5. “All very interesting”, I hear you say, “but how can I use all this?!”

It is quite simply that is part of this same process: whereas the renaissance or baroque musician was starting with an existing complete text and wedding the music to it, the performer of the active concert-reading in suggestopedia starts with an existing complete piece of music and weds the text to it: and the more you understand a piece of music that you think of using, the more closely you can wed your text to it, 'coupling the notes and the syllables lovingly together', the more effective your presentation of spoken material to it.

The renaissance musician learned the text by heart, the suggestopedic teacher learns their piece of music by heart: with your mp3-player you can sing its melodies to yourself as you wash up or jog round the block or have a bath. You can dance to it, on your own or with supportive like-minded colleagues; you can paint or draw it - just let the pen, pencil or brush, or your hands or fingers, travel over the surface - it might be paper, a white-board, a sand tray, a pavement, a beach, whatever.

To begin with you'll perhaps be aware of the superficial rythm of the melody, the fastest elements often make themselves most strongly felt: and you can place your superficial syllables, as if you would recite a crisp and incisive 'and so we're off!' to the beginning of Beethoven's 5th symphony, or a gentle 'just - en - joy' to the slow movement of Mozart's 'Kleine Nacht Musik' (in practice of course you will let the music establish itself in the mind of the listener before you start to contribute the text).

But then you may notice that there's another rythm, deeper down like the swell of the sea under the surface waves, with the one biggie in every seven, perhaps the regular division of the music into groups of regular beats - if you read music you may see that these correspond to a bar of the music, or a regular group of bars; so you can make sure your phrases agree with those, leaving space so the music and words can come to a pause together rather than rushing on over the break: since it's the sounds of the words which are the major point in the active reading, it's not of the first importance that the meaning follows the musical phrasing here, though with a bit of practice you can get that to fit too - and indeed there are people who can be completely blocked if they don't fit: I was one when I first heard Charles Schmidt's presentation.

Eventually you might notice the even deeper-level rythm of when major phrases or sections begin, like the monthly cycle dictated by the moon or the even longer ones dictated by the seasons. And when you feel those, you can make sure that you present the text so that major phrases and sections coincide with the music - that's the advanced course and involves some pretty sophisticated double-planed master-juggling ...