentals of musical culture—the ability to apprehend, understand, feel, experience to the full the beauty of melody—only during his childhood.

p All that is let slip during childhood, is very hard, almost impossible to make up as an adult. A child’s heart is equally responsive to 243 his native language, to the beauty of Nature and to musical tunes. If a child in his early years is taught to respond emotionally to the beauty of a work of music, if a child is able to sense the many-faceted nuances of emotion in sounds, he raises himself up to a level of cultural experience which is not to be attained by any other means. The awareness of beauty in a musical tune opens up to a child what is beautiful within his own character: the young person becomes aware of his own dignity. Musical education is not education for the musician but first and foremost education of the Man. (10, 52-53)

p I would select music for the children to listen to in which the familiar sounds they heard around them were conveyed in striking images: the twittering of birds, the rustle of leaves, the rumble of thunder, the rippling of streams and the howling of the wind.... At the same time I would make sure the children were not exposed to an overabundance of impressions. Once again I reiterate that too many musical images are harmful for children, for they can lead to confusion and later blunt a child’s emotional responsiveness completely. I never used more than two tunes a month, but used each one to carry out a wide range of musical study, aimed at arousing in my pupils the desire to listen to the piece of music in question again and again and ensuring that each time the children would discover new beauty in the piece. It was very important that as the 244 children listened to the music specially selected to further their mastering of the fundamentals of musical appreciation, there should be no haphazard, random musical impressions. After listening to tunes children should be encouraged to listen to the quiet of the fields and in the interval between the tunes they should be urged to aspire after an understanding of the beauty of Nature. (10, 54)

p Music lends to fairy-tale characters real life, a heart and ideas; music leads children into the world of Goodness. (10, 56)

p Music provides rich food for thought. Without musical education a child’s full mental development is impossible. The roots of music are to be found not only in the world around us, but in man himself, his inner world, his thoughts and words. A musical image is a new revelation of the objects and phenomena of the real world. A child’s attention is concentrated, as it were, on objects and phenomena which were revealed to him in a new light by music, and his thoughts paint a vivid picture; this picture begs for words. A child creates through words, gleaning from the world around him material for new concepts and ideas.

p Music—imagination—fantasy—fairy-tale— creativity: that is the path by means of which the child is able to develop his mental and intellectual ability. Music conjures up vivid pictures for children. It helps a child better than anything else to apprehend the creative power of the mind. While listening to the 245 melodies of Grieg the children imagined to themselves fairy-tale caves, thick forests, good and evil creatures. Even the quietest among them felt the urge to speak; the children’s hands stretched out for pencils and paper in their eagerness to reproduce the fairy-tale creations of their imagination in drawings. Music summons up mental energy in even the most inert of children. It is almost as if it poured into the cells of their brains some wondrous power. That impetus to children’s mental abilities under the influence of music I came to regard as the emotional source of thought. (10, 55)

p Gradually we are compiling a collection of musical works the children like best. From time to time we gather to listen music. I refer to this collection as our “musical box”; the children like this name and tell others with pride: “We have a music box”. This has prompted us to select some of the finest pieces from the treasure house of our musical heritage and set up a “Music Room”, where children can take pleasure in this beauty. ... There we shall sing, learn to play the violin and piano, but that is still a plan for the future and for the moment we shall play tunes on our simple reedpipes.

p One overcast day we went out into the nearby grove and fashioned a reed-pipe out of an elder twig. We polished it smooth and cut out little holes. Then I played the tune of a Ukrainian folk song about a merry shepherd. It is difficult to express in words the excitement 246 that gripped the children. Each of them was anxious to try his hand at playing the pipe and they all started dreaming of musical instruments of their own. After that each one of them made a reed-pipe for himself. (10, 59)

p Truly humane sentiments find expression in music, as they can in words. By stimulating a child’s awareness of music we ennoble his thoughts and his aspirations. Our aim must be to let melody open up in each child’s heart a life-giving source of human emotions. Just as in the vital words of his native speech, so in music the beauty of the world around him is revealed to a child in all its bright splendour. Yet tunes are the language of human emotions and they reveal to a child’s heart more than the beauty of the world; they also reveal to men human greatness and dignity. When enthralled with music a child senses that he is a real person. A child’s soul is that of a sensitive musician. If you succeed in reaching its taut strings then you shall be rewarded with the most enchanting music, and not only in the figurative but also in the direct sense. Childhood is as unthinkable without music as it is without play or without fairy-stories....

p Music is the most fruitful of soils in which there can grow up real communication between teacher and child. It opens men’s hearts so to speak. As they listen to fine music, experience and delight in its beauty together, teacher and pupil draw closer to one another and come to understand each other better. (10, 60)

p Words have never been adequate to explain music’s infinite depth. Yet without words it is impossible even to draw near to that most subtle sphere of emotional revelation. I tried to make of my words, of my explanations of music, some kind of emotional stimulus which would awaken not only sensitivity to music as the direct language of the heart. Words should attune children’s sensitive heart strings.... Explanations of music should contain a poetic element, something that brings words and music closer to each other. This I tried to achieve by appealing to pupils’ emotional memories: with the help of words I created pictures that should awake memories of past experiences___(12, 305)

I attempted to make those young hearts aware of man’s subtlest feeling, the feeling of love. The positive influence which music can have in this sphere of teenagers’ emotional life is enormous. Music which can embody the voice of the loving heart enthralled and captivated by the beauty of woman nurtures in future wives and hushands, mothers and fathers, the romantic, pure and noble emotion of tenderness. ... I would advise all who teach children of this age to provide less talks and lectures, debates and question-and-answer evenings on this subject but rather to encourage them in silent thoughtful mood to listen to music on the theme of love. (12, 307)