Where children learn to sing again

It was at this time, though, that a notice arrived from her original school: the Beijing Deqing Foundation was offering a three-day Kodaly Method training session in Huanggang, the city overseeing Macheng.

Her name was not on the list. Normally she would have just accepted the fact, but this time, she sent a long message to the school's leaders asking for a place in the program.

In January, Lanczky arrived in Huanggang. With no seats available, Wu sat on a tiny stool in the aisle among 365 music teachers from Hunan and Hubei studying the Kodaly pedagogy.

Lanczky has been promoting the Kodaly Method across Chinese counties since 2019 in a bid to support rural choral education. The method teaches music through games, body movement and the voice, with hand signs for pitches being its most famous feature.

After World War II, it became Hungary's dominant music education method and was inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2016.

In the first class, when Lanczky demonstrated Kodaly hand signs and asked for a volunteer, Wu was the first to step forward. She seized every chance to interact with Lanczky.

At the end of the course, Lanczky invited her and four others to an advanced class to apply the method to choir practice. When it opened in March, Wu was the only one without a choir and had to choose: form one immediately or wait for the next session.

"How could there be a 'next time'?" She refused to let it slip away.