Long version and bonus material

Active music-making by children, especially singing together, is not only a motivating leisure activity that is great fun for the them. Listening to each other also promotes integration and identification with the group. By learning melody and rhythm, it promotes language acquisition - and thus facilitates access to learning to read and write. Encountering musical forms makes it possible to experience basic mathematical and geometric models in a playful and physical way. Regular singing trains and expands the abilities of the vocal chords and the child's vocal apparatus, and thus also promotes the child's own articulation, self-awareness and perception of others. Singing teaches children to listen to their own feelings and develops emotional expression. Singing moves and reaches practically all hemispheres of our brain. And last but not least, singing develops our children's innate sense of beauty - it introduces us to the spheres of magic and the supernatural and opens up the space for supra-individual and religious experiences.

With this short film about the Düsseldorf SingPause, inpetto filmproduktion, together with sounding images gmbh, begins a series of articles about initiatives and projects that tell of the importance of making music and, above all, singing for the development of our children. We are not only bringing together selected examples of best practice, but also portraying the research projects that we consider particularly important in this area. Starting with the importance of singing for unborn babies in the womb, the series also includes articles on the potential of music in the treatment of senile dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

About SingPause Düsseldorf

SingPause is aimed at all four year groups at Düsseldorf elementary school. This means that it reaches more than 16,500 pupils. Trained singers interrupt the school classes' normal timetable twice a week for 20 minutes each, starting with vocal training, ear training and simple rhythmic exercises, partly in groups and partly as soloists and individually - and then teach the classes a repertoire of songs in around 15 different languages, usually including simple choreographies and dances. After four years of elementary school, the Düsseldorf pupils are able to read music and sing simple songs at sight. At the end of the school year, the respective schools gather in the Düsseldorf Tonhalle - together with the parents, this means 16 concerts with around 1400 participants each - to perform the repertoire they have learned during the year together.



The Düsseldorf SingPause is not a short-term project, but has now been in existence for 18 years. It is financed by the city of Düsseldorf and private sponsors with a budget of around 1.2 million euros per year. The effect of all the primary school children in a city mastering a common repertoire of around 100 songs over the years in German, Arabic, Hebrew, Ukrainian, Turkish, English and Japanese can now be proven. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to assume that SingPause can replace "normal" music lessons.

For our film, we filmed several classes at Matthias Claudius Primary School and documented their final concert in Düsseldorf's Tonhalle. We interviewed the SingPause director Mauricio Virgins, the primary school principal Hella Büscher, some of the children and the SingPause initiator and project manager Manfred Hill, as well as the Oldenburg professor of systematic musicology Gunter Kreutz.