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The intent of this website is to register what I experience over the next few years as I live in Europe. Thanks to WordPress the website is able to be shared through the grassroots with anyone who is interested.

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AT THE END OF AUGUST 2019 I traveled to Kecskemét, Hungary to begin a three-year stint at the Kodály Institute, a conservatory for music pedagogy. There I will be studying for a BA Degree in General Music Studies with a Kodály emphasis. All the classes will contribute to develop holistic and functional musicianship and to build a foundation and framework for further expression and teaching. The Kodály concept is instrumental as the mode for achieving this. I would not do justice to the concept by trying to define it myself, so I will be posting a page on this website with the summary put out by the Kodály Institute.

N.B. Kodály = “co-dye”
Kecskemét = “kech-ke-meyt”

I can, however, attest to the effectiveness of the Kodály Concept through my own experience at the American Boychoir School [ABS] for 3.5 years, where we were taught and mentored in the same approach. Within a year, any boy who joined was a consummate musician, ready for a schedule of four 2 to 4 week long tours every year of 5 to 6 concerts a week. At peak, we realized we had been able to learn and memorize 90 minutes of music in the space of about a week, for a tour to South Korea in my 8th grade year, right after the summer break.

In our daily rehearsals and theory classes we developed the music literacy to sight read 4-part hymns for warm-ups, and internalized the music theory to translate any hymn into different modes for fun. For those who don’t know, the modes are the different sounding scales that you get when you start on different degrees of the major scale. The song “Do-Re-Mi” from the Sound of Music is in the “Ionion” Mode. If it were in “Dorian,” it would have been “Re-Mi-Fa,” with an ending “that will bring us back to RE-ey-ey-ey.” To change modes is a bit like changing the culture of a piece. The scale is different, the chords are different. We played with the hymns in ways only limited by the imagination, a necessary ingredient to ever sing something upside down and backwards!

What we could improvise amazed some of our university audiences, but only because they hadn’t been trained with the Kodály Concept. We had been, and the musical framework that it gave us made interacting with music at that level a breeze.

Through the Kodály Concept we understood the music well enough to comprehend it as simple. With that caliber of understanding, music-making became more achievable, enjoyable, and worthwhile than it ever is for most people. This is why I choose to go to Hungary. I consider music to be like the old Greek goddess–the Muse. There are some of her traits that you just cannot experience or share with others unless you are close enough.

Sincerely,
Samuel Rausch

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