‘Music for Everyone’ at Holy NamesRobert Commanday writes:
A master project in the teaching of music was celebrated in a big way last Thursday. It was at Holy Names University in the Oakland hills, where the Kodály Center for Music Education has been operating for exactly 40 years. Under the title “Music for Everyone,” a three-day symposium gathered current and past faculty from many countries, student teachers, other music professionals, and admirers. Thursday night honored the Holy Names sponsorship of this institution, beginning with Sister Mary Alice Hein, the director who founded the program in 1969 and was inspired by an encounter at Stanford with the great Hungarian composer, Zoltán Kodály. Striving for universal musical literacy was his lifelong mission. This, the principal Kodály Center in America, was its first.
The gala event, chaired by the Kodály Center director, Anne Laskey, was graced by eloquent addresses: by Sister Rosemarie Nassif, president of Holy Names University; Gilbert de Greeve and Jerry Jaccard, president and vice president, respectively, of the International Kodály Society. De Greeve, a distinguished Belgian pianist, spoke of finding your “spiritual center through the language of music,” that “music makes the mind more sensitive to everything else,” and he stressed “the right of every person to be taught the elements of music” — as a subject, “music is not an option but basic.” Jaccard, associate professor of music at Brigham Young University, and a graduate of the Kodály Center at Holy Names, spoke along these lines in a most convincing fashion. Finally, the Hungarian government through a representative of its Consul General in Los Angeles, presented an award to Sister Mary Alice Hein.
A concert by Chanticleer set off the evening perfectly. Singing a full program — from Josquin to Mahler and Samuel Barber, and including folk song arrangements and other secular pieces — the dozen men, sang as one and beautifully, were never better.
The weekend’s activities concluded the Kodály Center's 2008 Summer Institute for teachers. For more information about the Center and short movies about Kodály’s approach and vision, go here.
Music News 7/29/08 - San Francisco Classical Voice website: sfcv.org
