Sounds like the future of music

Arminta Wallace joins a group of young Irish musicians on tour in Hungary as they undertake some unusual training

At a table in a hotel lobby in Budapest, a group of children is playing card games. One of them is wearing a football jersey with an unfamiliar sequence of letters on the back: "i, t, r. . ." Hungarian, I presume. But when the boy suddenly keels sideways, laughing, and collects up all the cards, I can see the whole word. It's not Hungarian. It's "Leitrim".

Not what you'd expect to see, perhaps, in the Hotel Liget opposite Heroes' Square on Dózsa György Street - but for the next couple of days, this easygoing hostelry is destined to have a distinctly Irish flavour as the Young European Strings school of music embarks on its Hungarian Tour, 2005. For these 49 young musicians, and the assorted siblings and parents who have travelled with them, it's an exciting way to spend the half-term break.

Before the week is out they'll have gazed at Budapest's spectacular Parliament building, crossed the Danube via three different bridges and played football in the City Park just across the road - which, conveniently, also features a zoo, an assortment of stalls selling everything from giant pretzels to woolly hats via stuffed animals, a funfair and an outdoor skating rink.

Some have performed outside of Ireland before - the older ones went to Barcelona last year, and at least one student has been a prizewinner in international competition - but for this particular school of music, this tour is more than a bit special. The founder of Young European Strings (YES), Maria Kelemen, left Hungary in 1956 when she was in the final year of her studies at the Béla Bartók Conservatorium. She has been teaching violin in Dublin for almost 20 years, using an idiosyncratic method of inner-ear training inspired by the philosophy of the Hungarian composer and music educator Zoltan Kodály. And now she is bringing it all back home.

Kodály believed that music is vital for a child's emotional, spiritual and intellectual development - all children, not just especially musical ones - and that it should be given a prominent place in the school curriculum from the very beginning of a child's education. What is often called the "Kodály method" is not so much a hard and fast set of rules as an approach to music teaching based on intensive, carefully structured training in listening, singing and tonic solfa. Kelemen has taken the Kodály ball and run with it; and her young Irish charges, aged from four to 17, are keen to show Hungarian audiences just what they can do.

First, though, they must rehearse. Players of all shapes and sizes, from tots with impossibly small fiddles through boys with punked-up hair to cool-as-cucumber teenage girls, stream into the hotel's circular dining room. Mammies stand at the door with offerings: mutes, jackets, musical scores. A kind of merry bedlam reigns; and then conductor and senior YES tutor Ronald Masin raises his baton, and there is silence. And then, as they run through their programme - children's pieces by Bartók, an arrangement of an Irish reel, a movement from Bach's double violin concerto - a subtle chemistry transforms a bunch of assorted kids into a single, focused entity: an orchestra.

"Are you impressed?" a parent whispers to me, as the juniors file out, followed - after an exuberant account of Raymond Deane's delightful Five-Piece Suite - by the intermediate orchestra, so that the chamber group can focus on the Bartók Divertimento for Strings which is the climax of the concert programme.

I have to admit I am.

"Hah!" she exclaims. To cover her pride, she adds: "Try coming to orchestra rehearsals back home in Dublin. Eight o'clock, bright and early on a Saturday morning - and some people come all the way from Cavan, as well."

As the week goes on I'm to get some idea of the dedication required, not to start a child on violin lessons at the age of three or four - anybody can do that - but to keep them there. The endless practice sessions. The problem of getting your hands on a decent instrument that doesn't cost the earth, only for the child to outgrow it after a couple of years. Blood, sweat and tears, as one dad puts it - and make no mistake, he adds wickedly, the tears are from the grown-ups.

Despite an indigenous string-playing tradition which makes Budapest one of the most musical cities in Europe, Hungarian parents have, it seems, problems in a slightly different key. Kelemen has arranged a visit to one of the oldest private music schools in town, the Adam Jenó Zeneiskola, where director Kalman Szentmary has organised a demonstration of Kodály solfege teaching for us - no small feat since Hungarian schools, like Irish ones, are closed for half-term break.

