Music - an important companion right from the start

It's a warm Tuesday evening before the summer holidays. The second-graders are in the final rehearsal for their performance in the singing hall of Zurich's Altweg school building. «We are so happy...» the children sing in front of the still empty rows of chairs. In an hour's time, the parents will be sitting here trying to capture the special atmosphere on their smartphones.
Afterwards, they will talk about the «experience», about the «joie de vivre» they felt. Because on this evening, the primary school children will visualise what they have experienced time and again in two years of music lessons: that making music together is more than just fun. «You need music to live,» says Giulia later on the playground. The eight-year-old means this literally.

Everyone is familiar with the magic of music. Music touches us, triggers emotions in film scenes, spurs us on to sporting achievements or makes us dance. Music belongs to mankind. The oldest flutes made from animal bones that have been found are over 30,000 years old. Making music is a unique form of human expression. Since ancient Greece, thinkers have been trying to describe the essence of music.

Everything is music

Hermann Siegenthaler writes in his standard work «Introduction to Music Education» that it is possible to name elements of music (harmony, tension, tone colour, etc.). However, nobody would describe music as the sum of these terms. Music is «more than what man is able to grasp rationally».

When asked what music is, even the second-graders start to ponder. Naila praises the sounds of the instruments. Hannah likes the fact that music can always be reinvented. Ayana thinks: «Everything is music, you just have to do it right!» You can make music with «crackling stones and rustling leaves». «The stones set the rhythm.»

Music touches us, triggers emotions, drives us on or makes us dance.

Primary school children learn what rhythm is in elementary music lessons. Learning here means using all the senses to perceive the topic in such a way that the knowledge is anchored in the children's minds and music fills the room at the same time. The children tap rhythms on each other's backs, write them down, make them audible as body percussion and on drums, create appropriate movements and dance to them.

Ayana's conclusion that everything is music if you do it right shows that making music is an artistic endeavour for her. She enters a musical field and experiments. With an idea, but without knowing exactly what will come out. This is an elementary musical experience. This has the same meaning for Ayana as it does for a professional musician.

Music strengthens the brain

«Music lessons should facilitate such in-depth experiences,» says Professor Christian Berger from the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). Teachers need to create situations, so-called «resonance spaces, where people realise that music does something to them.»

Because music does indescribable things to us, it has long been of interest to brain researchers. Recordings visualise how music stimulates different regions in our brain and strengthens connections. «Yes, there are wonderful images that show where rhythm has an effect and where melody does. The images prove that something is happening, in everyone,» says Berger.

However, further studies that aim to prove that making music makes you smart do not find favour with him. They are trying to make music useful. And that leads to fads. Music lessons are then en vogue for a while, but show no value in themselves. «The value lies in our own engagement with ourselves and the phenomena of music. The confidence that it has an effect and meaning is the reason to make music,» says Berger.

Elementary music lessons, often referred to as musical primary schools, have become increasingly popular and widespread in Switzerland over the last ten years. Recently, in times of cost-cutting pressure, political circles are once again calling for music lessons to be privatised. In schools in the Zurich Oberland, primary music lessons have just been halved from two to one lesson per week.

Christian Berger knows the ups and downs. He taught lower school children himself for twenty years and remembers his employment in Appenzellerland. One day, a member of the local council sat down in his music room. The man spread out folders of documents to help him assess whether these lessons were still needed. Christian Berger knew: «It's not going to work.» After a while, he sent the children to ask the visitor to join in. «The next time, he didn't bring the folders.» And after three visits, cancelling the music lessons was no longer an issue.

What happened to the man? «He was given an experience in a place that goes beyond the experience that you would recognise as a spectator,» explains Berger. The examiner was probably of the opinion: «This means something, I liked it, you can't take that away from these children.»

The music is with me and I am with it.

Hannah, 8 years old

Making music allows us to express ourselves in a way that we might never have thought possible. On the summer evening in the Altweg school building, the parents told us that they were most amazed by the performance of those children who could hardly concentrate in the classroom.

In his textbook, Hermann Siegenthaler encourages us to think about music as a creature that is capable of addressing and transforming us at the very core of our being. Eight-year-old Hannah puts it in her own words: «It's good that I'm completely inside myself when I make music.» And she adds, beaming: «The music is then with me and I with it.»