The Kodály Concept for Harp

The Kodály Concept for Harp

Motivation is one of the key elements in all teaching. To motivate is to provide the student with an incentive for learning the material being studied. In music teaching, this incentive for learning should be found in a joyful learning experience that can be achieved by using the appropriate teaching material combined with the proper teaching method. In Kodály's teaching method there is a balanced combination of these two elements that is applicable from the very beginning of music studies to the most advanced professional level. For example, for young children, the desire to learn to play on their instruments the authentic native folk songs they know, understand, and sing combined with the application of a child development approach is a powerful motivator; it is also one of the basic principle tenets of the Kodály Method. Listening or playing to complex music from early childhood may improve a child's ability to learn, memorize, think logically, and be more creative generally. Such is the belief engendered by the cutting edge of today's educational research. Much of today's published educational research centers around the development of a child's neurological capacity to learn. For example, in Owensboro, Kentucky, all children in Daviess County's elementary schools received piano lessons in the year 1997-98. The idea was to develop the mind, not strictly to make music. Everything in those schools - from learning to play chess, to being regularly exposed to the visual and performing arts, to learning the ABC's in Spanish as well as English - was calculated to increase neuron connections following the basic idea of the Graduation 2010 project. During the next 12 years, a research team at Western Kentucky University will follow up on this research in the hope that this project with a common sense approach will have a major impact on the students' achievement and capacity to learn. In Hungary, similar research was done between the years of 1969-1973 focusing on the effect of the Kodály Method in teaching elementary school children. Among the research findings, it was determined that additional music education resulted in a combination of high creativity with emotional sensitivity, greater thoroughness or exactness in the children's school work, and inner control in the children's personality. Furthermore, the research demonstrated that the Kodály musical training not only increased the students' level of creativity but increased it to the level where it surpassed the level predicted by measures intelligence.