Playing by ear - Teacher mixes music and culture for lessons

Students in Pam Dumey's music classes at Central Middle School quickly learn how to keep the beat.

The students play bongos, xylophones, recorders and bass drums during their 40-minute class as they practice for an upcoming concert. The songs they sing and play during the class period are primarily folk songs, but not always American.

Dumey mixes music and culture in her music lessons while trying to meet curriculum goals. She relies on a method developed by a German composer to help her students become instant musicians.

Using Orff-Schulwerk methods, Dumey teaches her students to be better listeners. The teaching method, used in elementary schools across the Cape Girardeau district, was developed years ago to build on the things children do naturally: sing, chant rhymes and clap. It's almost like teaching a new musical language, much like you'd teach an infant to speak.

Dumey said she teaches by imitation. "The premise is that it's sound before symbol."

The students still learn how to read music but they can play far more notes than they can read, she said.

As she pats her hands on her lap, slides her palms together or snaps her fingers to a beat, the students watch intently. It doesn't take too many failures for her students to realize the key to success is to watch and listen, she said.

"It doesn't take years of lessons to play," she said. "They can be an independent musician and play just like they would in an orchestra" with each person playing a part in the song.

With a group of fifth-grade classes, she's teaching about Jamaican and African-American music. As the students listen to her clap and snap, they practice along and then get the chance to play the notes on an instrument of their choice.

Some choose bongos, others play recorders or maracas or glockenspiels, which look like miniature xylophones and are used by marching bands.

During the lessons on Caribbean music, "we talk about other cultures and how music functions in other societies," she said.

After practicing the song "Jamaican Money Man" and learning new parts for instruments, Dumey asks the class a question: who can name a pop musician today whose songs were influenced by Jamaican sounds?

Students pause for a minute before answering. Someone blurts out Britney Spears. Others reply Shaggy and Michael Jackson.

Dumey suggests Santana and the students agree. "Can you see how music from other countries can influence us? When people come to this country from other countries they bring their musical heritage with them."

Music can help put history into perspective for the students, Dumey says.

Students in a sixth-grade class are learning about the Underground Railroad and how music played a role in its development. As part of their assignment, the students will write a new verse to the song "Follow the Drinking Gourd" that Dumey has supplied. The lessons are found on her web page:

"I'm not just teaching songs but how to enhance and enrich what goes on in the rest of the school," she said.

Several of the middle-school choir members and members of the percussion ensemble Bengal Beat recently performed a selection of African and African-American songs during the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. birthday observance at the Osage Community Centre.

The middle-school students also will perform several of the songs they've learned recently for their parents tonight as part of the Classroom Concert Series at the school.

Dumey doesn't expect all her students to become musicians "but at least they will be exposed to different kinds of music," she said. And with "a good music education they can become good music consumers."

ljohnston@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 126