Decadence as a theoretical phenomenon and artistic practice in modern literature

graduate work

2.2 God is dead: the spiritual impoverishment of society. The motive of God-forsakenness and emptiness

But it’s hard to live with anxiety for one’s posthumous self, so the soul begins to demand certainty already here, to actively search for “light in the darkness” and vice versa: “And in search of a roof the soul flies, / Now to the very bottom, then to the very top” (“HaliGaliKrishna ""). On such journeys, you cease to understand whether you are perishing or being saved, whose voice is guiding you: the devil or the angel? In a dream you meet the Winged Seraphim, you tell him:

"We fly, we fly, we fly,

I know there is and is waiting for me

My desired pier,

Give me the way, tell me the password,

I dreamed about him so much

And you hear in response from someone close to God:

“The Last War is coming,

He goes to war against those who are pure,

Damn Satan.

Fly with me, fly with me

With you we will win.

You will die for God, our hero,

And we will give it to you

Ausweiss ausweiss ausweiss to the sky"

("Ausweiss")

It becomes scary in your own fairy tales. The confident and daring “and I’m going to the top” is immediately replaced by the obvious “or I’m going to the bottom.” “Will they take you to heaven” or “will they send you to hell”? With this question, Gleb Samoilov is trying to break through the heavens and call for a sacred dialogue God or “whoever is there instead of him,” but “our God has gone on an honorable leave/The priests are conducting a worldwide search” (“Nobody Survived”). The sky is empty, “the sky is lonely and dark,” so “I throw the ashes into this sky” (“Gray Sky”). But this gesture is more tragic than blasphemous, and it cannot be truly understood without Nietzsche, the harbinger of decadence. God died because he did not find a place for himself either in man or next to him, and therefore in the sky, instead of a savior, “a black beast is hiding / In his eyes I feel trouble” (“Black Moon”), the sky is no longer sacred and it is capable now only for punishment and revenge. It turns out that man is deprived of everything: heaven, God, Love, earth, history - the era of simulacra has arrived, the evidence of which is increasingly spoken by modern philosophers. For example, Jean Baudrillard “The Transparency of Evil”, articles and monographs by Alexander Dugin, etc.

It must be night

But it's not dark

Everything in this city is cinema

Sparkles with purchased fire...

("In a taxi")

We all ended up in a circus

And I'm one of you.

("One of you")

We don’t deserve anything else: “A pure soul will not return / To the body where emptiness dances” (“Let’s sing about sex”). The favorite theme of the modern French writer and poet Michel Houellebecq: “we are empty, the sky is empty too” [M.U.]. Both are “active pessimists.” Gleb Samoilov, with his characteristic irony, calls himself a “cheerful pessimist” or “an optimist in perpetual depression,” says that he is probably “the only decadent in the country who loves life” - and I must say that he fully justifies these words with his work and his life. Both, in our opinion, stand on the border of decadence and existentialism and from this position they look at the world, captured by the “happy dregs” of postmodernism. “The world is like a disco,” in which there is neither God nor love, and therefore life is called into question by both: there is nothing to justify it, there is nothing to give it for.

Bitter complaints fly into the sky

Funeral bells.

The monks are crying, the monks are crying,

They have lost love.

They jump and dance, lifting up their robes,

From edge to edge of dawn.

They look at the sky and search through books

Traces of true love.

("Eternal love")

The sky is silent and does not send signs, because the world answered a psychedelic YES to obscurantism and emptiness:

Psychedelic disco

Surrender to heaven and die.

And the singer from Norilsk is waiting

To whom to surrender for love

Psychedelic disco

Remix of money and love

A singer from Norilsk sings

That there is no sky, just as there is no earth.

("Psychedelic Disco")

The existential motive of being forsaken by God is realized in contexts that are convenient for falls. These contexts are dictated to the poet by reality, but he does not give rise to a feeling of hopelessness and despair: first, Gleb Samoilov will offer to drink glasses of blood for the charm of struggle, and then he will call himself and us kings and say that “a king is a king to the end, And the end is only just a word,/Guillotine is the beginning of the dream of the Other..." and that we will always live in the eternal spring in cold December, deadly and everywhere ("We will always live"). A very dubious optimism, rather a bitter irony, but, believe me, this is how it most often finds expression in Gleb Samoilov.

Thus, the traditions of decadence merge with the traditions of existentialism and give rise to a powerful and at the same time ironic response to postmodernism, which should, in our opinion, no longer be called a “rest of culture”, not a “walk in the rain”, but rather a real “sunset” of the world --- “the restless dead man” A. G. Dugin - Russian philosopher, political scientist, sociologist, publicist... Let all the moves in the sky be written down, all the affairs at home are completed, all love is paid for, all accounts are closed, all tickets to heaven are sold, but we will meet the finale with dignity at our joyful show (“Tickets are sold”).

A.M. Gorky - for children

Sparrow Pudik loved to brag. But he is far from being a samovar. What a braggart! I forgot every measure. And he will jump out of the window, and marry the Moon, and take on the responsibilities of the sun! Bragging does no good...

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Now - more than ever - we have big houses, but broken families, we have high incomes, but low moral level, protected rights, but reduced respect for each other. We succeed in earning a living, but often fail in building that life. We rejoice in our prosperity, but languish in our lack of purpose. We care about our freedom - and at the same time we passionately desire to establish contact with other people. In our age of abundance, we experience spiritual hunger.
Psychologist David Myers.

To satisfy the highest needs of a person, in order to differ from animals, it is first necessary to satisfy physiological needs: food, drink, shelter, warmth and other primary organic needs (Maslow’s pyramid). As they say, you don’t think well on an empty stomach.

But our life shows that in a consumer society, people increasingly need not only goods and services, but also luxury goods. Here the question immediately arises: where is the line and measure - and how valuable is this?

Do you need children's makeup products, children's beauty contests or SPA treatments for dogs, nannies for dogs in offices, massages for managers without interruption from work? Why do ordinary people, losing their human appearance, show aggression towards other people during the so-called sales (or, as they are also called, “Black Fridays”) in the pursuit of things? With the advent huge amount It is becoming increasingly difficult for producers of goods and services to sell goods and convey them to consumers than to produce them.

Some scientists talk about all this as a disease - the so-called “consumerism syndrome.” This is when “consumption becomes pathological, as its importance increases and increases in direct proportion to our diminishing sense of satisfaction,” says G. Daly.

To satisfy all these needs, which can hardly be called organic, the consumer spends more and more working time. He devotes his free time from work to purchasing, consuming and servicing goods. Burdened with materialism, he seeks false peace in egoistic hedonism - all this leaves practically no opportunity for satisfying higher needs.

Consequence one - overeating

This kind of lifestyle gives rise to many health problems. Many people have problems with excess weight, and some suffer from obesity. In the United States, more than half of citizens are overweight. “In the countries of the WHO European Region, 30–80% of adults and up to one third of children suffer from excess body weight,” reports the WHO (World Health Organization). Globally, according to the same organization, as of 2005, “more than one billion people in the world are overweight and obese. If nothing is done, by 2015 this number will increase to one and a half billion.”

Some types of entertainment industry create interest in harmful, unnecessary needs. If the level of alcohol consumption has recently remained at the same level in developed countries, then the fight against smoking leads to an increase in drug consumption.

Gluttony and addiction to addictions cause physical illness, and the pursuit of money (or, to put it in biblical language, the love of money) for ever-increasing appetites, which are not always satisfied, contributes to nervousness and depressive states.

“The level of depression in the United States today is ten times higher than it was before 1945,” write John de Graaf, David Vann, and Thomas H. Naylor. And according to data published by the European Commission in the Green Book (Gruenbuch), 30% of EU citizens suffer from a mental disorder.

Chronic noncommunicable diseases, for example, in the WHO European Region, as reported by Dr. Martin Moreno, account for more than 85% of the total burden of disease, the causes of which lie in human passions, vices and lifestyle (about the same situation in other developed and developing countries ).

In particular, non-communicable diseases are characterized by the following risk factors: high blood pressure, tobacco and drug use, alcohol abuse, high cholesterol, overweight, underweight physical activity and everyday psychogenic tension.

The rapid development of medicine and the improvement of living conditions can no longer have such an impact on public health. As David E. Bloom, David Canning and Dean T. Jamieson write, citing World Bank data, the increase in life expectancy in developed countries over the period 1960–1990. was 2.3%, and for the period 1990–2001. growth has already dropped to 1.8%.

Another very surprising point is the effectiveness of financial investments, taking into account time. “If at the beginning of the 20th century, an increase in health care costs by 10% caused an increase in public health indicators by 12%, then later this ratio constantly decreased, and in the 80s, an increase in health care costs by the same 10% led in developed countries to improvement in public health by only 1.8%,” write O. Shchepin and E. Tishchuk.

And only a change in lifestyle, on which, according to WHO experts, health improvement depends by 50%, will not only reduce the problems with financing health care that all countries face, but will also reduce the social costs associated with premature retirement and sick leave etc.

The expansion of organic needs and rapidly growing wealth without the development of new forms of social relations led to an increase in the need for security. Now we can say with complete confidence: the richer we become, the less security there is in the world.

So, for example, in the USA, according to F. Fukuyama, “per capita income increased, adjusted for inflation, between 1965 and 1995 from $14,792 to $25,615, while personal consumption expenditures increased from $9,257 to $17,403.”

The second consequence is crime.

Along with the increase in income, both in the United States and in all developed non-Asian countries, from the 60s to the 90s, there was an increase in crime. “Americans may not realize that exactly the same increase in crime occurred in virtually all other non-Asian developed countries during approximately the same period of time,” says F. Fukuyama.

Increasing crime rates are only one aspect of the mismatch between rapidly growing wealth and social development and governance.
With this kind of discrepancy, by involving more and more countries in the process of enrichment, humanity has expanded the very forms of security. There is no longer any point in listing what threatens a person, since security penetrates almost all areas of life.

Due to the mismatch between rapidly growing wealth and social development, and in the absence of the development of new norms governing social relations, we are faced with “huge gaps” between poor and rich sections of the population, between poor and rich countries, as well as huge differences in worldviews - all this raises security concerns.

After the terrorist attack committed by Breivik, not a single country in the world, no matter how high the level of material well-being it has, can say that the problem is there, far away, but here everything is calm. And all this rearmament (as A. Arnoldov writes, if you convert all the nuclear weapons in the world to conventional explosives, then for each person there will be approximately four tons of conventional explosives) not only does not instill a sense of security, but also slows down economic development.

IN given time Security is not a problem for security forces. The only threat to a person's safety is identified only in himself. The desire for “possession” and not for “being,” according to E. Fromm, deprives a person of a free and safe world.

The third consequence is celibacy

The decline of various kinds of relationships, and in particular family ones, a sharp increase in divorces in almost all post-industrial societies between 1960 and 1990 are largely related to the current economic situation. So, referring to the data World Organization values, R. Inglehart and K. Welzel write that “from 1960 to 1990, the divorce rate rose sharply in almost all post-industrial societies except Ireland, where divorce remained prohibited until 1995.”

As industrial age economies transitioned to information age economies, the increasing need for enrichment in the labor market required greater participation of women. “The increase in the number of divorces in developed countries, according to Becker, is caused primarily by the increased activity of women in the labor market, which has sharply reduced the costs for them associated with living outside of marriage or with attempts to re-create a family,” writes R. Kapelyushnikov.

“Becker interprets marriage by analogy with the creation of a partnership firm: people get married if the expected volume of output of consumer goods produced jointly by them exceeds the arithmetic sum of the outputs that they can produce separately...” reports R. Kapelyushnikov.

If we develop the interpretation of G. Becker, then marriage is defined as a kind of transaction based on external factors: beauty and money, position and youth, adding one condition to another. Thus, the need for love is increasingly distorted through the evaluative side of a person, perceived not as to what he is essentially, but what he has.

We can say that a person strives for a kind of “possession”, and not for “love”. Of course, at first the category of “owners” has some feelings, more precisely it can be called passion, but when the passion cools down, one of the participants in the transaction finds a new, more profitable party - in order to conclude a more profitable deal.

It should be said that there is a category of people who want to love, but due to the established lifestyle, they simply do not know how. In this case, this category of people does not have time for spiritual development, which allows them not only to find a compatible partner for themselves, but also to build these relationships.

For the most part, all barriers to “having” in a relationship have been removed. Interfering elderly people, who spend more and more of their old age in boarding houses, are already becoming the norm. And the falling birth rate suggests that it is no longer man who has become the measure of all things, but a thing that has become the measure for man.

Consequence four - childlessness

Since the 60s, the birth rate began to fall in almost all developed countries. “Many countries, such as France and Japan, faced a decline in fertility even before the 60s,” writes F. Fukuyama. By the turn of 2000, population growth on Earth slowed down for the first time in human history. This kind of phenomenon is called a demographic transition, which, as S. Kapitsa proved, is not associated with a lack of natural resources, but has exclusively internal reasons.

Domination external factors in personal relationships not only distorts the very need for love and deprives a person of a full sense of life, but also affects economic condition society.

