Chapter 4: Imagination, and Putting It All Together

This burning quality… should be there in every human being, really. In order to live a full life, you have to burn about something… Let’s not pretend that this is a nicely air-conditioned room. This is a furnace at times, and so it should be, because you’re dealing with things which are at the absolute heart of what it means to live a meaningful life. 

- Stephen Hough [1] 

Clearly the sound development of our ears, our voices and our bodies depends to a great extent upon the sound development of our emotional and imaginative life. If we have failed to grow up singing, listening and moving our bodies freely, it may be due to a number of self-protective reflexes hammered into us by our emotional or scholastic upbringing which may cause us to be tense, self-conscious and fearful. Therefore we have “become afraid of the encounter with new musical experience, where knowledge and expertise are no guide and only the subjective experience honestly felt can serve.” [2] 

Children do not start out like this. Their lives, if we allow them to be so, are defined by “subjective experience honestly felt”. They interface with the world through role-play, games and make-believe. This is how they learn to be whole human beings, if we let them. Therefore education – and not just in music – needs to be full of stories, fantasy, and “what ifs”. There is no point in introducing a song by saying, “Now children we are going to sit down and learn this song,” if instead we can say “Oh! Listen! Can you hear that? Now what could that be?” As the wonderful Mark Schneider always put it: “First capture the imagination; then present the idea.” [3] 

If children are truly to express themselves musically, they must not lose touch with that part of them where they feel beauty and passion and are able to be vulnerable. In the words of Kodály, “If the music has come from the core of your being, if you have really felt it, it will have the same effect on others, too.” [4] 

This surely is the best thing about music: that, taught and learnt properly, it can help to transform our hearts, to sweep away the emotional cobwebs which may be paralysing us, to teach us to look away from ourselves. Learning music with the right priorities can teach us that what we achieve is less important than how we relate to others, that what we say is less important than how we listen, that what we play is less important than how we feel what we are playing. 

Putting it all together 

We have, over the course of the last four chapters, discussed several different aspects of music teaching. But I hope you can see how they all – Csikszentmihalyi, Alexander, Dalcroze, Kodály – point in the same direction. Music education is a process rather than just a product, an intrinsically valuable journey, one which is rooted in the centre and which therefore demands to be taught from the centre, one which provides its own on-going goals, gives its own on-going feedback, and demands and encourages a working balance between skills and challenges. 

Let us return to the three roots of musicality which we discussed in Chapter One: (1) the physical (body, movement), (2) the aural/vocal (listening, singing), and (3) the emotional/imaginative/ spiritual. These roots are so intertwined as to be virtually inseparable, particularly in very young children. 

In Chapter Three, we discussed at length some of the many ways in which the body is necessary to bring out the musical expressivity of voice. Now let us consider for a moment the converse of this: how the voice is necessary to bring out the musical accuracy of the body. As we saw in Chapter Two, the voice demands conscious listening: singing (or even speaking) makes us aware of what we are doing musically. Therefore, the voice is an essential tool in teaching the body to act.

So, for example, if you say to a group of children, “Listen: walk in time with this music!” you are likely to get mixed results. Listening, as we have seen, is not something which comes naturally to everyone; it is a skill which we can all learn to do better. If on the other hand you say your class, “Walk with me, and everyone say ‘Ta, ta, ta, ta…’” then you will get far better results. This is of course an example of one of the things we saw when we discussed Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas in Chapter One: If our music students are really in “flow”, then the music provides its own on-going feedback: we do not need to tell them to “walk in time”, but can let their own vocal music (“ta, ta…”) be their guide and their teacher. 

I often say to children, “Do you have clever feet?” The answer of course is: “No! Your feet have got no brains at all. They will only know what to do if you use your voice to tell them what to do. So everyone say ‘Ta, ta…’” The principle can of course extend to any musical situation: If you want them to run in quavers, ask them to say “Titi titi…” If you want them to take long slow steps, make them say “Ta-a, ta-a…” And so on: “Do you have clever hands? No!” – “Do you have a clever beater? No!” In all cases, ask your students to use their voices to tell their feet/hands/beater what to do: it will work. 

If there is one thing which makes the Stepping Notes approach to music education distinctive (and there are honestly very few such things), it is the importance of always maintaining this link between movement and singing, between the body and the voice. The Kodály people will teach you far more than I can about sitting still and singing; the Dalcroze people know more than I about moving to music whilst keeping your mouth shut. But I believe that, because of the nature of young children which we discussed in Chapter One, the body and the voice should always act together. This link must be practised and practised, reinforced to the point where the link between voice and body is so secure, and has become second nature to the children, that they always use voice and body together – the body to give expression to the voice, and the voice to give accuracy to the body. 

Then, it will be possible to give children a specific instruction, either to be silent, or to be still – without it detracting from their musicality! You see, there is a world of difference between not singing and singing inside: we want children to do the latter, not the former. And there is no comparison between not moving and moving inside: the latter is what we want. We want children to be singing inside even when their voices are silent; we want them to be moving inside even when their bodies are still. This is true musical imagination. 

If children sing for everything, then even silence is full of sound. If they move for everything, even stillness is full of movement. This is how they develop an “inner ear”, by hearing sound and feeling movement deep inside them even when they are neither singing nor moving. Then, as they move on to instrumental playing, they will still be singing and moving inside as they play their instrument. Their instrumental playing will be a product of their inner voice. Their inner voice will be in control of their instrument, not at the mercy of it. This is true musicianship: our students deserve this.

---

[1] Stephen Hough, quoted in “Imagine… Being a Concert Pianist”, television programme, dir. Rupert Edwards, broadcast on BBC1, 6^th July 2005

[2] Christopher Small, Music, Society, Education (Wesleyan, 1996), p. 5

[3] Mark Schneider, on Stepping Notes music course, 19^th Nov. 2011

[4] The Selected Writings of Zoltan Kodály (Boosey & Hawkes, London), p. 191

**********************************************************************

© 2025 Nikhil Dally
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.