Martha Russell first uncovered the principles that she called Creative Motion after a lengthy personal study with a variety of teachers. She shared the knowledge of her discoveries with several students - who were also fellow teachers - inviting them to her home in LaJolla, California for several summer institutes held throughout the 1920's.
Margaret Allen was one of those lucky few who were able to live, work and study with Martha Russell at her seaside home. After Mrs. Russell died in 1951, Margaret Allen played a key role in allowing for continued Creative Motion study by sponsoring a week-long workshop at her estate near Berea, Kentucky. The annual workshop "Windswept" still bears the name of Margaret's mountain-top home. Through her efforts and the work of countless others, Creative Motion study has been passed from teacher to student through the years, and continues to this day. |
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Margaret Belknap Allen, in her early years, moved into the world of music in a natural creative way. Previous to any professional training, at the age of five, she was improvising on the piano, intuitively expressing four part harmony, and rounding out the tonal meanderings with a certain amount of phrase form.
Fortunately her first teacher, the then noted Mrs. Crosby Adams of Chicago, was a pioneer in the imaginative and creative approach to music training. This, of course, nurtured the child’s inherent urge, so that soon after her lessons began she startled her father (sitting next to her in church) by singing the harmonic structure of the hymns rather than the words. “Quiet now” he would whisper. Later, at the age of ten, she organized a club in Oak Park, where she lived, teaching her interested peers to improvise. |
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Margaret Allen |
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Oberlin College and the University of Wisconsin left their strengthening stamp upon her: but she was always haunted by the wonderment of “why music moved as it did?” “what was the inner necessity that made the rules of music effective?” The casual answers never seemed to satisfy her.
While she was teaching Interpretive Dance and Drama in Evanston, she met Martha Russell and became acquainted with the Creative Motion principle with its necessity of involving the whole self in order to experience the needs of the music. At last dance, drama, rhythm, melody and harmony all moved together in a wholeness of expression.
After marrying John Milton Allen they moved to Scarsdale, New York. Here she taught in her private studio for sixteen years, inspiring the students to hear inside that which the music actually wanted them to hear on the outside. The response and the results justified the approach.
Following the death of her husband, and after her daughter and son had left home for their further education, she chose to transplant herself to a college campus where the student’s background was different from those of Westchester, Berea College invited her to teach in the Music Department where she has taught for twenty five years, interrupted only in order to get her Master’s degree at Stanford University. She eventually became professor of Humanities and Piano, but it was always the Creative Motion principle that guided her teaching.
As a little Scarsdale boy once said to her: “I hope you never die” she realized that those who truly experience Creative Motion gain something “which makes all of the difference” not only to their music, but to their selfhood. |