People experiencing emotional shock from separation suffer from depression, are susceptible to mental illness, and one of the main causes of suicide is personal separation. People who are divorced or single get sick more often and are more prone to chronic diseases than people who live happy lives. family life. In addition, divorced people lose their ability to work and are not as organized and mobile as married people. A child raised by one parent not only does not receive much extra, but also becomes a heavy burden for both the parent and the state.

The decline of family values ​​has led to a decline in the birth rate, which has caused a rapid aging of the population. This circumstance, of course, affects the economy, in particular, the provision of the pension system. The later emergence of serious family relationships in developed countries, as well as the decline maternal instinct, is explained by the fact that people's priorities have shifted in favor of recognizing career growth.

Regarding the need for recognition, F. Fukuyama writes: “The urgency and fundamental nature of this need make it, in fact, one of the main drivers of the entire historical process.”

The author continues: “In the early stages of history, it was realized on the battlefields, where kings and princes fought their battle for primacy, sparing neither their own nor the lives of others. In the modern era, the struggle for recognition has moved to the economic sphere, which is why society as a whole has only benefited: now this struggle no longer promotes destruction, but the creation of material wealth.”

There is no doubt that it is better to prove your worth not on the battlefield, as was done in the Middle Ages, but in economic sphere, increasing the level of material well-being. But if you look deeper and understand the motives of human activity, then after centuries they have undergone little change, and perhaps last decades became less human.

According to one study, “in 1967, two-thirds of American college students said that “developing a clear philosophy of life” was “very important” to them, while less than one-third said the same about “making a lot of money.” In 1997, these numbers were reversed,” write John de Graaf, David Vann, and Thomas H. Naylor.

Almost any motive labor activity comes down to the possession of material goods or to the satisfaction of pride and vanity. Popularity and material wealth have become so important that a person's ability to maintain self-respect depends on them. Such trends also deprived women of creative self-realization in raising children.

“The young people who flock to law and business schools, who laboriously fill out their resumes in hopes of maintaining the lifestyle they feel entitled to, I think they are in much greater danger of becoming the last people than to revive the passions of the first man. For them, the liberal idea of ​​filling life with material acquisitions and safe, permitted ambition fits too well,” says F. Fukuyama.

An insane passion for the result, which society values, deprives a person of the joy of the creative process itself - the growth of his hidden abilities, the emergence of new ideas. The prestige of a certain number of professions forces many people to engage in work that is alien to them, thereby limiting their human and creative capital.

The fifth consequence is lack of culture

The general enthusiasm of people for economic activities has led to the fact that economic power simply no longer corresponds to social development and social management. This discrepancy comes primarily from the modern education system.

Modern education is utilitarian in its essence, it does not focus on self-knowledge, it turns a person into a specialist - a cog in the system who is very easy to manage. “The specialist serves us as bright, specific example“new man” and allows us to discern all the radicalism of his novelty... He cannot be called educated, since he is a complete ignoramus in everything that is not part of his specialty; he is not an ignoramus, since he is still a “man of science” and knows his tiny corner of the universe perfectly,” writes Ortega y Gasset

By separating spirituality from science, and intellect from creativity in cognitive needs, a person was deprived of an integral, free perception of the world and limited the manifestation of his human essence, his capabilities in any type of activity. As E. Fromm rightly wrote, “ human brain lives in the twentieth century; most people's hearts are still set in stone."

The utilitarian system not only does not evoke the desire for self-education, but also due to a limited horizon, a person becomes helpless in the intricacies of information and cultural chaos. Many scientists call this time the era of excessive information load. A person is literally inundated with unnecessary information, propaganda, pseudo-culture, which is very difficult for him to understand.

Having turned culture and aesthetic needs into an instrument of material well-being, we stopped dealing with our inner world. We have ceased to be interested in, in the words of Dostoevsky, “new information about human nature.” Slogans replace poetry for us, and all this glamor, which is considered almost a standard of beauty, I think, is unlikely to be able to save the world.

There is no one left to shake up the world with personalities of the caliber of L. Tolstoy, A. Chekhov, B. Shaw, I. Bunin, M. Bulgakov, E. Hemingway, Remarque! The living R. Shchedrin is one of the last great composers. Classical music is practically no longer created, but only performed.

The so-called “artists” try to show themselves, no matter how, but the main thing is to express themselves. The mustache painted by Duchamp on the painting of Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci or the exhibition by D. Beldassari, where the ashes of burned canvases were exhibited, are all manifestations of harmful pseudo-art.

Most film products are also harmful. Through a direct impact on the subconscious, horror and disaster films create tension and inspire fear, and the so-called “hero of our time” in cinema fights evil exclusively using the same method - violence. This is completely contrary to the Christian law - not to respond to violence with violence. In general, we have many new religions in which there is little faith in God, but only continuous promises of happiness and success.

I was told an interesting story about one “cultural event”. One day, while thinking on public transport, the person who told me this story suddenly saw people wearing masks. The first thing that came to his mind was robbery. Naturally, you wouldn’t wish this experience on anyone. After some time, we managed to find out that it was teenagers who were “playing tricks” in a new way at the “cultural event” - Halloween.

And all these survival TV shows force us to perceive each other not as partners or colleagues, but as competitors in terms of salary, on the career ladder, etc. These kinds of shows, in my opinion, push people to display “animal competition.”

Thus, the owners of some American auto repair shops hired hooligans to break windshields, unscrew wheels, and tear out music systems. As a result, frustrated car owners turned to the nearest workshop. And there are a lot of similar cases.

The purpose of culture is to look for new forms of interaction that suit everyone, which are hidden only in the person himself. Increasing the level of material well-being through culture - its commercialization - contributed to the crisis situation like nothing else.

Already in Hilarion’s “Sermon on Law and Grace” and Vladimir Monomakh’s “Teaching,” thoughts are heard that material wealth cannot be assessed in isolation from spiritual principles. And only a culture aimed at self-knowledge and self-actualization of a person can reduce many economic costs and give impetus to economic development.

What is self-actualization

Of course, within the framework of the article it is impossible to fully define the need for self-actualization, but it seems possible to give some characteristics in the context of this topic.

Studying self-actualizing people, A. Maslow notes that, being successful and in demand professionally, these people are less concerned about the problems of survival - they simply live and develop. Organic needs require satisfaction in order to move on - this is primary, a kind of “foundation on which the temple will be erected,” writes A. Maslow.

But if they fail to realize themselves professionally, they, unlike an ordinary person, will not experience discomfort and succumb to self-flagellation, because thanks to spirituality, a sense of duty gives them pleasure and joy. These people are not characterized by any state of frustration, which is the source of depression and mental illness.

In love they do not set any goals or intentions; for them, love is a certain state for the sake of the state itself. Mutual compatibility is practically the norm, since feelings are friends with their mind. They have amazing qualities - the ability to recognize lies and the ability for maximum concentration.

“A self-actualized person builds his life not according to the laws of society, not according to the laws of culture, but rather according to universal human laws and the laws of his own human nature,” writes A. Maslow.

Dr. David Levy once said that in the Middle Ages such people were called God's men or holy men. And according to research conducted by Asch and McClelland, in the United States, from five to thirty percent can be classified as self-actualizing individuals.

Of course, such a small number of self-actualizing people is not enough for any drastic changes, but the very fact of their existence gives us hope for the best and allows us to look into the future with optimism. And who knows, maybe in the near future a self-actualizing person will be an average person.

As a conclusion

Despite the fact that we are now experiencing a deep crisis, we can say with complete confidence that living conditions in developed and developing countries have grown rapidly over the past two hundred years. Life expectancy has increased - approximately twofold, infant mortality has decreased, epidemics have decreased, and the availability of education has increased. Many have decent housing.

But there is a very important point here. Thanks to scientific and technological progress, the rapid increase in material well-being was not accompanied by corresponding spiritual development, that is, a “huge gap” formed. "IN Western Europe per capita income has now increased more than tenfold compared to the mid-eighteenth century,” writes F. Fukuyama. But how much have morals “grown”? I think the answer is clear to everyone!

All higher needs worked for organic needs and their expansion, that is, these can no longer be called natural needs, but fictitious. Higher needs were either distorted, misinterpreted, or not demanded at all. This kind of approach created disharmony and gave rise to an economic crisis.

The cessation of quantitative development and the transition to qualitative development is suggested by the history of mankind itself. If S. Kapitsa generalized the positive scenario by saying “that if we are counting on an optimistic future, we need to think about everything being better, not more,” then Arnold Toynbee specified and formulated the law of development of civilizations as “the ability to move energy costs from the realm of the material into the realm of spirit, aesthetics, culture and art.”

This does not mean at all that material goods will disappear somewhere. Just in order not to lose all the benefits and build harmonious development, a new person should not constantly worry about the problems of survival, he also needs to develop new hidden internal abilities, develop the so-called spiritual capital, which will not only reduce the costs associated with crime, health , corruption, shadow economy, rearmament, but also to bring the economy to new round development.

What should those who want to follow the path of salvation and are looking for a leader to help them do? Saint Ignatius explains the reason for the spiritual decline of shepherds and gives advice on what will help them follow the right path and maintain a strong faith. At the same time, the saint not only reproaches the priesthood, but also reveals the consequences of improper relations between the laity and pastors.

About the impoverishment of spiritual mentors

About the improper relationship between flocks and mentors

About the impoverishment of spiritual mentors

In the works of Saint Ignatius, the problem of the impoverishment of true spiritual mentors is clearly visible. This was largely the result of his personal experience, when, feeling unity with the teachings of the holy fathers, he was in the process of searching for a spiritual mentor who could quench his spiritual thirst, but never found one. At the same time, this was also his objective assessment of the state in which the pastorate of his time found itself.

Looking for a way out of this problem, Saint Ignatius offers some ways to help fill the lack of zealous leaders of spiritual life.

Firstly, Saint Ignatius, in his instructions, constantly advises to resort as often as possible to the Holy Scriptures and patristic wisdom, which are the only and true guides in spiritual life against the background of the general impoverishment of the true shepherds of the Church.

The feat of obedience in the ideal about which the holy fathers write is practically impossible in our time due to the absence of those truly spiritual mentors who can lead along the path of obedience.

These sources, faithfully leading along the path of a godly life, can at any moment provide needed by a person help. He wrote: “Reading the Fathers’ writings, in derogation of the Spirit-bearing mentors, has become the main guide for those wishing to be saved and even achieve Christian perfection.” And Saint Ignatius confirms this thought about the impoverishment of true mentors with the thoughts of the holy fathers, who also point out this problem that exists at different stages of church history: “The main feature that distinguishes the activity of ancient monasticism from the activity of the newest is that the monastics of the first centuries of Christianity were guided by divinely inspired mentors, and now,” notes the Venerable Nil of Sorsky, in agreement with other later Fathers, “monastics should be most guided by the Holy Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers, due to the extreme impoverishment of living vessels of Divine grace.”

For those who wish to follow the path of salvation by following the tradition of the Church, St. Ignatius cites the words of the holy fathers, who “command that anyone who wants to live piously and pleasingly follow the instructions of a true teacher or the guidance of the scriptures of the fathers, corresponding to the way of life of everyone. After eight centuries from the Nativity of Christ, church holy writers begin to complain about the impoverishment of spiritual mentors and the appearance of many false teachers. They command, due to the lack of mentors, to turn to reading the patristic writings, and to avoid reading books written outside the bosom of the Orthodox Church.”

Saint Ignatius considered the real danger to be the emergence of various false teachings and temptations, which he asked to beware of.

At the same time, Saint Ignatius, just like the holy fathers, distinguished between the methods of leadership of laity and monks. He wrote that the laity should “be guided in life by the Gospel and by those holy fathers who wrote instructions for Christians in general, as Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk did.” Monks, in his words, should “also be guided by the Gospel and the Holy Fathers, who composed works specifically for monks. A monk in any monastery, guided by the Scriptures of the Fathers, will have the opportunity to acquire salvation: he who lives according to his own will and according to his own reason will lose it, even if he lives in the deepest desert.”

Continuing his thought about the leadership of monks, he notes: “What does monastic virtue mean - obedience? Monastic obedience flourished with an abundance of spiritual mentors. With the depletion of mentors, the great feat of obedience, which soon led ascetics to holiness, also became impoverished: faith, which constituted the essence of this feat, requires that its object be true and spiritual: then it leads to God. Faith in a person leads to frenzied fanaticism. The guidance of the writings of the Holy Fathers is much slower, weaker; There are many more stumbling blocks on this path: a book written on paper cannot replace a living book of a person. A wonderful book - a mind and heart written with the Holy Spirit! life breathes out of her! This is how this life is communicated to those who listen with faith. But the guidance of the paternal scriptures has become the only guide to salvation due to the final impoverishment of mentors. Whoever submits to this guidance can be recognized as already saved; “Whoever is led by his own understanding, or by the teachings of false teachers, must be considered lost.”

So, Saint Ignatius sees the solution to the problem of the lack of true leaders of spiritual life, first of all, in a careful study of the Holy Scriptures and the patristic heritage of the Church.

