(Throughout the Year: Five-Note-Melodies)

Fifty two pages
Unison

By Dorothea Hahn.

From the Preface:
These songs are particularly suitable for our Engelberg Five Note Recorder. At first, however, these melodies should be sung, so that the young musician, hidden in each child, has assimilated the melodies and rhythms before trying to find the notes on the recorder with their tiny fingers.
They are the result of working with the musical elements of unison melodies and from the desire to have a little song appropriate for each event of the year.
The school year begins after the summer holidays, therefore the first song is a harvest thanksgiving song.
The little ones usually only get their recorders after half term, therefore the most simple song is called Late Autumn; however, we often had to invent new verses for this song up until Easter – it is so hard to abandon the first song ever learnt!
At the end of the book there are a few songs that go beyond the range of the Five Note Recorder.
Even though most of these songs were written for the first year at school, we would like to ask the parents to please sing along with the children! Children need to hear their parents singing to develop their own sense of hearing and by trying to imitate what they hear to develop their own vocal chords. Without the parents’ help, the spiritual, heavenly power of music could be lost forever.
Of course children also need to sing songs in a higher register to develop their voices, but surely everyone will know appropriate songs. Our specific concern, however, is for the children to develop real inner security within this limited note-range. Only this security can awaken the courage and desire to dare to explore a wider range of notes.
A few more comments for those who are keen to work with our recorder.
An especially fascinating aspect of the work with very small children is Dr Steiner’s descriptions from the Torquay Course (GA 311, Torquay, 18.8.1924). He talks about the necessity “to have music lessons for children from the very beginning, to sing songs with them but also introduce them to instruments that can be blown…Children gain most from learning to play a simple wind instrument and therefore slowly begin to understand music.”
Rudolf Steiner tells us: This observation makes it clear that, already from the very beginning, the art of interpretation is central and, in the true spirit of the Steiner philosophy of education, needs constant renewal.
As performing musicians we are aware of the huge demands made on our artistic commitment, as expressed in the following extract from “Tone-Eurythmics” (GA 278, Dormach, 21.2.1924):
Does this not mean that the melody is in fact a living, spiritual being? And how can we bring it alive on earth without our fullest inner commitment? The little child already understands the concept that melody is a heavenly princess which we can, again and again, collect from the gates of heaven, and which can only find its way on earth if we take it by the hand and guide it. It feels so natural to the child to look up the steps of the heavenly ladder, to invite the princess to come down again to visit us. As a heavenly being, music comes closer to us when we turn towards it, therefore it is important to strengthen the soul of the child we are responsible for, to awaken inner activity – this is the responsibility of music lessons.
Our Engelberg Five Note Recorder intentionally has only five notes: it is so easy to play that children can already experience the rewards of working hard at something in their first year at school. It is important that every child can have this experience, and this seems to be a realistic goal when using an instrument with only four holes.
Another concern of ours was to create a recorder into which enough air could be blown to strengthen the child’s breathing muscles. Don’t we nowadays tend to concentrate only on breathing in? But a re-vitalising inhalation can only take place if, before that, we exhale strongly: and what a joy for a child to be able to transform this intake of air into a complete sound!
We must make sure from the very beginning that the tip of the tongue is used for the articulation of a note – it is our servant that opens the gate for the note at the right time. It is a well known fact that the consonants D and T play an essential role in the development of a child’s thought process (GA 307, Ilkley,8.8.1923).
Therefore, it is important to use them here through the music. These are the obvious visible aspects of the small recorder. But the important thing is that there are so few technical difficulties to master that we can concentrate on this essential starting point.
So, let’s begin. The teacher, of course, needs to demonstrate every exercise, as the child needs to hear the sound to be imitated. Sometimes it can take a long time to reach the ear of a child, as they often close themselves off. A newborn baby, for example, will try to protect itself from the noise of the outside world. But our goal should be to make our children listen properly.
The teacher can let the notes speak to each other and ask each other: “Are you there?” This is totally different from asking the pupil: “Please play this note three times”. With the help of this little sentence, we can also inspire musical thought. A musical conversation between teacher and pupil develops. It is always very important to keep this inner movement and to lead our melodies, again and again, to and from silence and from one note to the next.
For us adults, notes often have a static quality, they exist by themselves and in isolation – we simply join them to each other. But we ignore this fact by playing them fast and thereby creating an illusion of movement. But doesn’t our soul sometimes still feel empty?
For children it is a tangible reality that every note has two gates: one through which the melody enters and one through which it leaves again. And it is our wonderful, but also responsible task to awaken not only the outer but also the inner ear of a child, with which it perceives the silent, heavenly force of music. This is important, so that the child can develop a strong enough inner substance which will carry it through the difficult times of later life, through the many assaults from outside aimed at stopping young people from understanding themselves.
 
Dorothea Hahn