by Nicole Cody In late February, on one of the few days we were actually in school, all of the high school orchestra students participated in a Skype session with Mr. Issam Rafea. Mr. Rafea is a professional oud player, composer, and music educator. He is a Syrian who is living as a refugee on legal asylum in Chicago. For our February concert in orchestra, the theme that connected all of our pieces was Building Community. We explored the positives and negatives of communities, what each of our responsibilities are to keep communities healthy and how music helps create community. We addressed these questions through reading poems, short texts, and watching videos that connected to these questions. (Thanks to Steve Peterson for sharing some of his resources with me!) One of the bigger questions I wanted the students to explore was this: how do you maintain community when you are not in your community’s physical location? This led us to wonder about refugees and about the current war in Syria. I partnered with Andrew Ellingsen as an instructional coach on this concert theme. Through one of our brainstorming sessions, we began to wonder if we could connect with someone from Syria who could share a folk tune with us. There are many “world” music resources on the internet and in textbooks, but it is difficult to research Middle Eastern music traditions from a Western music standpoint and know that what you have is authentic. Andrew was able to connect with a music friend, who connected us to an ethnomusicologist who knew of Issam Rafea’s work. Once we had a name, we began to research him and--not having luck with contact information--we watched some videos of him on YouTube. (I highly recommend looking him up and watching a few of his videos. He is very talented and the oud is mesmerizing.) We eventually came across a video of him and Gao Hong (a Chinese pipa player) playing for MPR that led us to research Ms. Hong. We found her contact information and emailed her. As luck would have it, Ms. Hong’s husband is Mr. Rafea’s manager, and we were connected! I only share the details of this process because it can be scary to reach out to professional-level culture bearers. I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t have a partner in Andrew. Our shared excitement over the possibility of this collaboration overshadowed my fear of rejection and led us to one of the coolest things that I has happened in my classroom this year. Mr. Rafea was so excited to work with us. He chose a Syrian folk tune for us, wrote it out in notation that we could read, and helped advise me on making sure I was understanding the building blocks of the music. Middle Eastern music uses an entirely different Theory system, so this was an interesting challenge for me. The orchestras got to work--learning how to play it and learning how it was constructed. The goal was to have each class take the tune and turn it into a class arrangement. Unfortunately, the winter of 2019 happened, and we didn’t have time to do that. We did arrange a Skype session in which we were going to play our arrangements for him and receive his feedback. Since our arrangements were not completed, we workshopped with him on creating the arrangement, which turned out to be an incredible experience. He had very high expectations of the students, emphasizing the need for accuracy on things that we were letting slide. He gave us ideas, and in an hour, through a lot of back and forth, we had created an concert arrangement of “Al Bulbul” with ideas from Mr. Rafea, myself, and my students. We haven’t had a chance to perform it yet due to our cancelled February concert-- hopefully we will this spring--but the experience of “real, live music making,” group improvisation, and expert feedback was invaluable. Final Thoughts: Find a partner that helps you dream big and make amazing things happen in your classroom. Connect to experts. Find culture bearers. Open your students’ eyes to a part of your subject they never knew existed. Allow your students to see your vulnerabilities and places where you are still learning. Cool things happen when you take some risks.
6 Comments
Kathryn
3/29/2019 12:29:51 pm
Thanks for all you do to bridge music and the world with DHS students. It is truly inspiring.
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Sarah Zbornik
3/29/2019 12:48:46 pm
Thanks being open to where the music leads you!
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3/29/2019 01:13:48 pm
Your passion for teaching your love of music is such a blessing
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Sarah
3/29/2019 06:02:46 pm
This is awesome! Thank you for sharing this with us!
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Steve Peterson
3/30/2019 06:02:38 am
Nicole and Andrew,
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4/1/2019 08:20:56 am
Nicole, this is truly exciting! I hope you share this with colleagues around the state. Wouildn't it be cool to next approach this from a co-curricular approach and possibly get either history or geography involved and maybe deepen that cultural connection? I seem to remember art and history doing something similar to that a few years ago.
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October 2018
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