The next thing that Saint Ignatius speaks with sorrow about, continuing the theme of the impoverishment of mentoring and spiritual life, is that the feat of obedience in the ideal about which the holy fathers write is practically impossible in our time due to the absence of those truly spiritual mentors, who can lead along the path of obedience: “Your desire is excellent - to be in complete obedience to an experienced mentor. But this feat is not given to our time. He is not only absent among the Christian world, he is not even present in monasteries. Mortification of the mind and will cannot be carried out by a spiritual person, even a kind and pious one. For this, a spirit-bearing father is necessary: ​​only before a spirit-bearer can the disciple’s soul be revealed; only he can discern where and where the spiritual movements of the one he is teaching are directed.”

Also, pointing to the impoverishment of spiritual mentors, he notes that this impoverishment is not absolute. Just as true shepherds existed at all times in the life of the Church, so they existed in the era in which Saint Ignatius lived. They just became rare and not available to everyone. An example of this is the fathers of Optina Hermitage: “At the present time there is an essential need for correct prayer... It is the essential, the only guide in our time to salvation. There are no mentors! The best, as far as is known, are the Optinsky mentors.” And for those who are fortunate enough to have found a spirit-bearing mentor, the saint advises to turn to him only on issues that are important in spiritual development: “Visit the cell of your mentor and spiritual father, if you are so happy that in our times you have found a mentor; and then visit in a timely manner and as required by need, and not out of despondency or for idle talk.”

A shepherd who knowingly acts incorrectly on his flock must find the strength within himself to consciously renounce the incorrectly chosen method of spiritual guidance.

The following advice is given by the saint to those who, in modern conditions, cannot resort to saving guidance, but strive to live a special, deep, God-pleasing life. He, being a teacher of repentance, writes: “Given the terrible scarcity of our time in teachers of true prayer, let us choose lamentation as our leader and mentor. He will teach you prayer and protect you from self-delusion. All those who rejected crying and separated him from their prayer fell into self-delusion. This is confirmed by the Holy Fathers." That is, the saint draws the attention of those being instructed to the need for constant remembrance of their sins, about every minute attention to themselves, and shares the experience of his mentors: “I recognize it as my sacred duty to tell you the wise advice that I heard from experienced elders worthy of respect. They said to both laymen and monks who were sincerely seeking salvation: “in our time, in which temptations have multiplied so much, we must especially pay attention to ourselves, not paying attention to the lives and affairs of our neighbors, and not judging those who are tempted: because the pernicious effect of temptation conveniently passes from those who are carried away a temptation to him who condemns them."

Against the backdrop of the decline and impoverishment of pastoral leadership, Saint Ignatius considered the emergence of various false teachings and temptations, which he asked to beware of, to be a real danger: “The further times deviated from the appearance of Divine light on earth, the greater the lack of true holy mentors, the greater the abundance of false teachers; Since the discovery of book printing, they have flooded the earth like a flood, like bitter apocalyptic waters, from which many people died a spiritual death.”

To summarize, let us summarize the above with the words of St. Ignatius Brianchaninov: “our time has been given another feat, associated with many difficulties and stumbling blocks. We had to travel - neither during the day, nor in the clear light of the sun, but at night, in the pale light of the moon and stars. We have been given sacred and holy Scripture for guidance: the Holy Fathers of later times say this directly. When guided by Scripture, the advice of neighbors is also useful, namely those who themselves are guided by the Scriptures of the Fathers. ...Our feat has a price before God: our weakness, our means, our circumstances, and time itself are weighed on His scales. A certain great Father had the following vision: before him, the earthly life of people was depicted as a sea. He saw that the ascetics of the first times of monasticism were given wings of fire, and they were carried like lightning through the sea of ​​passions. The ascetics of recent times were not given wings: they began to cry on the seashore. Then they were given wings, but not fiery, but rather weak ones: they flew across the sea. On their way, due to the weakness of their wings, they often plunged into the sea; with difficulty rising from it, they began their journey again, and finally, after many efforts and disasters, they flew across the sea. Let's not be discouraged! Let us not recklessly strive for brilliant feats that exceed our strength; let us accept with reverence a humble feat, very much in keeping with our weakness, given as if visibly by the hand of God. Let us accomplish this feat with fidelity to the holy Truth - and in the midst of the world, a noisy, countless crowd striving along a wide, spacious path following self-willed rationalism, we will go to God along the narrow path of obedience to the Church and the Holy Fathers. Not many people follow this path? As for that! The Savior said: Fear not, little flock: for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Enter through the narrow gate: like a wide gate and a wide path you lead into destruction, and many are those who enter through it. What a narrow gate and a strait path, enter into the belly, and there are few of them who find it(Luke 12:32; Matt. 7:13-14).”

About the improper relationship between flocks and mentors

Above, we touched upon the problems of spiritual leadership in the time of St. Ignatius, associated with the practical absence of a true example of inspired shepherding. The consequence of this was the improper relationship that developed between the flock and the mentors. Because there were such church ministers who did not lead people to Christ, but themselves became idols for the flock.

In the letters of the Right Reverend Ignatius, we can find valuable instructions regarding the relationship between shepherds and their flock. And the first thing he warns about is the danger of the flock’s addiction to their mentors: “Let your heart belong to the Lord alone, and in the Lord to your neighbor. Without this condition, belonging to a person is scary. Do not be a servant of a man, - said the apostle... until the carnal feeling prevails in the disciples - their teacher is great in front of them; but when a spiritual feeling appears in them and Christ is magnified in them, they see in their mentor only the beneficent weapon of God. Protect yourself from becoming attached to your mentor. Many were not careful and fell, together with their mentors, into the snare of the devil. Counsel and obedience are pure and pleasing to God only as long as they are not polluted by partiality. Addiction makes a loved one an idol: God turns away with anger from the sacrifices made to this idol. And life is lost in vain, good deeds perish, like fragrant incense carried by a strong whirlwind or drowned out by a stinking stench. Don’t give any idol a place in your heart.”

The best guide in the spiritual life of a Christian is to follow the patristic writings, and whoever submits to this guidance can be considered already saved, and whoever follows his own understanding or the teaching of a false teacher can be considered lost.

“Attachment gives over to the power of the one who attracts the souls of believers. Out of fanatical faith, the attached one is resolutely ready to do whatever pleases his idol: to follow him even along a heretical or sectarian path. With dogmatic firmness, a shepherd who is attracted to himself can fall into conceit and the search for glory and, with its weakening, suffer.”

As we see, the saint clearly sees the danger of advancing into religious life the personality of some shepherd, a promotion that will give rise in his flock to a desire not for a godly life, but only attachment to oneself. A shepherd who knowingly acts incorrectly on his flock must find the strength within himself to consciously renounce the incorrectly chosen method of spiritual guidance. The shepherd must fight decisively and skillfully against the partial attachment of his flock. The pastor must direct their love, which is important in the matter of salvation, from himself to God and the Church. A person attached to the personality of his shepherd is already decisively ready to do everything that his idol tells him. Many even begin to follow their shepherds along a heretical and sectarian path. Also, following excessive attachment to their idol, believers begin to gradually cool down towards God and the Church. Sermons or conversations from their dear pastor become more important to them than prayer. And here we can point out the following danger, which St. Ignatius points out when speaking about the incorrectly developing relationships between shepherds and their flock. And it consists in seizing the power of the shepherd over the spiritual children entrusted to him by God. The saint says: “If a leader begins to seek obedience to himself, and not to God, he is not worthy to be the leader of his neighbor! He is not a servant of God! Servant of the devil, his weapon is a net!

Those who come to the priesthood must test themselves and their hearts to see if it responds to the words of Christ, who asks the Apostle Peter: Do you love Me? feed my sheep, - and does it answer together with the Apostle Peter: Lord, You know that I love You(John 21:15). And he must also honestly admit to himself: is it for good? sheep comes into the sheepfold, but they have belly" or for their own gain, "let them steal and kill and destroy(John 10:10). If he comes with the first intention, then he can be called a shepherd, but if with the latter, then he is none other than a thief and robber.

Further, he more specifically notes this problem: “Every spiritual guide must only be a servant of the Heavenly Bridegroom, must lead souls to Him, and not to himself, must proclaim to them about the infinite, ineffable beauty of Christ, about His immeasurable goodness and power: let them love Christ, as if worthy of love. And let the mentor, like the great and humble Baptist, stand aside, recognize himself as nothing, rejoice in his humiliation before his disciples, humiliation, which serves as a sign of their spiritual success. And you, mentor, guard yourself from sinful endeavors! Do not replace God with yourself for the soul that has come running to you. Follow the example of the holy Forerunner: seek only for Christ to be magnified in your disciples. When He is magnified, you will decrease: seeing yourself diminished because of the increased Christ, be filled with joy. From such behavior, a wonderful peace will be brought to your heart: you will see in yourself the fulfillment of the words of Christ: humble yourself, you will be exalted.”

The archpastor clearly saw that there were very few true mentors, even in his time. And knowing the great responsibility of those to whom Christians entrust their lives, he warned everyone who takes on the responsibility of being a mentor not by calling: “It is a terrible thing to take on responsibilities out of conceit and without permission, which can only be performed at the command of the Holy Spirit and by the action of Spirit, while communication with Satan has not yet been broken and the vessel does not cease to be defiled by the action of Satan! Such hypocrisy and hypocrisy is terrible! It is disastrous for you and for your neighbor, it is criminal before God and blasphemous.”

The fatality of incorrect leadership lies in the fact that a shepherd who is not experienced in spiritual life directs the life of his flock along the path on which he himself stands. And if he stands on the wrong path, then he will guide others along this path, because, according to St. Ignatius, obedience forms the one to whom he obeys. The shepherd walking ahead of his flock must experimentally show not only where to go, but also how to go along the path indicated by him. By the example of his virtuous life, he will act better and stronger. But at the same time, he must not forget that his personality should not obscure Christ in the eyes of his flock. And again, Saint Ignatius sees the reason for this state of affairs in church society in the impoverishment of the true shepherds of the Church. Therefore, he points out again and again that the best guide in the spiritual life of a Christian is to follow the patristic writings, and whoever obeys this guidance can be recognized as already saved, and whoever follows his own understanding or the teaching of a false teacher can be considered lost. For Christians who are seeking salvation and have not found a true leader, the saint advises: “Do not tire yourself in vain in searching for mentors; our time, rich in false teachers, is extremely poor in spiritual mentors. They are occupied for the ascetic by the Scriptures of the Fathers. Try to find a good, conscientious confessor. If you find him, be pleased; nowadays conscientious confessors are a great rarity.” And if, having found such a confessor, someone begins to notice some shortcomings in him and is embarrassed by this, he gives the following advice: “The Holy Fathers command monks to remember the virtues of their Superiors, to often reflect on their praiseworthy deeds, and not to pay attention to shortcomings as if we were like twigs, in comparison with which our infirmities are like logs. By true repentance and true humility - they are invisible to people - reconcile your soul with God and your neighbors."

And here we come to a conversation about the image of the true shepherd of the Church, which runs through all the works of Saint Ignatius, and which, first of all, he himself follows. On the one hand, pointing out the scarcity of spiritual mentors who can lead along the path of salvation, Saint Ignatius at the same time draws out the image of a shepherd to whom those who want to follow Christ should strive. And as already said, he not only talks about this, but also shows by his example that this is possible. But we’ll talk more about this topic in the next article.

reader Pavel Mironov

Keywords: Saint Ignatius, shepherds, flock, pastoral leadership, spiritual mentor, Holy Scripture, feat, salvation

Right there. P. 776. Collection of letters of St. Ignatius (Brianchaninov) / Comp. Abbot Mark (Lozinsky). - M.-SPb.: Publishing house of the Center for the Study, Protection and Restoration of the Heritage of Priest Pavel Florensky, 1995. - P. 238-239. Collection of letters of St. Ignatius (Brianchaninov) / Comp. Abbot Mark (Lozinsky). - M.-SPb.: Publishing house of the Center for the Study, Protection and Restoration of the Heritage of Priest Pavel Florensky, 1995. - P. 303.

About the positions of parish elders. - M.: Sretensky Monastery, 2004. - P. 17

Collection of letters of St. Ignatius (Brianchaninov) / Comp. Abbot Mark (Lozinsky). - M.-SPb.: Publishing house of the Center for the Study, Protection and Restoration of the Heritage of Priest Pavel Florensky, 1995. - P. 448-449.

Saint Ignatius (Brianchaninov). Creations: in 7 volumes - Vol. 5: Ascetic experiences. - M: Sretensky Monastery Publishing House, 1998. - P. 73 [Reprint].

(22 votes: 4.82 out of 5)

Hieromonk Nektary (Morozov)

Preface

The problem of the spiritual formation of a Christian in modern world it's very sharp. Most people are not “born” into the Church, but come to it already at a conscious age. A person enters a new church life, completely unfamiliar to him, a life someone else's, which, however, must necessarily become his. This process has received the name “churching” in today’s practice, that is, the gradual transformation of a Christian nominal into a Christian real. Churching can sometimes happen quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes easily, sometimes with great difficulty. Unfortunately, mistakes, disappointments, and sorrows are inevitable along his path. It is completely impossible to avoid all this. But it is possible to help a person who has come to, to offer him a number of tips that are not at all superfluous for him before he gets firmly on his feet. This is the purpose of this publication, as well as a number of others planned for release in the near future.

