Christy Ripa and Professor Jerry Jaccard, Department of Elementary Music Education
Contrary to what I expected when our team arrived in Budapest, Hungary, I found that it was not much different from our American cities. While they are speaking a different language and have different cultural expectations and norms, they wear modern clothes and live modern lives with indoor plumbing, electricity, public transportation, and the like. The story is not the same, however, for the small villages that are scattered across the Hungarian countryside. These small villages that are nearly forgotten are where their musical folk traditions live on. Sadly, because we only had two weeks to spend in Hungary, my group and I were unable to study the musical traditions in these small villages directly. Instead, we were able to discover the impact that the folk tradition has on the school’s music programs in the cities and schools of Hungary. As an elementary music specialist, I focused even more specifically on how these programs are structured to teach musicianship to children from a very young age with world-renowned success.
My exploration began with a tour of the Institute for Musicology-Folk Song Research in Budapest. Their research group collects folk songs from all over the country and preserves them by recording them in a system they created called the Type System. A member of their team named Lázár Katalin, who specializes in the collection of children’s songs and games, explained in detail how they organize all of the folksongs with each variation they find. She also showed us the room that contained all of their work that has taken decades to organize. From this experience, I realized how dedicated they are to never losing their folk tradition. One reason for this dedication to preservation of their folk heritage is that they have been watching children grow up in the larger cities today who know nothing about their folk ancestry and heritage. This is such a disheartening reality to them that many native musicologists spend their lives preserving Hungary’s folk tradition.
After spending one day learning from Lázár Katalin, our research group visited schools across Budapest for five days including the Bartók Conservatory of Music, the Hungarian Radio Choir School, the Kodály Hungarian Choir School, the Leopold Mozart Music School, and the University of Budapest. This list is comprised of public and private music schools/programs. Within these programs, we had the opportunity to observe private instrument lessons, music dictation/harmony classes, choir rehearsals, and choral conducting classes from first grade to university level.
I found in all classes and schools that developing the musicianship in each child was the primary focus. Musicianship can be defined as “knowledge, skill, and artistic sensitivity in performing music.” In every class, a complete knowledge of music was being taught. Knowing just the technical skills in a piano lesson was not enough. In one lesson, the teacher was helping the student to learn a three-part piano fugue, which is a piano piece that contains three different melodies that all start at different times and intertwine to make beautiful harmonies. This teacher had her student sing the middle melody while playing the two outer melodies on the piano. The musical skill this requires is far above what we expect from our children in their music lessons in America. This raised the question of why so much more is expected from the Hungarian children in their music classes and though I would need to research longer to confirm this, I believe that it is because musicianship is taken more seriously. The teachers in the schools in Hungary all have more than a love for music. They have a respect for it. This was also demonstrated when we interviewed Attila Friedrich, the school principal of the Kodály Hungarian Choir School. He is not a musician himself, though he took music classes in school growing up. When we asked him why music was such an important part of his students education he told us as if it were common knowledge that music develops the brain. He said that it is necessary to be healthy emotionally and spiritually as well as to develop children’s intelligence.
This mentality is so different from those of most principals in the United States. Noticing this different mindset would be a recurring theme as we went to Kecskemét, Nyíregyháza, and then Debrecen, which are all larger cities with well-established music programs. Every teacher, musical or not, valued music in a way I have never seen so consistently. This made applying what I learned from my research more difficult than I thought because until we have the structure and passion in American music education programs that Hungary does, we will never be able to compare to the musicality they instill in their students beginning in primary school. In Hungary, every student will grow to appreciate music regardless of whether they go on to be a musician or not. Sadly, that is not the story for American schools.
Even so, our trip was very successful. In two weeks we were able to see so many schools and classrooms whose teachers demonstrated amazing teaching strategies to us. There are so many specific teaching techniques that I will apply as a teacher to help my students be well-rounded musicians that I learned in Hungary. Musicianship will be a higher focus in my teaching. Understanding music will be more important than making music.
I wish our time could have been extended for another month for us to gain a more holistic perspective. However, our time spent in Hungary was spent wisely and we were able to learn a lot about how this world-renowned education system thinks and functions. As a researcher, I expected their success to come from their teaching techniques or their superior program. While it is true that those things contributed, I found that their passion and appreciation for music is what has the most impact. How can one person create such a passion in the American music education system? It is not possible. What I can and will do is teach music holistically and try to change the system by changing one child at a time.