Karissa Baker and Professor Jerry Jaccard, Department of Music Education
For my ORCA research project, I spent two weeks in Hungary studying the Hungarian music education system, with a particular emphasis on choral development. From May 4 through May 18, I traveled with my faculty mentor, Jerry Jaccard, and three other student researchers: Catherine Golding, Bethany Richards, and Christy Ripa. We divided our time in Hungary between the cities of Budapest, Kecskement, Debrecen, and Nyiregyhaza, observing music classes and private lessons, interviewing conductors, teachers, and school administrators, and attending musical performances. In so doing, we were exposed to many practices, philosophies, and ideas that will inform our future teaching as music educators. Detailing all of these experiences would take far more than two pages, so in this report I will focus on those experiences that seem most relevant to choral education.
Our research began with the Institute for Musicology/Folk Song Research Group in Budapest. Dr. Katalin Laszar gave us a tour of the Institute’s folk song archives and introduced us to the three main classification systems used: the Bartok system, the Kodaly system, and the type (or Jordani) system. She then showed us her classification system for children’s games and songs, which included 33,000 games, 10,000 of which had melodies to accompany them. This led to a conversation about the role of games in children’s development. Dr. Laszar pointed out that it can be difficult to find funding for game research because it isn’t considered serious or important. However, Dr. Laszar asserted that understanding games is important to understanding children, because children learn a lot of what they need to know for life through playing games. As an educator, this conversation about the importance of games in children’s learning has inspired me to thoughtfully use games and play to augment my students’ learning.
Our first visit to a school was to the Bela Bartok Conservatory of Music, a music high school in Budapest. At the “Konzi,” as the school is called, we observed two piano lessons with Gabor Eckhardt and an 11th grade solfege and harmony class with Tibor Szabo. In the solfege class, we observed the students do a two-part dictation of a section from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and then from a Bartok violin concerto. In an interview with Mr. Szabo and other Konzi staff, we learned that Hungarian children begin ear training of this type very early (usually around age 7), so that they have a strong musical ear in place before they begin to learn a musical instrument, which is why these students were able to complete such difficult exercises. We also noticed that their dictations came mostly from classical repertoire, rather than from pre-composed exercises like in many American music classes. Mr. Szabo explained that solfege classes typically use a mix of repertoire and specially-composed exercises for dictation. This emphasis on classical repertoire was expressed in a later interview with Katalin Losonczy at the Leopold Mozart Music School. She commented that folk music and classical music has survived over time because it expresses something that needed to be expressed. Early exposure to great classical music and folk songs creates a love for quality music.
The observations we participated in that were most valuable to my specific research area (choral development) were of the Hungarian Radio Choir School in Budapest. We were able to observe some of the choir’s rehearsals, conducted by Gabriella Thesz. As Ms. Thesz conducted the choir, I noticed that she put a very heavy emphasis on the importance of intonation. The warmups focused on building chords and listening to one another in order to sing in tune. In side comments to us, Ms. Thesz said that she never plays the chords on the piano during this warmup; she merely plays the root of the chord and the students must use acoustic intonation to find the rest of the chords. She also never used the piano to correct the students’ mistakes; instead, she would sing the correct note and have the students echo it. Throughout the rehearsal, she demonstrated high expectations of her students, asking students to raise their hand if they made a mistake and commenting to us, “They are not ‘wonder children’. They will be because of the work [that they put in], but they need to learn to sing in tune.”
Another school visit that provided a lot of insight into choral development technique was our visit to the Kodaly Hungarian Choir School, also in Budapest. At this school, we observed a rehearsal of one of the school’s choirs, directed by Ferenc Sapszon. Unlike Gabriella Thesz, Mr. Sapszon used the piano frequently in his rehearsal, especially during warmups. However, he still paid a lot of attention to training his students’ ears and intonation ability, playing dissonant clusters during their warmup exercises so they had to listen carefully to stay in tune. His rehearsal techniques also placed a heavy emphasis on proper tone, resonance, and placement. We later had the chance to interview Mr. Sapszon. He told us that in his rehearsals he focuses on keeping a balance between hard work and on the joy of music, telling us that when you focus only on the joy of music, the music is popular, but cheap. “The real joy of music is when you sing a song perfectly,” he said.
On one of our forays outside of Budapest, we visited the Kodaly Zoltan Altalanos Iskola in Nyiregyhaza, Hungary. At this school, we watched a few solfeggi classes, but of greatest interest to me was the choir rehearsal we watched, conducted by Denes Szabo. What impressed me most about Mr. Szabo’s conducting was the energy, verve, and love he put into it. Because he was in engaged in the music, the students were too. When we interviewed Mr. Szabo, he mentioned that “Kodaly said that we have to teach music in a way that children love it.” He described the importance of allowing students to grow and succeed, even those who may seem “hopeless” at the start.
In this report I have only detailed a small sampling of the many observations, interviews, and experiences I was able to participate while studying in Hungary. I have learned a great deal about how what makes the Hungarian music education system successful, particularly as it pertains to choral music. Hungarian teachers and conductors train their students’ ears early on. They pay great attention to proper intonation, breath, and tone in rehearsal. They expect their students to work hard and to achieve great things. However, the most important trait that I saw expressed in every teacher, conductor, and administrator I observed or met was a passion for great music. By loving and knowing the great music of the past, from folk songs to classical repertoires, these teachers were able to ignite in their students a desire to create beautiful music.