Time of spiritual impoverishment

When we talk about the purpose of the Christian life, the answer to the question of what it is is implied. It was given once and for all time by the Savior Himself in His Divine Gospel. This goal is the acquisition of the Kingdom of Heaven, that is, existence and closest unity with God both here on earth and in blissful eternity. But what is the specific content of these very simple and brief words, what are the paths to achieving the Kingdom of Heaven, how can a Christian find out for himself, how far or close is he personally from this Kingdom - this is what each of us must understand for ourselves.

The life of the human soul in its relationship to God, the inner path that a person travels from ignorance of his Creator to tangible unity with Him, always belongs to the realm of the secret, hidden from the gaze of an external observer. But the true essence of Christian life is precisely internal in nature, it is the life of the heart, that mysterious abode which He chooses as His temple and in which the Lord, who is inconceivable to the entire universe, dwells.

You can quite easily understand, assimilate rules of an external nature, and discern certain patterns in them. But learning that inner work, without which the spiritual growth and success of a Christian is impossible, is much more difficult. The Holy Scripture says that the Lord is the same yesterday, today and forever, that is, unchangeable. And this is beyond doubt. Consequently, that inner activity, that path of the human soul to God, which we are talking about, must remain unchanged in its essence. However, there are, to slightly paraphrase well-known words about monasticism, circumstances characteristic of our very specific time, which, without changing the essence, nevertheless have a “significant influence” on it. Our era, no matter how differently we characterize it, in any case cannot be called simple. She is truly complex in many ways. And, above all, in terms of spirituality.

When we say this, we mean not only the increase in temptations or the cruelty and coldness of the world around us. The doctrine of salvation is not a bookish, dry teaching, but a living one, presupposing the direct perception of experience, its transmission from mentor to mentee, from teacher to student. The living experience of Christian asceticism is precisely what is sorely lacking today. It is probably impossible to say that there are no people who have achieved a certain degree of success, there are no people who strive. However, at the same time, the fact remains: very often the question about the path of salvation asked by the person who came to us remains unanswered, or the answer is given, but a formal one, not confirmed by the personal experience of the answerer. And most importantly, people find too few examples around them to follow and to learn from. And actions edify much more than words, they edify even without any words. While words that are not confirmed by deeds inevitably lead to the impoverishment of faith in those who hear them, seeing how they often diverge from deeds.

And we can, we believe, say even more than that. Questions about spiritual life, about the inner, hidden life of the human heart, being essentially paramount for Christianity, today are more and more relegated to the background. We are increasingly immersed in external affairs, which may be necessary and useful in themselves, but without internal work they often turn into a form in which too little necessary content remains.

Every Orthodox church is a place of special Divine presence, a place where heaven visibly bows to the ground where we really meet God, Mother of God, Angels and saints. But all people are very different, each with their own personal characteristics. Therefore, it is very important that a person choose for himself some kind of temple that is suitable for him and go to this temple constantly. You can go to different churches and pray in different churches, especially when this is due to circumstances. But one temple must become for the believer in the full sense of the word his home, he must become related to it, internally grow into it; this is a very serious moment.

It is no less, and most likely, even more necessary for a Christian to find a priest with whom he would constantly confess, to whom he would turn for clarification of the unclear, for answers to the questions that arise.

We can say that today this is not always possible. Practice shows that it is in this regard that people often have serious difficulties. And in fact: for some, a confessor is given right away, for others, the search for him becomes a matter of not one month, but sometimes even a year. But often the reason for this is again not in the temple, not in the priest, but in the person himself. If he demands from the priest spiritual perfection, holiness, and demands undeserved love for himself, then he may search for a long time and not find a mentor who would fully meet these requirements. If his needs are much more modest, if he is only looking for an answer to the questions that arise in him about spiritual and church life, looking for help on the path of his spiritual formation, then he will find a priest with whom he can confess and whose guidance he can use. much simpler.

Very important point In churching there is constancy, or, what is the same, systematicity. You need to start small: by going to church not only when such a desire arises, but regularly, every Saturday and Sunday, every major holiday. Pray, again, not only when an inner urge to pray arises, but every morning and every evening. Let this be a fairly short prayer rule, the main thing is that it is fulfilled consistently. It’s the same with confession and communion: you need to start these Sacraments not once a year, or when your soul is sore or trouble has happened, but with a certain frequency, depending on how the priest from whom the Christian receives spiritual nourishment blesses.

And all this is not some kind of “formal”, “legalistic” instructions. No, these are the only possible (especially at first) measures to awaken the deeply sleeping spirit in us, measures to strengthen it.

Patterns of spiritual development

Often people, not only those who have recently joined the church, but also those who have been living the church life for a long time, complain that they do not see any spiritual success in themselves. Moreover, they note that in the first days, weeks, months after their arrival in the Church, they felt extraordinary joy, spiritual uplift, everything came easy to them. Then, on the contrary, everything seems to begin to decline, every step is difficult, church life becomes something, so to speak, familiar, does not bring such joy to the soul, on the contrary, shortcomings begin to be seen in it more and more . Despair comes, often leading to a kind of spiritual paralysis, when a person no longer lives, but barely vegetates: it seems that there is no point in doing anything, “there will be no result anyway.” And since there is no labor, no good change in condition occurs; a person seems to give God the opportunity exclusively “Himself” to save him - through sent trials and sorrows. Moreover, this situation is not the situation of one or several Christians, but a phenomenon, one might say, on a church-wide scale.

What is the reason for this, one of the most serious problems of today? Christians actually complain about the decline of their spiritual life, about the fact that at first they had much more than they later had. They are sincerely perplexed: why is this happening? However, bewilderment here arises only from ignorance of the very course of spiritual life, its laws.

Spiritual life is, at its core, a relationship between man and Divine grace. First, grace calls a person, touches his heart, and he responds to its call, comes to the temple, turns to God. And it’s like reliving childhood. At this time, grace itself does everything for the new convert, carries him in her arms like the mother of a baby. The Lord gives him a taste of the joys of being, of communion with Him, and clearly shows him what life in the Church, life in God, is. At this time, he belittles a person’s passions, grants him various spiritual consolations in order to give him the opportunity to be distracted, at least for a short time, to break away from his carnal, earthly life, and to taste heavenly life.

And then another period comes. Grace, as it were, retreats and hides from the Christian. She is co-present with him, guards him, but no longer works in his place. At this time, the Lord is waiting for work from the person himself, who already has experience: here is the earthly, and here is the heavenly; now he must make his choice. If he wants heavenly things, wants to be with God, then he must prove it.

God can give us grace, but until we work ourselves, this grace will remain something external, alien to us, and it will not be able to save us without our own participation. And when we endure the abuse of our passions, we fight against them, then the grace that invisibly helps us is assimilated into our soul, our heart.

“Legal” relations are impossible between man and God: God loves man and expects love from him. You can even say this: we are saved not only by God’s love for us, but also by our love for God. But love is not something that can be proven in words. Here we need deeds that would testify to whom or what we really give our hearts to. We love the world, we love our passions, we love, no matter how scary it may be, sin. This is unnatural love, and it is, of course, incompatible with the love of God.

And therefore we are constantly given the opportunity to choose between God and that which is disgusting to God. And depending on what we choose, our path is determined. We choose loyalty to God and are confirmed in love for Him. We choose the world, our own passions, sin and become established in evil.

The man is very spoiled. This is both the ancestral sin and the sinful habits in which he became established in life before turning to God. Therefore, constant struggle, constant work of self-correction is necessary. And grace participates in this work, in this struggle, invisibly helping the Christian and strengthening him.

Sometimes the question arises: why is it still so difficult for us and why do we succeed so little in spiritual life?

But the answer is obvious. It is difficult because grace educates, trains us, forces us to work to the limit of our own capabilities. One can make such a comparison from the world of living nature. When his mother teaches a little seal to swim, she only lightly supports him from below and when she sees that he can swim on his own, she stops helping him, although she watches him, ready to help at any moment.

The Lord works the same way with us. Every moment He supports and strengthens us, but most often in such a way that we do not notice it. The Lord allows us to work on our own, learn something, experience something, and through all this draw closer to Him.

Spiritual life is characterized by change, there is no immutability in it. Intercessions of grace and gracious consolations necessarily alternate with periods when a person feels abandoned and helpless. Consolations strengthen a person’s weakness, make him stronger, teach him to hope in God, and give rise to a feeling of gratitude to Him. And the feeling of abandonment, the consciousness of one’s own helplessness, on the contrary, humbles human pride and gives us best opportunity understand that without God we are nothing. Feeling our helplessness, we begin to truly seek God’s help, only here we most often learn for the first time what real prayer is.

Sometimes a person experiences a very long period of this “abandonment”, when the sky seems to close to him and the soul becomes completely impervious to any spiritual sensations. Such a state is well known not only to weak, sinful people like us, but also to genuine ascetics, saints of God. This requires patience and faith, hope in God, trust in God. Without receiving any spiritual reinforcement and reward, a person must still work and believe that the Lord sees his sorrow, his work, but for some reason considers such a test useful for him.

At this time, the enemy usually confuses a Christian with thoughts of sadness and despair, makes him think that those joyful feelings and experiences that took place before will never return, that, on the contrary, he will become worse and worse. But that's a lie. In fact, if a person endures the test of cooling courageously, without ceasing to struggle and work on himself, then he will again feel the action and consolation of grace, and to a much greater extent, still unknown to him.

And then again there will be a time of seeming abandonment, again struggle and again consolation. And so - throughout life.

What kind of work and what kind of struggle is necessary on the part of man? To a large extent, we are talking about simple and quite accessible things: despite the feeling of inner emptiness, thoughts about the “meaninglessness of doing”, do not abandon the established rule of prayer, reading spiritual books and their thoughtful comprehension, temple worship, participation in church sacraments. But at the same time, it is very important to try to arouse waning or even extinguished jealousy. For this, it is useful to reflect on those objects that initially determined our turn to God, about what led us to repentance. More often in this state one needs to remember the inevitable death and the equally inevitable judgment, the need to prepare for it even in this earthly life. But along with this, in order not to be suppressed by fear and even greater despondency, we need to remember the love of God for us, evidence of which abounds in the lives of each of us.

In such a test, a person feels more acutely than ever before that he has no helper except God. This means we need to turn to the Lord as often as possible with prayer appeals (whether these are the words of the prayers found in the prayer book, verses of psalms, or our own appeals). To appeal, asking that He, the Almighty, Himself heal the weakness of our soul, enlighten our darkness, give joy and joy, communicated to the human heart from the feeling of His Divine presence, when everything in a person’s life is filled with the highest meaning, that fullness that does not leave and the slightest place for "emptiness and dissatisfaction".

Necessary rules

In general, as for this question - about why we really do not succeed much in spiritual life, then this, frankly speaking, is a reason for very sad reflections. The whole point is that for the most part, as the monk put it, “by sleeping, we want to be saved.

In every earthly occupation, in every profession, there are rules, neglecting which, it is impossible to achieve success. And if we look, we will definitely see that only those who follow these rules succeed on earth in business or professional terms. No athlete will become a champion if he skips training, violates the regime, and eats junk food.

And we Christians have rules, without which it is impossible to succeed in spiritual life. These rules are those ascetic principles, advice and instructions that we can find in the books of the holy fathers and ascetics of recent times. We very often not only neglect them, considering them something unimportant and unnecessary, but also act completely contrary to them. The already indicated indispensable attendance at divine services, fulfillment of the prayer rule, feasible abstinence, attention to oneself, one’s inner world, the life of one’s heart, an uncompromising struggle with passions, forcing oneself to fulfill the Gospel commandments - without this doing, success is unattainable.

Man is not only corrupted by sin and passions. He is also very fickle and changeable. The good disposition in him is unstable and needs constant warming and renewal. And in this regard, books can provide the best help: the word of God, patristic works. Moreover, it is very important to choose reading in accordance with your inner structure, so that it can truly serve the soul for the benefit. For us, people still overwhelmed by passions, who have not fully known ourselves, along with the Holy Scriptures, the most necessary are the books of the holy fathers who wrote about active life: about passions and overcoming them. Among these, first of all, one should name the “Soulful Teachings” of the Rev., “The Ladder” St. John, Abbot of Mount Sinai, “Guide to Spiritual Life” by St. Barsanuphius the Great and John the Prophet, “Invisible Warfare” by St. The creations of ascetics closer to us in time can bring great benefit. These are “Ascetic Experiences” and “Letters”, “Letters” and other books of the saint, “My Life in Christ” by the righteous saint.

It is probably impossible not to say here about the spiritual heritage of the recently deceased Svyatogorsk elder Schemamonk Paisius (Eznepidis; 1924-1993). His teachings are distinguished by their extreme simplicity, accessibility for the perception of modern man and at the same time - depth, unity in spirit with the instructions of the venerable fathers of antiquity. Reading his books leaves a feeling like talking with a living, very caring person who cares about us, who sincerely wants to help in the life difficulties that we face.

