Willems® thinking
To describe in a few words what the Willems® Pedagogy is is a challenge! For although the main elements of Edgar Willems’ thinking are very simple, their development allows us to grasp the whole range of questions relating to musical education, from the initiation of the first contacts with music to its instrumental practice at the professional level.
The Foundations of the Willems® Pedagogy
From a methodological and pedagogical point of view, this is probably the most characteristic element of this proposal, which has been tried and practised since 1950: all the musical principles introduced in the first courses must remain relevant in professional practice, and a fortiori in amateur vocal and instrumental practice.
This implies an in-depth reflection on all the elements that make up music: rhythm, melody, harmony and on how to introduce, practise and name them.
The correlation between music
& human nature
Edgar Willems highlighted the possible correlation between the nature of music and human nature, which is made up of three elements: a physical body, animated by physiological life, a sensitive soul for emotional life, and a thinking head for mental life.
Music education touches on these three dimensions of the human being:
The Body
Physiological life is affected by sound. Physical life is linked to rhythm and is necessary for rhythmic action.
Sensitivity
Emotional life is affected by melody and expresses itself through it.
Intelligence
An intuitive or conscious mental dimension is necessary for receptivity and the practice of harmony.
This musical-human synthesis shows that music is not external to man, but the artistic expression of his deepest nature.
There is therefore no question of inculcating musical concepts in pupils who are more or less receptive and more or less ‘gifted’. Because music is an emanation of the human being, it is above all a question of revealing to these apprentice-musicians what they already carry within themselves, by stimulating their body, their heart and their head through music, by seeking a balance in the realisation of these three dimensions: a thinking head in an active body available to the sensitive expression of the best of oneself, which could be a definition of a complete art.
Music as a profound expression of the human being
Musical learning: a linguistic journey
The other major characteristic of Edgar Willems’ teaching approach is his methodology, which considers music to be a language. Learning music follows the same stages as learning a mother tongue: impregnation, experimentation, awareness, conscious life, creation.
The keys to the Willems® Pedagogy
Edgar Willems set out to describe the psychological stages that the child musician goes through little by little, sometimes spontaneously, depending on his or her educational or family context, more often under the guidance of a teacher. The progression will be broken down into 4 stages, concretised with Jacques Chapuis into precise principles from musical initiation to musical training (solfeggio) and instrumental training.
This is why the Federation has developed various cycles that allow students to appropriate and integrate Willems’ thinking into their activities.