The Presence of the Lyre at the 2024 WECAN Conference

Saeko and Assistant at the LANA table at WECAN

On February 9 and 10, I brought a suitcase full of sheet music, music books, pentatonic lyres, and accessories, such as lyre strings and tuning forks, to the Vender Hall at the Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America (WECAN) conference in Spring Valley, New York. This conference that convenes annually at the Green Meadow Waldorf School has been a beloved tradition among Waldorf early childhood educators for many decades, and this year, it was sold out, attended by over 330 individuals from all over North America. For the attendees, this is a weekend extravaganza of professional development workshops, reunions, and networking, accompanied by meals in the Threefold Cafe, puppet plays, and a eurythmy performance. 

Equally beloved by both attendees and the locals alike is the conference's Vender Hall. This was my second WECAN conference as a LANA representative, and there was a certain feeling of reunion among some of the old time vendors. Similar to four years ago, I very much enjoyed meeting the many people who stopped by our LANA table, browsing music books, taking 7-string lyres in their hands, and listening carefully into the sound that is hardly audible in the chatter-filled Vender Hall. 

One teacher shared with me that at the end of the summer in a school where she works in her native country of Hungary, parents of the rising first graders gather to carve wood and make pentatonic lyres for their children! I was touched to hear such a beautiful story. In general, I received the impression that many of the Waldorf kindergartens and nurseries are already equipped with various types of pentatonic lyres, but teachers are often too busy to care for them, tune them, or to actively use them in their classrooms on a daily basis.

It was a pleasure to introduce some of our useful resources for these teachers, such as Julius Knierim's Quintenlieder: Music for Young Children in the Mood of the Fifth, Gerhard Beilharz and Mechthild Laier's A Guide to Playing the Pentatonic Children's Lyre (both German titles in English translation), and Channa Seidenberg's I Love to be Me. (These books are available for purchase at our LANA online music store.) In the future, perhaps we could offer a lyre concert or music for the Madonna pictures for this particular audience, along with a workshop on the Mood of the Fifth. In this way, more early childhood educators could experience firsthand the healing impulse that lives in each one of the lyre tones every time someone plays, sings along, or even just strums the seven strings for children.