Of our domestic ascetics who have not yet been glorified by the Church, I would like to mention the abbot; 1894-1963), author of the remarkable “Letters”, published under the general title “Repentance is Left to Us.” Also - schema-abbot; 1873-1958), a Valaam elder who completed his life path in forced emigration, on New Valaam in Finland. After him, he also left numerous letters to his spiritual children, breathing with holy love for them and for every soul seeking salvation. The instructions and letters of the abbess are remarkable in their way; 1833-1905), surprisingly close in character and content to the writings of St. Ignatius.

It would be good to get acquainted with the books of such still living church writers as Archimandrite and Archimandrite, who live and work in the Iveron land. In them, the seeker will find answers to many of his questions.

And, of course, the letters of a contemporary elder, revered in Russia, Archimandrite, published in two editions, can bring very great spiritual benefit. They are quite laconic, but they understand them the most important aspects today's church life, the problems that people who turn to the Church face these days.

Of course, the list of books that need to be read is by no means exhausted by the authors mentioned here and their works. But this is the most accessible and urgent thing, which I would like to say first of all. At the same time, of course, it is good to be guided in reading by the advice of your confessor: he can better see what exactly is needed for the person confessing to him at the moment.

It is very important to understand one thing when reading the patristic books: they should be read, as the Optina elders said, “by deeds.” In other words, you need to study, research what is said in these books, apply it to yourself and try with all your might to put it into practice. If we do this, then it is unlikely that we will have that feeling of dissatisfaction with our spiritual life, which now haunts us.

Temptations in church life

Speaking about the churching of modern man and about the obstacles that he encounters on this path, one cannot help but say that one of these obstacles is those temptations and disorganizations in church life, which, unfortunately, are often encountered in our days.

Is it worth talking about these temptations and disorders in detail? Probably not: almost everyone knows what they can be. Sometimes these are temptations, real, real vices, sometimes they are seeming, far-fetched. But in any case, for a correct attitude towards them, it is necessary to always remember that the Church, by its nature, is simultaneously something both heavenly and earthly. The heavenly in the Church is the Lord acting in it, His grace, His saints and incorporeal angelic forces. And earthly things are people, living people just like you and me. And it is better never to confuse the heavenly with the earthly in the Church.

Needless to say, it can be very difficult when a person comes to the Church, sometimes even decides to devote his life to serving it, and is faced with something that, it would seem, has no place at all. Faces human shortcomings, completely “earthly” interests, and people’s weaknesses. It is very easy to become disappointed and recoil.

But it’s much better to try to understand it correctly. People come to the Church to be saved, but they do not automatically become saints. They bring their passions, their sinful skills here. Some people eventually stop fighting with themselves and live simply as they have to. It is very difficult with such people in the Church. Someone is struggling, but with little success. And someone, with God’s help, conquers himself and his bad inclinations.

And you need to know yourself very well, your own extreme weakness, so as not to judge anyone, so as not to be burdened by someone else’s weakness, but to empathize and have compassion for it.

It is also very important not to judge the Church as if from the outside, you need to live in it, feel like an integral part of it, consider its shortcomings as your shortcomings, its troubles as your troubles, its pain as your pain.

Then you need to know that the enemy of salvation always seeks to quarrel, divide people, and pit them against each other. And here his main weapon is. He shows us something that really doesn’t exist, presents small mistakes as terrible crimes, and makes mountains out of molehills.

The Church today has many enemies, and the main means of their struggle against it is the same lies, the same slander, both terrible and dirty. The sad thing is that, believing these slanderers, people sometimes simply recoil from the Church, stop believing it and thus directly flee from their salvation and perish. But there is no doubt that an even more bitter fate awaits those who curse and mock the Church in this way.

We must always remember that a lot depends on with what thought, with what internal structure we evaluate the reality around us. Elder Paisios of Athos talks wonderfully about how much the assessment of this reality depends on “thought”: “When some told me that they were tempted by seeing a lot of inappropriate things in the Church, I answered them like this: “If you ask a fly, are there flowers in the vicinity?” , then she will answer: “I don’t know about flowers. But that ditch is full of cans, manure, and sewage.” And the fly will begin to list to you in order all the garbage dumps it has visited. And if you ask a bee: “Have you seen any uncleanness here in the vicinity?”, then it will answer: “Employment? No, I haven't seen it anywhere. There are so many fragrant flowers here!” And the bee will begin to list to you many different flowers - garden and field. You see how: a fly only knows about garbage dumps, but a bee knows that a lily grows nearby, and a little further away a hyacinth has blossomed.”

As I understand it, some people are like a bee, while others are like a fly. Those who are like a fly look for something bad in every situation and do only that. They don't see an iota of good in anything. Those who are like a bee find goodness in everything."

Information these days is heard from different sides and is very contradictory. People try to understand it, but they do not always succeed; they often make mistakes, mistaking white for black and black for white. But here, too, it would be useful to heed the wise advice of Father Paisius not to get carried away with books and publications that discuss complex issues of church politics and church disorders. The elder wrote: “If you want to help the Church, correct yourself, and one part of the Church will immediately correct itself. If everyone did this, naturally the Church would correct itself.” Indeed, a person who studies the shortcomings and sins of others, is indignant at them, and condemns them, over time himself comes into complete spiritual disorder and in this way cannot help anyone, but can only harm.

And, on the contrary, a Christian who leads an attentive life, works on himself, struggles with his passions, becomes a good example and helper for those who are next to him. And in this (in doing what we are each called to do in our own place, trying to do it according to God) lies the most real benefit that a believer can bring to the entire Church.

About the service

Often we have to face the fact that Christians, even those who have been visiting the temple for a long time, still do not understand what is happening in it, do not understand the meaning of Orthodox worship. As a result, they feel like strangers in the temple, external people, they feel that there is some kind of very important life, to which they are not yet involved.

It is imperative to understand what is happening in the Church. Church services are essentially a poetic exposition of Orthodox theology, moral principles and truths of Christianity. The words of prayers, stichera, troparions can most likely elevate, literally lift to heaven the person who listens to them attentively, with reverence. Therefore, it is a great pity when people, not knowing the Church Slavonic language, do not listen to what is sung and read in church. In this case, the whole service turns for them only into some kind of mysterious music, incomprehensible to them.

But in fact, the Church Slavonic language is not something alien and incomprehensible to us. Most of the words are familiar to people. The property of this language is such that, praying in it, after some time a person, to his surprise, begins to notice that he understands words and expressions that previously seemed difficult to understand. Well, as for truly incomprehensible words, their meaning can always be looked up in dictionaries, of which, thank God, there are many published today.

In addition, it is necessary to study Orthodox worship as such, study it both in practice and in theory. In practice - that is, praying during the service, pondering the mysterious meaning of what is happening there. And in theory, this means reading those (again, numerous) books on liturgics and church rules that have been published these days.

If we start here with the simplest, then first of all we need to find out what the service consists of - then it will become much more understandable, it will be easier to perceive, just as everything that we have managed to understand for ourselves is easier to perceive.

The liturgical day begins in the evening, according to the biblical account of the creation of the world: And there was evening, and there was morning: one day. The evening service includes the ninth hour, Vespers and Compline (today Compline is celebrated, however, only in monastery churches).

The morning service consists of the Midnight Office (which, like Compline, is primarily a part of monastic services in our time), Matins and the first hour.

And finally, the daytime service consists of the third and sixth hours and the Divine Liturgy.

The symbolic and mysterious meaning of all liturgical sequences, as well as their history, require a separate, rather lengthy explanation. Briefly, we can say here, perhaps, only that Vespers and Compline, as their name implies, should be celebrated in the evening, and Midnight Office, Matins and the first hour - in the morning. However, due to an already established tradition, for the convenience of those praying in parish and in a significant part of monastic churches, in the evening the combined ninth hour, vespers and matins are served, to which the first hour is added, and in the morning, after the reading of the third and sixth hours, the liturgy is performed.

Among the books that I would like to recommend for familiarization with divine services, it is worth mentioning, first of all, the repeatedly reprinted sequences of the All-Night Vigil (a festive service consisting of Vespers and Matins) and the Divine Liturgy, the “New Tablet” by Archbishop Veniamin (Krasnopevkov-Rumovsky), "Guide to the Study of Worship" Orthodox Church"Archpriest, "Hymnography and Eortology" by Archimandrite. For more serious study – “The Liturgical Charter of the Orthodox Church” by Vasily Rozanov and “Explanatory Typikon”. An acquaintance with the liturgical books themselves could provide significant help here: the Book of Hours, the Followed Psalter, the Octoechos, the Menaions, the Lenten and Colored Triodions.

And for something, especially something incomprehensible, something that a person cannot figure out on his own, it is always appropriate to ask the priest to whom he is confessing.

Human relations in the Church

But in general, church life consists not only of worship. It also consists of some specific deeds, living human relationships. On the one hand, the Church always needs people who are willing and able to help and work in it. On the other hand, the Christian himself, by doing something for the temple, gains incomparably more than he gives. Therefore, often washing the floors, cleaning candlesticks, cleaning the territory, or any other, more or less skilled work that he performs here, becomes the most real and most effective way of his churching.

Then he no longer has the feeling that “there is some important life in which he is not involved.” On the contrary, he develops a feeling of involvement in church life, he truly begins to feel like a part of the Church.

Some people sometimes find it strange that we talk about living human relationships in the Church. And indeed: some people could say to this that the temple is a place where people come not for communication, but for prayer. And they are certainly right.

However, it is natural that the time of communication between believers should not be a church service: it is also a time of communication, but not with people, but with God. And, of course, under no circumstances can a temple become some kind of club where people meet and spend time together, talk about the latest news, etc.

But at the same time, living people come to the temple, and it would be abnormal if, we repeat, living human relationships were not established between them. In ancient times, Christians lived in communities; they had everything in common: life itself, the means to support it, thoughts, and feelings. There was a time when Christians, as they say in the Acts of the Apostles, absolutely did not consider anything as their own. And someone else’s misfortune, someone else’s need, accordingly, were not considered strangers.

But we live in fundamentally different times, in completely different conditions. We are very separated, distant from each other. People who believe today inevitably often find themselves in some kind of isolation: they do not meet understanding at work, in the world around them, sometimes even in their own home. It is very difficult to constantly face such misunderstanding. Sometimes this leads to some kind of internal bitterness, sometimes to despondency, sometimes even to hesitation in one’s Christian life.

And where else can believers look these days for understanding, like-mindedness, human closeness and support, if not in church? People come here, although very different, but with similar thoughts, feelings, joys and sorrows, and most importantly, equally believers, seeking God, striving for Him. And one person manages to go a little longer in his movement towards God, another - a little less, someone manages to understand and learn a little more, and thanks to this he can help his neighbors, share with them those, albeit very small, spiritual or emotional ones. gifts that the Lord has given him. And then it is natural when believers help one another not only in something spiritual, but also in ordinary, everyday matters - after all, this is precisely what expresses the love that the Lord commanded us to have and which is an obligatory sign of His true disciples. In addition, next to us, around us in modern life, there are a lot of those who need support: these are the old, the sick, people who do not have sufficient funds for food, and homeless children, and simply beggars who are looking for sometimes not only alms, but also a kind, cordial attitude towards them.

It is very gratifying to see how good, sincere relationships develop between people in a particular parish. And it is equally bitter to observe how over time they often collapse, or even simply develop into some kind of mutual alienation, misunderstanding and even hostility.

But we remember the words of the Savior spoken by Him to the Apostle Peter: Simon! Simon! Behold, Satan has asked to sow you like wheat. To sow means to scatter, to separate, to cause discord among Christians. It is the enemy of the human race who is trying to destroy our unity and sow enmity between us. We are truly strong when we are gathered together by the grace and love of God in the name of Christ. Today one can very well see how even the darkest, unkind forces unite in their activities, in their struggle against the Church, and it is very bitter when, on the contrary, we cannot find among ourselves common language, we run away from each other as if from enemies, or we simply close our hearts from our neighbors. Our duty is to be above any dissimilarities and disagreements in trifles, we are called to cover the weaknesses of those who are next to us, to cover them with love, to bear each other’s burdens and thus fulfill the law of Christ.

We in the Church can all really be very different people - different in nationality, temperament, life experience and spiritual structure. But what unites us is much greater than anything that could divide us. What unites us is Christ, whose love reaches every person, does not disdain anyone, does not turn away from anyone. And this must always be remembered.

Instead of a conclusion

This is, perhaps, what I would like to touch upon in this small publication. Of course, the depth and breadth, and even more so the importance of the topic raised cannot be exhausted by what has been said here. However, it is necessary to speak and write on this topic. The only question is who to tell and how: who has enough experience for this, enough reasoning? Probably, for almost each of us it would be great arrogance to consider ourselves to have “understood everything,” “comprehended everything,” and “solved all the issues” in modern church reality. But a wonderful church writer of our time, Archimandrite, once remarked in a private letter that today we Christians need, if not to give each other advice, then at least to call each other, to “call each other”, so as not to go astray, not to get lost and don't get lost. And this text offered to the attention of readers, as the author himself evaluates it, is an attempt to participate in such a roll call. The author would be very happy if it brought real benefit to someone, or at least helped someone take a closer look at themselves, at their spiritual life, at their existence in the Church.

