Carl-Bertil Agnestig 100 years
On March 7, 2024, Carl-Bertil Agnestig would have turned 100 years old. With his playful and elaborate musical methodology, Agnestig was innovative when his first instrument schools were published by Gehrmans Musikförlag in the mid-1950s. Since then, We play the piano 1 has sold around 700,000 copies. Even as a music school principal, children's choir leader and composer, Agnestig made a big impression on musical Sweden, and his pedagogy still stands out as distinctly forward-looking and modern.
Carl-Bertil Agnestig was born in Järvsö in 1924. The family moved to Småland, but landed during Agnestig's teenage years in Nacka outside Stockholm. At the age of 22, Agnestig took a music teacher's degree at the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm, and after a short time he was a teacher at Nacka Music School, where he would later become principal.
The human voice and song were always at the center of Agnestig, in instrumental schools as well as choral compositions. In the late 1940s, Carl-Bertil started his singing lessons at Nacka Music School; a persistent work that gave rings on the water for over 30 years. Nacka Music School's Girls' Choir became a role model and was heard in recurring Lucia concerts on radio and TV.
In the mid-1950s, during a period when the municipal music school in the country was in strong expansion, Carl-Bertil Agnestig's first instrument schools were published by Gehrmans Musikförlag. We play piano 1 and Our first recorder book came to dominate the country's music schools for a long time, and he also lent his keen eye for children's musical development stages to other instrument schools in collaboration with the foremost pedagogues of the time. He also composed over 150 children's choir songs ( Diskanten , published at Verbum) which came to form the basis above all for children's singing in the church for many years.
Agnestig's great influence in Swedish musical life is clear not least through the prizes and awards he received, among others the Medal for the promotion of the musical arts from the Kgl Musikaliska Academy, Children's and Youth Choir Leader of the Year (Ung i Kör) and Life Time Achievement Award (Svenska Musikförläggerareföreningen). . He was also an honorary member of the National Association of Church Musicians.
But Agnestig's importance is perhaps best measured in the amount of teaching books that have accompanied generations of children and young people in their first active encounter with music. We play the piano 1 has sold around 700,000 copies and is still, almost 70 years after it was first published, one of Gehrmans Musikförlag's best-selling releases every year.