The following article written by Agnes Kory was published in the DOUBLE REED NEWS in August 1995.

I feel honoured that I have been asked by the editor of DRN to write about my work in the Béla Bartók Centre for Musicianship. I hope that my views will not offend but instigate self-examination.

My work centres on what I call true musical literacy. In my experience both the profession as well as the educational establishment regard such matters as irrelevant. My proposition is that the majority of musicians and music educators are musically illiterate. It is not their fault: their training did not include true musical literacy. In turn they do not provide fundamentally essential basic training, they create and choose illiterate musicians for the profession. Musical illiteracy is therefore perpetuated.

One can't claim to be musically literate unless 1) reading a musical score means active immediate inner-hearing and structural understanding of all parts; 2) aural perception of a musical score translates into notation.

I claim that the ultimate performance and the ultimate enjoyment of any musical score presupposes true musical literacy. For this reason classes in the Béla Bartók Centre for Musicianship (for musicians, amateurs and children) provide training in sight-singing, dictation, transposition in any clef/on any instrument, analysis, polyphony, pentatonic/modal/ tonal/atonal music, performance skills. Details of the training include such matters as pitching 'semitones'/tones, etc. of different sizes, the creation of overtones, 'self-polyphony' and-as the children would explain-singing in the head (i.e. structured training in inner hearing).

I propose that musical literacy is of equal importance with regular literacy. It is fashionable to blame lack of finance for gaps in music education. But one cannot teach (or even appreciate) what one does not know. Indeed, music education at primary level has come to mean instrumental tuition of some sort-mostly with fingering charts minus notation. Musical education at a high level centres around instrumental playing and essay writing. Professional musicians often tell me that it would be lovely to learn to read (and hear!) in all those clefs, to be able to sing one part and play the other, to have full command of quarter tone pitching, to be able to read complete musical scores. But they are too busy. Too busy to learn their trade?! Too busy to have an overall view of the scores they perform?

At universities courses are offered on tunings in various ages. One learns that the piano is a compromise instrument with all intervals out of tune with the exception of the octave. However, the so-called general musicianship training / examinations are linked to the piano. Score reading means playing notes on the piano. Never mind if a piano never can be in tune. I hasten to add that great musician-pianists (such as Radu Lupu, Daniel Barenboim) create the illusion of true pitching. But I stand by my point regarding the state of musicianship training in the institutions.

Béla Bartók was constantly surprised and embittered by the lack of true musical literacy among professional musicians. Though a pianist himself, he was very aware of the need for true pitching and he used various unconventional signs (arrows, circles) to indicate various sizes of semitones. He also insisted that one should not play a single note on an instrument unless one could accurately sight-sing it first. His young son Peter had to sing every note of the Microcosmos pieces before he was allowed to go near the piano. Full control of the score had to precede instrumental playing!

I hope that Béla Bartók would be satisfied with the training given at the Béla Bartók Centre for Musicianship. I also hope that some readers of DRN will investigate our work further.