Betty Bertaux (1939-2014) was a very active creator of children’s music and in 1976 founded the Children’s Chorus of Maryland with six students she was giving lessons to in her home. The chorus expanded to 30 students and later performed at the Kennedy Center, the White House, and sang with the Moscow Ballet. In 2001, she founded the American Kodaly Institute (to teach people Kodaly’s method for choral direction) at Loyola University School of Education, Maryland. Her enthusiasm for teaching, her success at writing good music for kids, and her educational credentials got her faculty positions at the Peabody Institute, as well as being the leader of music in programs for gifted children in Baltimore.
The Kodaly method, (Zoltàn Kodàly, Hungarian, 1882-1967), is a process of training children in how to sing before they are adept at reading music. Kodàly believed that music should be taught at ALL levels of primary and secondary education, and his method includes hand signals to show pitch (pictures on Wikipedia), solfège (singing “do” “re” “mi” to learn the relationship between notes in a song), and using syllables to represent note values (for example, “ti ti” for two eighth notes and “ta” for a quarter note). Some of these practices were borrowed from England and are also used in Suzuki methods. Kodaly also incorporated motion in teaching, including running, clapping, and other bodily movements, which have been shown to enhance memory of rhythm and song.
The songs in her repertoire, and ones she adored from others, are included in The Betty Bertaux Series published by Boosey and Hawkes. There are only two that are SATB, and one, her most famous, is S’Vivon. S’Vivon is a song about the dreydl and is translated “Little dreidel, spin, spin, spin, Hanukkah is a festive time. A joyous holiday for everyone, For a Great Miracle Happened There.”
We may remember “Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel, I made it out of clay, and when it’s dry and ready, with dreidel I shall play.” S’Vivon is far more complex! A word about the dreydl, or as it is sometimes spelled, dreidel:
The letters on each side of the dreydl are Nun, Gimel, Hey [Chai], and Shin. The letters stand for “Nes [Miracle] Gadol [Great] Haya [Happened] Sham [There]”. There are arguments about whether the last letter should be “Pe” (here) or “Shin” (there), with most of the experts feeling that “There” is best, for the miracle of the candles that did not go out happened in the Temple, where there was only oil enough for one night after the Maccabees reclaimed the Temple, but the light burned for 8 nights.
Remembering my days in grades 6 through 8, around 1955, we had a song book with mostly two part harmony, largely composed of British songs like “A Capital Ship for an Ocean Trip”; there was no clear teaching method used. It was the same book my father had used 25 years before. Betty Bertaux had a goal of changing the world of singing teaching, which she achieved in some measure, but now music in many schools is thought of as a luxury item. We need more Bettys.