Introduction. 2.

Chapter 1. History of the issue. 4.

x 1. Musical education in the first place

kindergartens in Russia. 4.

x 2. Objectives of music education. 8.

Chapter 2. Development of musical abilities. 10.

x 1. Musicality. 10.

x 2. In the world of mysterious sounds. 12.

x 3. Pitch hearing. 13.

x 4. Duration of sound and sense of rhythm. 14.

x 5. Timbre coloring and timbre sound. 16.

x 6. Learning to listen to music. 17.

x 7. Development of perception. 20.

x 8. Development of musical abilities

in singing. 20.

x 9. Music and movement. 24.

Conclusion. 27.

Bibliography. 29.

Applications. 31.

Musical education is not the education of a musician, but, first of all, the education of a person.

V.A. Sukhomlinsky.

One of the most pressing and “big” problems facing modern society is the threat of spiritual impoverishment of the individual, the danger of loss of moral guidelines. Therefore, our education needs a turn to the vital problems of modern society, providing moral education, confronting lack of spirituality, consumerism, and reviving in children the desire and need for active intellectual activity.

For many years we have been discussing: among the specialists there are teachers who are well versed in the musical education of preschoolers; This is on the one hand, on the other - there are specialists in the musical education of children at school. School teachers say: “It’s difficult to work with first-graders, because sometimes they can’t name a single composer and don’t know the songs they learned in kindergarten.” Teachers, in turn, believe: “Our children learned to sing and dance, but at school there was only one music lesson.”

Unfortunately, we have to admit: both are right. It is a rare coincidence when a child, having received a full musical education in kindergarten, finds himself in an equally favorable musical environment at school. Moreover, the practical worker sees the interaction between the music director of the kindergarten and the music teacher at school in the continuity of the work of everything that has been accumulated in the musical education of the child at the previous stage.

Musical education in the first place

kindergartens in Russia.

Members of the St. Petersburg Society for the Promotion of Preschool Education tried to substantiate the importance of musical education back in the last century, who believed that the main thing was to develop musicality, a sense of rhythm and hearing in preschoolers. However, the organizers of the society noted that fulfilling this requirement is quite difficult, because there is no clarity in the programs, the experience of the leaders (the term of that time), and their musical training are insufficient. Thus, teacher L. Schleger proposed diversifying music classes through the use of exercises to develop musical education, as well as the use of marching to music.

In 1873, a “Collection of articles and materials for conversations and classes at home and in kindergarten, for reading in gymnasiums, teachers’ seminaries and city schools” appeared, where its author, I. Belov, tried to develop methods for introducing games to singing. The compiler of the book “Games and Activities for Children of All Ages” A. Dussek proposed a game based on musical impressions “Concert”, gave a detailed method for showing shadow theater. The musical collection “Outdoor Games with Singing” (author N. Filitis) included games that are popular to this day in musical work with children (“Teremok”, “Rain”, “Loaf”, “Ladushki”).

The following directions in the organization of musical activities in kindergartens working according to the method of A. S. Simonovich, in the “ideal kindergarten” of K. N. Ventzel, in the preschool institution of S. T. and V. N. Shatskikh deserve attention. Here musical education was carried out most systematically.

Thus, A. S. Simonovich believed that music should perform an illustrative function for classes. For example, when conducting classes on “Homeland Studies”, you need to sing songs about the weather, in physical education classes you need to use games - fun and games with singing. The most noticeable contribution was made by A. Simonovich to the issue of holding children's parties. She recognized their pedagogical expediency when fulfilling a number of requirements: holidays should leave a deep impression, develop a sense of collectivism, children need to see a beautiful combination of colors, listen to beautiful music, the entire organization of holidays is designed to arouse the kindest and best in them. The basic principle of music education by A. Simonovich is reliance on the desire of preschoolers.

The creator of the “ideal kindergarten” model, K. N. Ventzel, proposed his own system of musical education, consisting of various types activities: singing, listening, dancing, playing children's musical instruments. The main purpose of musical education, from his point of view, is not the formation of copying and mechanical reproduction skills, but the development of the child’s creative powers. Therefore, he believed, we must rely on the free activity of children, proceed from the nature of the child, and look at him as a “little artist.” In musical work, according to the teacher, there should be two stages:

first - perceptive activity, when the baby is sung, played an instrument, and he listens;

second - is based on the method of “releasing creative forces”, thanks to this the child creates in music, improvising melodies with his voice or on a musical instrument.

The development of artistic and creative ideas of children is helped by the teacher, who creates the appropriate atmosphere, selects the musical repertoire, taking into account the needs, experiences, and desires of the children. The thoughts of K.N. Ventzel regarding the role of an adult in raising children in kindergarten sound very relevant and modern (“do not enslave the will and mind of the child, take care of spiritual communication and equality with him, and then it will become possible to develop in children the ability to enjoy art” ).

The third direction in the development of the theory and practice of music education can be considered the work of the kindergarten of the Shatsky spouses. Aesthetic education was the fundamental and integrating element of the pedagogical concept of S. T. Shatsky. It was built on a cultural approach, when art is introduced into life and life is organized in art, which is why S.T. Shatsky’s motto is “there must be music!” According to the author, the following must be taken into account:

• musical life should be organized in accordance with the age and needs of children;
• rely on the child’s personal experience;
• conditions must be created for the development of musical ear, musical language, and creative perception.

It is important to systematically examine the degree of musical development of children, identifying their needs and interest in music, creativity, and level of musical knowledge. Only thanks to this approach can you create the necessary musical atmosphere at concerts, evenings, and special classes.

In the Shatsky kindergarten, musical education was carried out most systematically and consistently, so it is no coincidence that V. N. Shatskaya’s book “Music in Kindergarten” is still considered the first methodological guide on the musical education of preschoolers. It is in it that for the first time the methodology of conducting musical group lessons is discussed, the tasks of musical work in each are determined. age group, generalizes the basic provisions on the organization of listening, singing, musical and rhythmic movements, substantiates qualification requirements to prepare a music teacher in kindergarten.

Objectives of music education.

Music has the potential to influence not only adults, but also children themselves. early age. Moreover, and this has been proven, even the prenatal period is extremely important for the subsequent development of a person: the music that the expectant mother listens to has a positive effect on the well-being of the developing child (maybe it shapes his tastes and preferences). From the above, we can conclude how important it is to create conditions for the formation of the foundations of the musical culture of preschool children.

The main objectives of music education can be considered:

1. Develop musical and creative abilities (taking into account the capabilities of each) through various types of musical activities;

2. To form the beginning of musical culture, to contribute to the formation of a common spiritual culture.

The successful solution of the listed tasks depends on the content of musical education, primarily on the importance of the repertoire used, methods and techniques of teaching, forms of organizing musical activity, etc.

It is important to develop in a child all the best that is inherent in him by nature; taking into account the propensity for certain types of musical activity, on the basis of various natural inclinations, to form special musical abilities, to promote general development.

Each child's musical abilities manifest themselves differently. For some, already in the first year of life, all three basic abilities - a sense of harmony, musical-auditory perception and a sense of rhythm - are expressed quite clearly, develop quickly and easily, this indicates musicality; For others it’s later, more difficult. The most difficult to develop are musical and auditory concepts - the ability to reproduce the melody of a voice, accurately, intoning it, or select it by ear on a musical instrument. In most children, this ability does not appear until the age of five. But the absence of early manifestation of abilities, emphasizes musician-psychologist B.M. Teplov, is not an indicator of weakness, or even less a lack of abilities. Great importance has the environment in which the child grows up (especially in the first years of life). The early manifestation of musical abilities is observed, as a rule, in children who receive sufficiently rich musical impressions.

Development of musical abilities.

Musicality.

Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Beethoven... Famous names known to everyone. Who chose the path of geniuses for them? Who determined the glory of musician-composers? Nature? Parents? Teachers?

Maybe professional qualities are passed on through genes? Maybe the son of a scientist, when he grows up, will become a scientist, and the son of a writer - a writer?

You can often hear: “my child must have taken after his father, he has no ear for music at all.” A fairly common formula for the reason for the lack of abilities of a son or daughter.

Teachers and musicians have come to the conclusion that everyone has the makings of musical activity (i.e. physiological features of the structure of the body, for example, the organ of hearing or the vocal apparatus). They form the basis for the development of musical abilities. The concept of “non-developing ability,” according to scientists and specialists in the field of research into musicality, is in itself absurd. It is considered proven that if the necessary conditions are created for the musical development of a child from birth, this has a significant effect in the formation of his musicality.

Nature has generously rewarded man. She gave him everything to see, feel, feel the world around him. She allowed him to hear all the variety of sound colors existing around him. Listening to their own voice, the voices of birds and animals, the mysterious rustling of the forest, leaves and the howling of the wind, people learned to distinguish intonation, pitch, and duration. From the need and ability to listen and hear, musicality was born - one of the properties given by nature to a person.

Experts define musicality as a set of abilities that allows a person to actively express himself in various types of musical activities: listening to music, singing, moving, and musical creativity.

These, as they are commonly called, special or basic abilities include: pitch hearing, modal sense and sense of rhythm. It is the presence of them that fills the music a person hears with new content; it is they that allow one to rise to the heights of a deeper knowledge of the secrets of musical art.

However, the main thing, according to scientists, is that these abilities do not so much manifest themselves in musical activity, but are themselves created in the process of it. Such an interesting and obligatory pattern is observed. That is why teachers include understanding music, the ability to sing and move expressively, and engage in musical creativity as part of the concept of “musicality.” So,

how more active communication child with music, the more musical he becomes, the more musical he becomes, the more joyful and desirable new meetings with her .

In the world of mysterious sounds.

What is sound? Sound is a vibration that affects any object, living organism, including human

Quiet and loud sounds, of course, can never be confused. If you listen carefully to the sound of human speech, you will notice that it is rich in dynamic shades (“dynamics” translated from Greek means “force, relating to force”). Thanks to shades, our speech becomes more colorful: the same as the color drawing proposed for comparison.

Dynamic shades in musical speech are unique musical colors that, painting the melody in different colors, make it sound more expressive.

The strength of any sound is one of its important properties, one of its features.

In music there are special designations for sounds of different strengths. A loud sound is called “Forte” (indicated by the sign F), a quiet sound is called “Piano” (sign P), moderately loud is called “Mezzo-Forte” (MF), suddenly loud is called “Sforzando” (SF).

By the way, from the merger of two words: forte (loud) and piano (quiet) - the name of the well-known keyboard instrument - piano.

So, in order to develop in a child the ability to distinguish sounds of different strengths, you need to perform several game tasks with him that develop this ability. (See Appendix 1.)

Pitch hearing.

Sounds differ from each other not only in dynamics. To learn about another secret of sound, play a dialogue game with your child. Imagine that two people met, one big - big, with a low voice, and the other tiny, with a thin voice. The giant began to question the little man in a deep voice, and he began to answer him subtly and tenderly.

Where do you live? - the giant thundered.

In a lily of the valley flower, it rang gently in response.

Who are you friends with? - the thunderous question rang out again.

With Thumbelina...

You can come up with further dialogue and perform it, not forgetting that the giant speaks in a thunderous bass voice, and the fairy-tale little one speaks high and tenderly.

Every musical sound has a pitch.

It is this that distinguishes one musical sound from another, and any noise sound from a musical one.

Read with your children a fairy tale about the girl Ksyusha, the cat and the piano, so that the child understands which sounds are called high and which are low. (See Appendix 2).

Duration of sound and sense of rhythm.

High and low sounds create a melody, the expressiveness of which is given by dynamic shades.

But any melody will seem unattractive if the sounds that make it up are the same in duration, or, as teachers say, in duration.

In music we can hear the same rhythmicity: long, short, medium-duration sounds alternate evenly, in an orderly manner, forming colorful rhythmic patterns, or, as musicians usually say, rhythmic patterns.

Duration is one of the important features

sound. Alternation of sounds of different durations

forms a rhythmic pattern.

Elena Alekseevna Koroleva came up with an interesting fairy tale, which tells how they lived together in harmony and did not bother the family for different durations. (See Appendix 3).

If it is difficult for a child to understand and remember the name of durations, you can use other conventional signs to indicate short and long sounds.

Express a long sound in the form of a long vertical strip of a smaller size.

To indicate a long sound, you can use an unshaded oval, and short sounds will be the same ovals, only shaded.

For example, like this:

Instead of counting, some teachers suggest using rhythmic syllables. So, for example, a long sound is indicated by the syllable “ta”, and a shorter sound by the syllable “ti”. To better understand how the rhythmic pattern develops, you can imagine the durations in the form of uniform steps:

equal to pitch - (quarters),

equal to two steps - (half),

equal to four steps - (integers),

The step can be replaced with the syllable “ta”. It turns out:

ta ta ta ta - in four steps - 4 syllables “ta”

ta-a ta-a - in four steps - 2 syllables “ta”

ta-a-a-a - in four steps -1 long syllable “ta”

Smaller durations of sounds, for example, when there are two durations per step, are indicated by the syllable “ti”.

