Verbal Music as an Attempt to Enter the Child’s Sound Space: Theory and Practice

Abstract

The article researches the pedagogical
potential of verbal music actualized in music
classes. The authors focus their attention
on the history of the question, suggesting
to supplement the classification presented
by S.P. Scher with such a type of interaction
between words and music as words spoken
during music (melo-recitation). While
examining verbal music in the context
of the art of music, the authors concentrate
on Camille Saint-Saens’ composition
“The Swan” from the suite “The Carnival
of Animals,” suggesting not only variants
of verbalization of the instrumental music itself
by the example of Lev Druskin’s poem
“The Swan Struggles with Human Anguish…”,
Dmitri Bykov’s “The Swan and Archpriest
Andrei Tkachev’s prose, but also the an attempt
of verbalizing the plastic intonating
of Saint-Saens’ piece realized in the work
of Anna Pavlova, Galina Ulanova and
Maya Plisetskaya. In addition, the authors bring into scholarly use the verbalization
of music presented in Evgeny Vodolazkin’s
novel “Brisbane.” Proposing a set
of assignments aimed at the actualization
of verbal music as a unique opportunity
of re-expressing musical content into
the spoken word presenting itself as a unit
of speech of the studying youth, the authors
turn to Russian scholarly literature, as well
as to that of other countries. According
to the authors, the inclusion
of the phenomenon of verbal music into
lessons provides a maximal problematization
of the studied material, helps maintain
the students’ interest in their music studies
by stimulating children’s creativity, and also
sets up the resultative qualities
of communication of all the participants
of the pedagogical process, enabling
the musicians in their realization
of the immutability of the following fact:
music can be and must be talked about!