Singing – When a Trinity Becomes One

The picture shows the sculpture Three Singing Women by Ernst Barlach. The photograph was taken by Andreas Weiss. The sculpture is located in the Ernst Barlach House in Hamburg.

Singing is one of the most natural and spontaneous forms of human expression. It is related to laughter and crying, and even infants express themselves through tonal vocalization and react when they hear their mother or father singing or speaking. Music is a nonverbal language that defies linguistic conceptualization—and yet it is understandable to humans. Music can express emotional states such as longing, joy, sadness, and hope, or even create them in the first place. The individual experience of music is not bound by any temporal causality—depending on the situation, it can evoke memories of the past, hope for the future, or awareness of the present.

Musiké: Unity of language, song, and movement

In ancient Greece, the term musiké was used to describe a holistic process of life that cannot be translated today. Musiké describes a symbiosis between language, song, and movement that is no longer comprehensible today. In his History of Musical Education, musicologist Karl Heinrich Ehrenfort describes musiké as a fusion of word, melos (melody), and rhythm. Language, singing, and movement were not used in their respective individual disciplines, but only in the unity of this trinity. Over time, these three activities became increasingly emancipated from one another, so that by late antiquity at the latest, this process of separation was complete. Language, singing, and dance became artistic disciplines that were practiced separately from one another.

When children are completely absorbed in free play, it can give us an idea of what musicé might have been like as a life process. The seriousness with which the child devotes itself to play is never heavy or rigid, but always carries within it the child's inherent lightness and tendency to allow whatever comes its way. The child experiences play in accordance with its holistic nature: movement, feeling, and thought form a unity. 

Flow in music-making

We find the same principles at work in art and in making music together. The deeper you immerse yourself in a piece of music and allow it to resonate within you, the more likely you are to enter a state of flow in which none of your mental activities need to take center stage. Thinking, feeling, and willing merge into an overall artistic expression that cannot be planned, but must be allowed to arise from the moment. In this present moment, the future arises immediately. In such an artistic moment, people create the future because they can let go of their expectations formed in the past in order to open themselves up to what comes to them from the immediate moment of the future. Based on Schiller's famous statement from his letters «On the Aesthetic Education of Man», the following thesis can therefore be put forward: when singing, people are completely human.

Singing in Waldorf education

«In art, man liberates 
the spirit bound in the world. 
In musical art, man liberates 
the spirit bound within himself.» (Rudolf Steiner)

Music and singing have traditionally played an important role in the history of Waldorf education. Singing is an integral part of music and main lessons, school festivals, class plays, concerts, annual festivals, the beginning and end of the school year, and many other occasions. Paul Baumann, music teacher at the first Waldorf school, established a lively music culture at Uhlandshöhe that can still be experienced at many Waldorf schools today.

Singing together in class can harmonize many things. It is possible to achieve musical harmony and a shared flow of breath. A listening space is created that is also a singing space. Singing can help people achieve a harmonious balance between thinking, feeling, and willing. Making music together can have an immense community-building effect if teachers actively exemplify values such as mutual appreciation and mindfulness in their interactions with one another and try to cultivate a corresponding atmosphere in music lessons. However, criticizing what children and young people are not yet capable of doing musically can easily lead to individual students being excluded, developing a fear of failure, and thus being forced into a situation of lack of freedom.

From accuracy to reception culture

The reason why so-called classical music and the music education that has developed from it place too much emphasis on the shortcomings of musicians lies in the history of music itself. Classical music is understood as precisely notated music and follows the norms of right and wrong. Until the Baroque era, musicians still had a certain amount of freedom to improvise in their musical performances. The cadenzas of various solo concertos of the Viennese Classical period, in which there was still room for improvisation by the soloist, can also be seen as the last remnants of free musical practice.

From the mid-19th century onwards, however, a professional bourgeois concert culture developed in Europe, gradually replacing courtly and ecclesiastical liturgical music. In addition to contemporary music, compositions from past eras were also performed for the first time, which led to the establishment of a musicological culture of reception that clearly defined what was right or wrong in terms of interpretation. In this context, a music pedagogy developed that demanded unconditional adaptation to the requirements of the musicians in terms of the exact implementation of the musical text. In practice, we often see children, young people, or music students presenting themselves to the audience with self-deprecating facial expressions after a supposedly imperfect musical performance, thereby opening the door to criticism of their shortcomings. Such a musical educational context focuses less on individual creative possibilities and more on the adaptability and competitiveness of individuals. 

I assume that most of the music teachers currently working have gone through this educational concept themselves. One challenge will be to avoid passing on this mechanism to children and young people without reflection, but rather to transform past experiences in such a way that music education becomes alive, formulated by children, young people, and individuals, and which understands, empathizes with, and protects their creative and formative powers as a basic prerequisite.

A formative experience

I had an enormously formative educational experience in this regard about 20 years ago. I was in my second year as a young music teacher at a Waldorf school in Berlin when I was allowed to sit in on a first-grade class taught by Gabriele Bär. What I witnessed there had a lasting influence on my life and my view of being a musician.

The children sat in a circle of chairs and waited eagerly for the teacher to hand them their own little harps. When the teacher sat down too, the atmosphere in the room suddenly changed. It became quiet and the concentration was almost palpable. However, it was not a tense situation, but rather a joyful anticipation that I felt at the time. Then the teacher began to sing and the children joined in. After singing the song a few times, the children began to play the song on their children's harps at a hand signal from the teacher. Then half of the class sang again and was accompanied by the other half of the class on the harp, before the groups swapped roles again. It must have lasted about 20 minutes. And during that time, a flow developed in which the children lived, which took hold of the room and ultimately me as well. The entire atmosphere was enchanted: time and space condensed into a unique artistic moment that the teacher could not plan, because such moments elude availability and predictability. And yet I was very aware at the time that without the years of inner work done by this teacher, such a moment could not have come about. Looking back, it was certainly this experience that made me decide to become a music teacher and not just be employed as a music teacher at a school.

I subsequently observed this class many times and came to realize that love, reverence, and respect for the children are fundamental prerequisites for a healing pedagogy. This teacher loved her children—not as an educational platitude, but as the basis of her fundamental human attitude. This created the conditions for an atmosphere of wonder, increased vitality, and a sense of community to be experienced during the joint singing lessons, and the children were able to actively participate in the lessons with a sense of basic trust and security.

In my work as a music teacher, I have accompanied hundreds of children and young people on a small part of their journey through life—but above all, these young people have accompanied me on my journey to myself. This has allowed me to rediscover the musician within me and bring him to life. Even though I have lost contact with many of these former students, we are still connected by one thing in common—our singing biography.