Ti-ti ti-ti ti-ti ti-ti - in four steps - 8 short syllables "ti".

Timbre coloring and timbre sound.

Warm - cold, hard - soft, light - heavy, matte - shiny... If there is a person on earth who has never heard music, he is unlikely to believe that these words refer to an invisible and intangible sound. Why do we never confuse the voices of people we know? How do we distinguish the sound of one musical instrument from another? Why do sounds of a high register in our imagination are most often painted in transparent light colors, while low sounds evoke a feeling of dark, cold colors?

This is the mystery of another property of sound - timbre. You can give it several more characteristics: thick, deep, courageous, harsh, grumpy, velvety, rich. (See Attachment)

Timbre - color.

Any sound existing in nature has this property, and, of course, musical sound.

Learning to listen to music.

1.First of all, remember that any musical composition you need to listen without being distracted by anything else. The main thing, of course, is to want to listen! You need to try very hard to carefully follow what is happening in the music, from the very beginning to its very end, covering your ears sound by sound, without losing sight of anything! Music will always reward the listener for this, giving him a new feeling, a new mood, perhaps never experienced before in his life.

2. At first, you should not listen to major musical works, as you may fail. After all, the skill of following sounds with the ear has not yet been developed and attention is not disciplined enough. That's why It is better to choose small works for listening.

3. It can be vocal music (music for the voice) or instrumental (which is performed on various musical instruments). Listen to the sounds, try to hear and distinguish the dynamic shades of musical speech, determine whether they make the performance of a piece of music expressive.

5. There are no words in instrumental music. But that doesn't make it any less interesting. Take a record of the famous composition by P. I. Tchaikovsky “Children's Album”. What kind of life and even fairy-tale situations are not depicted in this music! The composer, like an artist with a brush, painted surprisingly interesting pictures from the life of a child with musical colors. Here are “Game of Horses”, “March of the Wooden Soldiers”, “Doll Disease”, “New Doll”. Here you will hear very affectionate, dreamy plays “Sweet Dream”, “Mom”, “Winter Morning” and many other charming musical sketches. Other composers also have similar music albums addressed to young listeners. S.S. Prokofiev’s album is called “Children’s Music”. Musical plays seem to depict the day a child lives. Listen to the “Fairy Tale” or the poetic play “A Moon Walks Over the Meadows” from this collection. In Robert Schumann's "Album for Youth", children should definitely like "The Bold Rider", and "The Merry Peasant", and the slightly mysterious play "Echoes of the Theatre". And the colorful work “Santa Claus” will revive the fantasy and imagination of any listener.

In “Children's Album” A. Grechaninov can make everyone laugh

the musical play “Riding a Horse”, and “An Unusual Journey” may even scare someone a little. And the works of composer S. Maykapar “In the kindergarten”, “The Shepherd Boy”, “Little Commander” will be close and understandable even to the smallest.

6. From time to time it is necessary to return to listening to the same works. You can mentally imagine their sound in order to quickly and easily recognize them. The more often you listen to already familiar works, the more and more you like them each time. But always listen to the music carefully, without distractions, thoughtfully. It is important to monitor not only the change in dynamic shades, but also the pitch of sounds and the speed of their change. We must learn to enjoy the colorful musical waterfall and be able to subtly distinguish each crystal stream. Learn to compare them, admire them. Feel the orderliness that exists in music: sounds cannot sound “haphazardly, however you please.”

7. Try to make listening to music a regular activity. Set aside a special time for listening. Nothing should distract the child from communicating with music; this should never be done hastily.

8. It is very useful to listen to the same works performed by different soloists and groups, watch performances with different casts of performers. All this will help expand your knowledge of music, allowing you not only to think more clearly, but also to feel more deeply.

Development of perception.

To develop children's music perception skills (musical memory, the ability to distinguish moods, the nature of musical works), you can also use some games. But first, read the children a fairy tale by E. Koroleva about the two main modes of music: major and minor. One of them paints works in sad, sad tones (minor), the other loves bright, cheerful, cheerful colors (major). Having become acquainted with the fairy tale, the child will more easily distinguish the major mood of the sound of a piece of music from the minor one. (See Attachment).

Development of musical abilities in singing.

Every person, when born, receives from mother nature a precious and great gift- a special quality musical instrument - the voice. Some teachers believe that it can become the basis, the foundation of all human musical culture in the future. You just need to learn how to use this instrument correctly.

The best way to teach a child to sing is to use your own voice. Listening to the song, the baby himself begins to sing along, diligently imitating the expressive intonations of the adult’s voice. The younger the child, the easier the song repertoire should be. Remember that the volume of a child's voice is small. The vocal cords of babies are thin and fragile. Therefore, the child’s entire vocal apparatus requires a very careful and caring attitude.

When learning to sing, always go from simple to more complex, as if you are gradually climbing a ladder to the heights of performing skills.

Method of learning songs.

1. It is better to start learning the melody without text, on some syllable, for example “la” (in this case, all the child’s attention will be focused on the pitch line).
2. Moving songs must first be sung at a slow pace so that the child can pronounce all the words well and correctly, especially those that are difficult to pronounce.
3. Fragments of the song that are complex in rhythmic pattern and melody must be taught separately. In order for the child to clearly understand where the melody is moving and where to direct the voice, use a gesture (the hand moves up and down, jumping or smoothly, depending on the movement of the melody). Measures with a difficult rhythmic pattern need to be clapping, then simultaneously clapping and singing on any syllable.
4. To ensure that the sound while singing has a beautiful color, watch your child’s lips. It should always have a round shape. A well-opening mouth also helps with this.
5. You need to breathe calmly, without raising your shoulders or taking noisy breaths before each new phrase songs. It is advisable to retain air in the lungs until the end of the phrase, using it sparingly. You can learn this by playing, for example, with candles (blow on the candle flame as long as possible, watching how it deviates to the side) or with white fluffs - the parachutes of the familiar dandelion.
6. Before singing, the voice must be “warmed up”. For this purpose, small chants of three to five sounds are used. This could be a “Musical Staircase”, which it is advisable to sing from different steps, gradually raising your voice, or some other short chants, for example, “Two Thirds”, “Bird and Chicks”, etc.
7. The correct position of the child's body while singing helps to perform the song. You need to sit straight, without tension, with your shoulders straightened, your hands calmly placed on your knees closer to your body, you should not lower your head down. If the song is performed standing, then the back should also be straight, it is advisable to calmly lower the arms along the body. With this position of the body, the entire respiratory system, the entire vocal apparatus are harmoniously tuned to the singing process.

Musician teachers often use the term “purity of intonation” when assessing children’s singing. They say, for example, that a child’s intonation is not clear, or “the purity of intonation leaves much to be desired.” What does this mean?

To intonate purely or, which is the same thing, to sing “cleanly” means to sing without falsehood, not to be out of tune while singing.

When you play an instrument and sing at the same time, you need to listen to yourself and make sure that the sound of the instrument and the voice merge. You have to consciously control your voice and adapt it to the sound of the instrument. If a high sound is produced from an instrument, you need to try to make your voice thin (for example, like a mouse’s) and listen to whether it has reached the high sound of the instrument, whether it has connected with it in a consistent sound. If a low sound is played on the instrument, you need to do the opposite, lower your voice, let it be thicker, lower. The main thing is to always listen to and control yourself. The voice of the singer and the sound produced by the instrument must merge into one. It is very important. If there is even a slight discrepancy between the sound of a musical instrument and its repetition by a person, there can be no talk of pure singing, but people have always taken and still take the frequency of singing very seriously.

Don’t be upset if you can’t immediately perform the song cleanly. Success requires time, exercise in developing pitch hearing and, of course, regular singing practice. And always remember:

Before intoning (singing) the sound of a song, it is important to hear it correctly and repeat it accurately in your voice.

Music and movement.

Music and movement are the same interconnected concepts as sound and its rhythmic organization. As already mentioned, the temporal beginning, the rhythmic pattern form the basis of sounds, and, consequently, of the musical image. Rhythm, pulsation, movement, action are essentially characteristics of the same thing.

For decades, teachers have been using movement as a means of musical development. In progressive pedagogical systems of musical education, movement has always been given a special place, since musicians recognized its ability not only to improve the body, but also to develop the spiritual world of a person.

Various types of dancing, musical games, motor game exercises help the child understand the content of music and master its difficult language.

To develop children's sense of rhythm, expressiveness of movement, fantasy and imagination, pedagogical material such as word games can be used in classes. The special feature is that all these games can be played without musical accompaniment, to a melodized text, which to a certain extent seems to replace a melodic tune.

Most games are based on folk texts. They are especially convenient for sing-song expressive pronunciation (intonation). The presence of a melodic and rhythmic beginning allows you to move through the content of the text in the desired rhythm and tempo. At the same time, children improve their motor skills: jumping, spring and fractional stomping steps, gallops, steps with high legs, light fast running.

An adult who does not know how to play a musical instrument, with the help of word games, is able to competently help children master expressive movements. The text of the game does not need to be specially memorized with the child. It is remembered during the game action. The main condition is an expressive, chanting, rhythmic pronunciation of the text.

The text of any game can be specifically used to develop rhythm in a child. It can be easily reproduced in claps or, as teachers say, rhythmically.

For example, using the syllable “ta” to express a longer sound and “ti” for a shorter one, while clapping our hands, we reproduce the following rhythmic pattern of the text “Sun” (1st phrase).

Sunshine, sunshine,

Look out the window.

Ta ti-ti

Ta ti - ti or or

ti-ti ti-ti

(above pictures)

All texts should be rhythmized in the same way. (See Attachment).

Conclusion.

It is necessary to create conditions for the development of the foundations of children's musical culture from an early age. Some children are able to achieve high level musical development, others perhaps more modest. It is important that from early childhood children learn to regard music not only as a means of entertainment, but also as an important phenomenon of spiritual culture. This understanding may be primitive, but it is significant for the individual.

Only by developing the needs, interests, emotions, feelings, tastes of children (musical and aesthetic consciousness), can they be introduced to musical culture and lay its foundations.

Preschool age extremely important for a person’s subsequent mastery of musical culture. If in the process of musical activity the musical and aesthetic consciousness of children is developed, this will not pass without leaving a mark on their subsequent development and spiritual formation.

By acquiring certain knowledge about music, skills and abilities in the process of musical activity, children become familiar with the art of music. It is important that in the process of musical education, the acquisition of knowledge, skills and abilities is not an end in itself, but contributes to the development of musical and general abilities, the formation of the foundations of musical and general spiritual culture.

Society is interested in preserving and passing on spiritual values, including musical culture, to future generations. Children must develop through knowledge cultural heritage, to be brought up in such a way as to be able to increase it.

Solving the problems of musical education of children depends on pedagogical skills, conditions, methods of education, and the attention of both parents and educators.

Bibliography.

• Beilino A. Musically - rhythmic finger games. - Preschool education, 1993, no. 9, p. 114.
• Vetlugina N. A. Musical classes in kindergarten. M.: "Enlightenment" 1984.
• Vetlugina N.A. Musical ABC book. - M.: Music, 1973.
• Davydova N. Fundamentals of musical education. - Preschool education, 1994, No. 6, p. 89.
• Kuzmicheva L. Work of a music director (outside classes), - Preschool education, 1980, No. 5.
• Lifits I. Rhythm lessons. - Preschool education.
• Methods of musical education in kindergarten, / under. Ed. N. A. Vetlugina and others. Publishing house "Prosveshcheniye" 1976.
• Mikhailova M. A. Development of children's musical abilities. - Yaroslavl "Academy of Development", 1997.
• Music in kindergarten / under. Ed. N. A. Vetlugina. M.: Music, 1980.
• Musical education in the first public kindergartens in Russia. - Preschool education, 1996, No. 11, p. 91.
• Radynova O. Preschool age - tasks of musical education. - Preschool education, 1994, No. 2, pp. 24 - 30.
• Radynova O. Functions of a music director and educator. - Preschool education, 1994, No. 11, p. 52.
• Rusyaykina T. About the joint work of the music director and teacher. - Preschool education, 1980, No. 1.
• Stolyarova V. So that children grow up kind. - Preschool education, 1996, No. 9, p. 119.
• Furmina L. Music in the life of a baby. - Preschool education, 1990, No. 12, pp. 57 - 62.
• Shkoljar L. A child in music and music in a child. - Preschool education, 1992, p. 39.

Annex 1.

We read a fairy tale.

There lived a cat Vasily.

The cat was lazy!

Sharp teeth and a fat belly.

Very quiet he always walked.

Loud, insistently asked to eat,

Yes a little quieter snored on the stove

That's all he knew how to do.

A cat once had a dream like this:

It was as if he had started a fight with mice.

Loud screaming, he scratched them all

With your teeth, your clawed paw.

There are mice in fear here quiet prayed:

Oh, have pity, have mercy, do mercy!

Here a little louder exclaimed the cat: “Scram!” -

And they rushed into scattered flight.

(And in fact, while our Vasily was sleeping, this is what happened)

Mice quiet came out of the hole

Loud crunching, ate bread crusts,

After a little quieter laughing at the cat

They tied his tail with a bow.

Vasily woke up suddenly loud sneezed

He turned to the wall and fell asleep again.