The dozen or so bright-eyed 10- and 11-year-olds who have turned up, though, are all smiles as they chant, then clap the rhythm of the melody on the board. Then they turn their backs and do it without looking. The teacher plays the melody on the piano. How many bars? The hands shoot up. And how did it start? They shoot up again. Let's write it down, she suggests. Having done just that, they sing their way happily through an exercise in augmented fifths.

For the moment, Szentmary explains, private music schools such as these are heavily subsidised and instruments are supplied, so parents pay - by Irish standards - practically nothing. In theory, at least, this makes music accessible to children from all backgrounds. But the changes in Hungary, especially since the country's membership of the EU, spell major changes for music teaching in the years to come.

A bill currently being debated in that beautiful parliament building may result in 30 per cent subsidy cuts to schools such as this. Parents, meanwhile, feel that languages and IT should get priority. "Instead of dedicated music schools the government is encouraging 'music and drama' schools on the American model," Kelemen translates as Szentmary moves from soft-spoken English to impassioned Hungarian, "where kids do a little of everything. Film, hip hop, whatever".

Later in the week it's the turn of the younger YES students to take part in a workshop at the old Liszt Academy, showing an audience of Hungarian music teachers how Kodály's ideas have shaped their instrumental studies.

This involves, among other things, walking around the stage with a violin under the chin, no hands, eyes closed; playing with a tuning fork instead of a bow; doing various physical exercises, including press-ups; and producing a faultless Frères Jacques in four-part canon. The applause from the teachers is warm and genuine; and at the end there are so many questions from the floor that, to the delight of both audience and performers, the session runs on for much longer than expected.

With three evening concerts at different venues to get through, as well as normal daily practice, the week develops into something of an action adventure for both parents and children. The logistics involved in negotiating almost 40 youngsters, plus assorted instruments and a local pianist and bassist, to and from each venue - not to mention negotiating late nights, such as the first-night post-concert party hosted by a beaming Irish Ambassador to Hungary, Brendan McMahon - are pretty hair-raising. Thanks to the efforts of a team of tireless parents, however, it all seems to work smoothly.

On the Thursday we hear that a recital of Bach's six violin sonatas is to be given at the Dohanyi Street synagogue by Miklos Szenthelyi, whose sister Judit is the YES piano accompanist. We head for the city centre, only to find a queue of aminated concert-goers snaking right around the building; the result, it turns out, not just of enthusiasm for Bach in Budapest, but the fact that this is the first in a series of events to celebrate Jewish-Christian co-operation. Strict security measures are in place at the entrance, but as soon as 2,000 people have been crammed into the temple's glorious interior, Szenthelyi steps up and begins to play.

It was an unforgettable evening of music, which some of our group would have had to forgo had someone in the queue not taken pity on us and produced spare tickets, refusing to accept any payment. To the lady in the red woolly hat: shalom. You know who you are. It was also, of course, an object lesson in exactly how high are the heights that the young YES players must attempt to scale if they want to achieve a solo career in music.

Not that they seem particularly daunted. One of the soloists on the Hungarian tour, 17-year-old Gina McGuinness, says she can't imagine life as anything other than a professional musician. Another, 10-year-old David Tobin, is also determined to make the grade - as a professional footballer.

There is also, of course, a living to be made as an ensemble musician. Some students will go on to work in orchestras and chamber groups in Ireland and elsewhere. Many will drift away, to become unusually well-trained concert-goers in years to come. In the meantime, will this hard-working bunch get a well-earned rest? Kelemen looks dubious. Then she grins. "Oh, alright then," she says. "But just a little one. We have to get working on our Bartók for the concert at the National Concert Hall after Christmas."

Young European Strings play a programme of Bartók at the National Concert Hall in Dublin on Jan 29