The Tale of Mishka Fort and the Tale of the Silly Giraffe Octave

Kirюшин, a musician and teacher, invented a series of magical fairy-tale myths. They are written in a genre understandable even to the smallest children. In the fairy-tales, you learn about wonderful relationships between cheerful animals—Intervals—about how Dissonance fought with Consonance, and about many other marvelous and funny things. The heroes of these fairy-tale myths are musical terms: by playing, a child joyfully absorbs the most complex musical concepts, develops musical hearing, and enriches the emotional world.

So what brilliant thing did Kiryushin come up with? He invented a series of magical fairy-tale myths. According to Kiryushin, the impulse to develop his artistic-figurative system came from the children themselves. For example, grasping the essence, children found something poisonous, prickly, and squeaky in the sound of a second—this is what, in general, determined the second as a creature resembling an hedgehog, a piglet, and a rat all at once—with two large needles (a second in Latin means two). Tertium for children is something tender and soft—so there are fluffy little animals, like bunnies, with 3 ears, 3 paws, and 3 little tails (tercia in Latin means three). In a similar way, during lessons with children, Kiryushin teaches them to perceive chords. For example, children call a tercqvart chord “curious,” because of the introductory semitone at the top; a non-chord — “long”; a major minor seventh chord — “irritable and злой,” and a diminished seventh chord — “cautious.” Then they immediately come up with the right image: a major seventh chord becomes “Бо-Мажор,” the military minister; a diminished minor one becomes “King Mal’s’UmKvinт” (he was short, carried a bag where he kept diminished fifths, ruled a country called Lokria-Lukria); and so on.