And the mice climbed onto the back of the lazy man,

Until the evening loud they made fun of him.

Appendix 2.

Once upon a time there was a girl in the world. Her name was Ksyusha. Once they gave her a piano for her birthday, but she didn’t know how to play and started banging on the keys, scaring even Murka the cat.

Ksyusha became sad and went to bed. Ksyusha fell asleep and had an amazing dream.

It's like she and the cat are at home,

And they sit by the window.

And behind him: “Boom-boom!”

Ksyusha turned around when she heard a noise

He sees the piano walking,

The lid opens like a mouth.

And under the lid there are keys in a row,

As if teeth were sticking out.

Here comes the angry piano

Swallow the girl Oksana.

Oh, how scared she was! She wanted to run away, but she couldn’t.

But then the cat jumped on the keys!

And the miracle happened in an instant.

Murka walks on the keys,

And the piano sings and sings.

Murka steps silently,

And the piano answers her affectionately.

Then suddenly a miracle happened -

The cat suddenly learned to say:

“Meow, I’ll tell you everything,

If you want, I’ll show you the secret!”

She says to Ksyusha

And he orders me to look into the piano.

She herself wags her tail,

He presses the keys with his paws.

And if he turns right -

The sounds are getting higher and softer.

Ksyusha looked into the piano and gasped: there was a hammer attached to each key, and behind it there was a whole row of strings, but all of them were different!

And the thicker, the longer the string -

The lower it sounds.

Murka presses the key -

The hammer strikes the string

The girl Oksana thinks,

“Not a scary piano at all.

You just have to not hit him,

Don't hit him with your fists,

And touch the keys carefully -

So it won’t bite.”

Then morning came and the dream was interrupted. Ksyusha stood up and gently touched the keys.

E. Queen.

The piano has many keys!

You will make them all sound.

On the far left the bass is humming

It's like he's always angry.

On the far right the sound is high

In the middle keys just

N. Konchalovskaya.

Appendix 3

Friendly family.

Once upon a time there lived a large friendly family:

great-grandmother

two grandmothers

moms and dads

and the kids

They often went for a walk to the park together. And then one day, to make walking more fun, the guys came up with something to do: count their steps. The alley in the park was long, they had to take many steps, and they could only count up to four. They thought and thought about how they could lengthen the count, and came up with an idea: after each number the guys decided to add the letter “i”. No sooner said than done.

Children are running along the road

And count the steps of the naughty girl,

And this is what they come up with:

One and, two and, three and, four and,

See how fast they run.

Moms and dads heard them

And they instantly counted their steps:

One and, two and, three and, four and

This is what they did.

Well, grandmothers, so as not to be left behind,

One and, two and, three and, four and

Then the great-grandmother said quietly:

And I also counted the steps:

One and, two and, three and, four and

Oh, how slowly she walked!

And we went home to rest.

So it's time to end the fairy tale.

Appendix No. 4.

Loudly - quietly binge drinking.

Game material . Any toy.

Progress of the game. Several people can take part in the game. They can be either the baby’s relatives or his friends. A driver is selected and leaves the room. The remaining children agree on where to hide the toy. The driver's task is to find it, guided by the volume of the song, which can be sung by all participants or one of the players. Everyone needs to remember the basic rule: the sound of the song increases as you approach the place where the toy is located, or weakens as you move away from it.

If the child successfully completed the task when repeating the game, he has the right to hide the toy.

Appendix No. 5.

Who goes?

Using the fairy tale “Friendly Family” by E. Koroleva, practice drawing up rhythmic patterns.

1. Play sounds for entire durations on any musical instrument (even a noise instrument: rattle, maracas, tambourine), thus depicting the “steps of a great-grandmother.” Count out loud as you do so.

2. Simultaneously with the child, they play another musical instrument, alternately depicting “grandmother’s steps” (half duration), “mother’s steps” (quarter duration) or “children’s steps” (eighth duration). The child must guess who is walking next to “great-grandmother”, “grandmother”, etc.

3. Ask the child to name the durations in which the heroes of the fairy tale “walk” as performed by their parents.

Appendix No. 6.

Murka the cat and musical toys.

Game material. Musical toys: pipe, bell, musical hammer; cat ( soft toy); box.

Progress of the game. An adult brings a box tied with a ribbon, takes out a cat from there and tells the children that the cat Murka came to visit and brought musical toys as a gift, which he will give to the children if they recognize them by their sound.

An adult plays musical toys unnoticed by the children (behind a small screen). Children recognize them. The cat gives the toy to the child, who rings the bell (tapping with a musical hammer, playing the pipe).

Appendix No. 7.

Two brothers.

In ancient times, in a fairy-tale country called Soundland, King Ding dong the Seventh ruled. More than anything else, he loved to sleep and be bored.

Sometimes he would sit on his throne and get bored.

He's swinging his legs out of boredom,

Out of boredom, he will order cookies to be served, and the soldiers will start singing a song.

His soldiers were unusual -

All of them are excellent singers.

And for this, by the way,

Dean and Don began to call them with sounds.

The Sounds will sing to the king one song, another,

The king will snore, and Sounds will also go to the side.

They sleep until the morning.

In the morning they will get up and shout: “Hurray!”

The king will wake up

Turns from side to side,

And everything will start again:

Boredom, cookies, soldiers' singing.

From this life the Sounds have become so lazy,

They completely forgot how to sing properly.

The king was terribly upset.

He even stopped being bored.

Makes them sing this way and that,

But they don’t want to.

And then one day two brothers arrived in Soundland from the distant country of Ladiya - Lada. One was a cheerful dancer - laughing, the other was sad and thoughtful. The cheerful one was called Major, and the sad one was Minor. Major and Minor learned about the king’s trouble and decided to help him.

They came to the palace

The king was bowed as expected.

Hello, Dean - Don, they say. -

We want to listen to your soldiers.

Well,” the king commanded the sounds, “

Sing it all out!

One, two! One, two!

The Sounds sang, some into the forest, some for firewood.

The brothers couldn't stand this music,

Come on, they say,

Dean - Don, we will help you,

From your sounds we will compose a good song.

Major arranged the sounds in a row -

The result was a scale.

The Major commanded them: “Calculate by a tone or semitone!” The sounds were quickly calculated:

Tone, tone, semitone,

Tone, tone, semitone.

Start singing! - Major commanded. The sounds began to sing.

We all stood in a row together,

The result was a scale.

Not simple - major,

Joyful, perky.

When we finished singing the Sounds, Minor stepped forward. He commanded: “Calculate a tone or a semitone!” For some reason the sounds became sad and reluctantly settled.

Tone, semitone,

Tone, tone, semitone,

Start singing! - Minor commanded. The sounds began to sing.

We are a minor scale

There is a long row of sad sounds.

Let's sing a sad song

And now we will roar.

Since then, order has come to Soundland.

Dean - Don began to live differently,

Under new music stopped sleeping

He will be sad - Minor will appear,

If he wants to have fun, Major will appear.

The sounds began to live well,

And the songs sounded smooth.

Appendix No. 8.

Sun.

Sunshine, sunshine,

Look out the window:

Your children are crying

They jump on the pebbles.

Initial position. The children stand scattered.

Progress of the game. On the 1st and 2nd lines of the text, the adult and the child perform frequent half-squats - “springs” - and simultaneously clap their hands. Under the text of lines 3 - to her and 4 - to her, light jumps are performed with simultaneous clapping of the hands.

Explanation. The text is pronounced at a slow pace, in a sing-song manner, with a pronounced metrical pulsation, without stopping, acceleration or deceleration. The downward intonation of the voice occurs on each strong beat: ¯ Sunny, ¯ sunshine, Look out the ¯ window, etc.

Appendix No. 9.

1. Exercises to develop a sense of rhythm.

1. Children march, highlighting the downbeat with clapping, (without clapping)

They stand in a line, pacing.

Perform exercises a, (b) one at a time, leaving the line.

2. “Hedgehog and Drum”

The leader reads a poem, and the children play the drum (or imitate playing it). Subsequently, words are completely replaced by rhythm.

A hedgehog walks with a drum

Boom Boom Boom!

The hedgehog plays all day long

Boom Boom Boom!

With a drum behind my shoulders,

Boom Boom Boom!

The hedgehog got into the garden by accident

Boom Boom Boom!

He loved apples very much

Boom Boom Boom!

He forgot the drum in the garden

Boom Boom Boom!

Apples were picked at night

Boom Boom Boom!

And the blows rang out

Boom Boom Boom!

Oh, how the bunnies got cold feet!

Boom Boom Boom!

We didn’t close our eyes until dawn

Boom Boom Boom!

3. The teacher says:

A woodpecker sat on a thick branch

Children: Knock and knock, knock and knock!

U: To all my friends to the south

Children: Knock and knock, knock and knock!

U: The woodpecker sends telegrams,

That spring is already coming,

That the snow around has melted:

Children: Knock and knock, knock and knock!

U: The woodpecker hibernated through the winter,

Children: Knock and knock, knock and knock!

U: I’ve never been to hot countries!

Children: Knock and knock, knock and knock!

U: And it’s clear why,

The woodpecker is bored alone, without friends and without girlfriends.

Children: Knock and knock, knock and knock!

4. “The orchestra is noisy.”

Children sit in a circle. Repeat as shown by the teacher.

Shoo - shoo (free movement of hands)

Clap - clap (hands)

Slap - slap (on the knees)

Top - top (legs alternately)

You can diversify, that is, divide into batches.

5. Lay out the rhythm on the flannelgraph:

Short sounds are narrow stripes, long sounds are wide stripes.

Find a card with a song, tap out the rhythm of the song.

6. Game: “Rhythmic Echo.”

The teacher claps simple rhythmic patterns. Children must repeat them exactly. Complication: stomping with the foot or with both feet is introduced.

7. Game: "Hasle to the beat."

A piece of music plays. Children use clapping and stamping to emphasize each strong beat.

8. Game: “Musical Stompers.”

The rhythmic pattern of the work, only the strong beat, split the duration.

9. Pointing with hand - emphasis on each word.

My cheerful, ringing ball, where are you off to?

(You can jump like bunnies).

10. In an old little shoe, over potholes, over bumps,

Everything is straight and direct - 2 times.

And then suddenly... thump into the hole! (squats).

11. “Shifters”

These words should be quickly turned around.

Oh, chicks, chicks, chicks, cucumbers.

Spoons, bowls, ladle. Changelings.

12. “Play like me.”

Game material: tambourine, metallophone, musical hammer, wooden cubes.

Progress of the game: The music director or teacher invites the children to listen and then repeat a rhythmic pattern consisting of 5 - 7 sounds played on any of the above instruments.

13. Simultaneous bow and clap of hands.

Without a command (class or group), time is given during which the children must gather and, without a command, simultaneously clap their hands and after 3 seconds. clap again (throw hand, bow).

14. Singing with hand movement following the movement of the melody.

Strength of sound: open your palm and close it.

Exercises to develop a child's creative imagination.

1. Thumb hands touches the middle of your palm alternately with the middle finger.

“The sparrows have flown and are pecking, the doves have flown...”

After the exercise, rest: shake off the tension “shoo-shoo, fly away!”

2. Game: “Who is closer?”

Two children become respectively closer and further to other children and constantly change their places. The rest guess which child is closest to them.

3. Plastic studies for hands.

1. “The leaves are falling” (the wind blew).
2. “The snow is spinning” (snowflakes do not fall all together, but one by one).
3. “The icicle is crying” (rhythmic pattern with music).
4. “Streams are running” (hands and fingers).

4. Exercises for hands and fingers.

Our scarlet flowers open their petals,

The breeze breathes slightly, the petals sway.

Our scarlet flowers cover their petals,

They quietly fall asleep, shaking their heads.

The rain dripped on the palm ( right hand touch left)

On flowers (circular movement with right hand)

And onto the path (both hands in front of you).

It pours, it pours - oh, she, she! (shaking head)

We ran home (running in place)

We ran home and sat down.

Exercises to develop a sense of harmony.

• Knock with different wooden blocks.
• Shake different boxes.
• Play the tambourine: how there's a bear coming like a hare jumping.
• Play and sing your name on the metallophone.
• Play on the metallophone how a bird and little chicks sing.
• Play a dance song for a doll on one plate.
• Ring the rattle, sometimes loudly, sometimes quietly.
• Clap your hands 2 times, your fingers 2 times, your knees 2 times.
• "Echo". One child sings, everyone repeats.
• Playing with the doll: the doll loves to dance. One child sings a funny song- the doll is dancing.
• A game: " Railway“- children imitate the whistles of a steam locomotive using pipes, the sound of wheels with their feet, alternating strikes with their toes and their heels.

2. Game "Mood".

Certain concepts (sadness, joy, fun) are “voiced” by music. From several proposed passages, the children choose the one that corresponds to this or that concept.

3. Game: “Sing by phrases.”

The songs used alternate: group - group, teacher - group, child - child.

Exercises to develop diction.

1. “Intonation.”

(High, low, fast, slow).

2. “Pick up a melody.”

Sing any poem to a familiar tune. (The Forest Raised a Christmas Tree).