Category: teaching material

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Flower song from Vaitari: A musical picture book from Kerala

Cover page of "Vaitari - musical picture book from Kerala"

Vaitari, A musical picture book from Kerala
Song for page 13

This colourful book creates opportunities to enjoy making music together without any prior training in Indian music on the parts of teachers and their pupils. “Making music together” means nothing more or less than using half an hour in a constructive manner without lengthy preparations, equipment, or instruments. In our approach, the use of voice and hands are wholly sufficient to participate; and pictures serve to get children involved and motivate them to draw and paint themselves before or after each lessons. But if time is limited to a single session, teachers are offered plenty to choose from and make those shared moments memorable and enjoyable.

More information about Vaitari, A musical picture book from Kerala is found on the project website: www.sam.mimemo.net (English) | Deutsch >>

Art © Arun VC >>
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“Flow” in music for integrated education and lifetime learning

“Just as flow is a prerequisite for mastery in a craft, profession, or art, so too with learning. Students who get into flow as they study do better, quite apart from their potential as measured by achievement tests.” – Daniel Goleman in Emotional Intelligence

Learn more in the context of a free, raga-based exercise that can be taught and practiced anywhere, any time with a modicum of experience and perseverance >>

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Creation, Kabir says again and again, is full of music: it is music – Rabindranath Tagore

Kabir was essentially a poet and musician: rhythm and harmony were to him the garments of beauty and truth. Hence in his lyrics he shows himself to be, like Richard Rolle, above all things a musical mystic. Creation, he says again and again, is full of music: it is music. At the heart of the Universe “white music is blossoming”: love weaves the melody, whilst renunciation beats the time. It can be heard in the home as well as in the heavens; discerned by the ears of common men as well as by the trained senses of the ascetic. Moreover, the body of every man is a lyre on which Brahma, “the source of all music,” plays.

Everywhere Kabir discerns the “Unstruck Music of the Infinite”—that celestial melody which the angel played to St. Francis, that ghostly symphony which filled the soul of Rolle with ecstatic joy.

Songs of Kabir by Rabindranath Tagore, p. 19
https://archive.org/details/songs-of-kabir

Listen to Tagore: Unlocking Cages: Sunil Khilnani tells the story of the Bengali writer and thinker Rabindranath Tagore: https://bbc.in/1KVh4Cf >>
The acclaimed BBC 4 podcast series titled Incarnations: India in 50 Lives has also been published in book form (Allen Lane).

“I was moved by how many of these lives pose challenges to the Indian present,” he writes, “and remind us of future possibilities that are in danger of being closed off.”1

  1. Sunil Khilnani quoted in a review by William Dalrymple in The Guardian, 14 March 2016[↩]