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BIOS
Current Level II and Level III Certified Creative Motion Teachers
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Martha Stockton Russell |
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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. Creative Motion study has been passed from teacher to student through the years, and continues to this day.
In their book "Creative Motion," Margaret Allen and Anne Niles, both students of Martha Russell shared biographical information about Mrs. Russell. Excerpts from that narrative are below.
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"Martha Stockton Russell was born in 1875, her father was veteran of the Union Army, with bitter memories and a bad wound that gave him trouble for the rest of his life. His greatest pleasure was singing, with accompaniment on his guitar, to his appreciative, brown-eyed, little daughter. Later he showed her simple chord patterns so that she could play the songs for herself on the piano. This was the beginning of joy."1
"It was not until she was seven that she had her first piano lesson. She had looked forward so long to that day that when at last it came she climbed the teacher's steps with the feeling that the doors of paradise were swinging wide. And then, instead of the singing, moving beauty she had gone to find, she met little black notes (on the page) and shiny white keys (on the piano), and if you matched them fast enough, moved your fingers fleetly, and played with something that in those days was called 'expression' - that was music."2"
When Martha grew up she decided that "more than anything else, she wanted to know what it was that she had known as a little girl, and didn't know any more. What was the magic Something that sometimes got into music and made it come alive? She had to know, and present she started to find out."1"
She graduated from Northwestern University's Music Theory Department, enjoyed a brief, yet wonderfully happy marriage to Frank Russell and gave birth to two boys. While Martha was recovering from thyroid surgery, the tragic news of her husband's sudden death was brought to her. Her elder son died of diabetes at the age of two and a half and her remaining son, Christopher, lived only a few years.It was through observing Christopher that she learned that music directly affects the body reactions of the young child. This knowledge sent her forth to search out ways of re-opening contact with music in older children who had lost their original ability to respond directly.
She traveled to London to study with Dr. Yorke at the Royal Academy of Music, and Jacques Dalcroze in Hellerau, Germany. She acquired a new awareness of the importance of the body, as well as the mind and spirit, in any form of creative expression.Gradually her own techniques evolved.
She selected schools across the U.S. where she taught group singing and a modified Dalcroze method and continued her research. She advocated music "as an important fundamental for binding one's life into a unity... [T]he relation of feeling to action, inside to outside..."I was, at the time (1919-1921) considered new to the usual concept of education.
For the next ten years to her lovely studio home near the sea in La Jolla, California came students from many parts of the country to spend six weeks of intensive study in every aspect of music at her summer school workshop in Creative Motion, as she came to call her method. After a summer at the workshop, students returned to teaching. Some of them taught music, others applied the principles of Creative Motion to the dramatic arts, to dancing, to physical education and even to the three R's.
The Depression forced the closing of this studio workshop series, but the work went on elsewhere. Martha Russell traveled widely to spend a few days coaching and sharing her discoveries. These visits were highly prized. She was equally successful with every age, from toddlers, who had to sit on several fat volumes to reach the keys, through school and conservatory bound young people. Teachers came to her as well to learn her way. She was on a round of visits to the Chicago area in 1951 when the end came.
Her book, entitled A Music Lens on History was published in 1952 thanks to the interest of friends, to whom she had read many of the chapters. Fortunately for us, the work of Martha Stockton Russell and the legacy of her discoveries about Creative Motion live on as the wisdom has been passed from teacher to student through the years. Those who carry on this work now are honored to be a part of the tradition of helping others rediscover vitality and joy within their music and within their lives.
1 Excerpts from "The Source" by Anne Niles, page 15-19 Creative Motion - (The White Book) - by Margaret Allen and Anne Niles; Drake House, Publishers, Anderson SC; © 1971.
2 Sing, Swing, Play - How to Do it - by Martha Stockton Russell - The Viking Press, New York, © 1938. |
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