Overseas music teachers are carrying a better tune, thanks to this neighbor
Cathy Mathia didn’t need to travel to the Pacific rim to learn that music makes the world go round, but it was a good refresher course.
The founder and director of East Dallas Children’s Music recently spent two weeks training more than 100 Chinese and Taiwanese music teachers. She taught the same Musikgarten curricula she uses at home, and worked with the same birth to 9-year-old age range, only the songs were in Mandarin instead of English.
Music is a universal language to some extent. Mathia says, but training the teachers did require a translator.
“It was a challenge because there are so many additional syllables for Mandarin,” she says. “I would say something that might take two minutes, but the translation might take six minutes.”
Musikgarten implements early American folk songs and spirituals, and as the company expanded its curricula to countries in Europe and Asia, it began using folk music from these cultures.
For Mathia, this meant teaching songs about lady moon shining like a gong and a Tang monk riding on a horse. Folk songs were unearthed from every province in China, as well as from Taiwan. It surprised Mathia that the songs were as unfamiliar to the adults as they were to the children.
“They mostly listen to Chinese pop. Especially in Taiwan, there is no concept of folk material. These were songs that were buried and maybe grandparents remember,” she says. “Children need to be exposed to music that has survived generations, not just the bubble-gum, cotton-candy music that’s developed now.”
The folk songs appealed to everyone, and concepts such as pitch matching and keeping a steady beat easily crossed over cultures, Mathia says. Teaching musical creativity, however, was a little trickier.
“The idea of individual thinking is not as nurtured in that society,” she says. “In this culture, I can show examples to teachers and they can run with it. But I had to work with these teachers to make sure they weren’t doing just what was on the page of instruction.”
Language and culture barriers were inevitable, but Mathia found that the teachers’ dedication transcended the boundaries. Many of them had very little money, but they traveled from throughout the country-which took days, in some instances-so that they could learn how to enrich children’s lives through music.
So when obstacles arose, “it didn’t matter,” Mathia says. “We could always sing together.”
