During my time studying in Switzerland I had the opportunity to explore Waldorf education, founded by the philosopher, lecturer and writer Rudolf Steiner (1961-1925). Moreover, Steiner was the founder of the movement known internationally as Anthroposophy.
My first contact with the Waldorf pedagogy was through a family that worked at the Steiner School in Lugano, with whom I lived during my first six months in Switzerland. She was a eurythmist and he was a teacher at the school. Through this introduction to the pedagogy, I was able to experience an education very different to the traditional approach. This gave me a wonderful boost during my time at the Conservatory, as I had access to two pedagogical worlds at the same time: traditional and alternative.
What struck me most about the Waldorf pedagogy was that the student is viewed from three perspectives, as having a spiritual, emotional and physical dimension. The importance of harmony between these dimensions is essential to ensure a natural learning process. This experience, together with the natural environment that surrounded me in those days, formed the basis for the creation of a different method of teaching music, a method through which students are encouraged to experience the music on every level of their being.
In this way, SOUNDS, RHYTHMS, IMAGES: MIRROR OF NATURE constitutes a new vision and teaching method whereby every element of classical music is internalized by the student through the relationship of those elements to nature. The purpose of this is to help the student to learn to play a musical instrument naturally, as a mental image of nature will create a specific emotion that will lead to the performance of the appropriate action, free of tensions, through the musical instrument. In other words, students are acknowledged as beings with their own thoughts, feelings and intentions.
Over the years, this approach to teaching has evolved and developed, leading to the Integral Development Course and The Conscious Musician. But the basis of this ideology remains the same: to experience music in all its splendour, and express it in a way that is both natural and captivating.
In conclusion, I’d like to offer you the meditation that Steiner gave to all Waldorf school teachers:
“Imbue yourself with the power of the imagination; have courage for the truth; sharpen your feeling for the responsibility of the soul”
– Rudolf Steiner, The Foundations of Human Experience, Steiner Books, 1996, p. 22.
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