The Blog
Part 1 - The Big Idea
This project began back in 2016. I had just started my second year of teaching and I was much more confident in my teaching practices. I began to develop a curriculum that met all of the county-wide standards while focusing on music from the countries and cultures that my students specifically identified with. That year, I found songs from Guatemala, Cameroon, and with a lot of help, Ethiopia.
My first experiences with Ethiopian music were all thanks to my students. One of my first grade students told me about a song she liked to sing called “Abebaye Hoy.” When she first told me the name, I could not figure out how to find it on YouTube, and eventually had her look with me on YouTube to find a video she recognized. The sound quality was very static-y and the voice sounded almost computer generated and unusually high pitched. I wasn’t sure if it was being sung by incredibly young girls or if someone had altered the recording in some way. My student asked if we could do that song in class, but when I tried to find a pronunciation or translation of the song I hit my first barrier: Amharic uses a different alphabet. I couldn’t understand any of it, but I wanted to do whatever I could to make it accessible to my students, so I presented it as a listening activity to my students.
Later that year, the student’s older brother, who was in second grade, asked to do an Ethiopian song in his class too. This time I was more determined. I started with a recording of the song "Hoya Hoye," which was given to all music teachers in the county during a meeting on cultural proficiency in the music classroom. Next, I sent home a letter to all of my Ethiopian students with the link to the recording, and a request for a pronunciation and/or translation of the song. I got back one response with a pronunciation. I then enlisted the help of two of my second graders who told me they spoke Amharic, to help me translate the song. As I spoke each line, the first student I worked with gave me confident responses, telling me the song was about a “bad girl” who was not doing her chores. However, when I worked with the second student, they were equally confident that the song was about something else entirely (though I can’t remember what). So I didn’t have a translation, but I did have the pronunciation of the words and the cultural context of the song.
"Hoya Hoye" is a song traditionally sung by boys and young men on the holiday Buhe, also known as the Ethiopian New Year. The tradition is for the boys to go from house to house singing this song and tapping a beat with sticks in order to receive treats, usually in the form of food or money. I bought long dowels at a craft store for some of my students to tap on the floor and I intended my second graders to perform this song at their end-of-year concert, which was called “The Music and Art Extravaganza.” Unfortunately, I became very sick the week of the performance and was not able to attend. The students did perform "Hoya Hoye," but I never found a recording and therefore do not know how it turned out. However, this experience of collecting a song from another culture sparked an interest that I did not realize I had. I spent the summer thinking about how I might be able to replicate this project on a larger scale.
Part 2 - Reaching Out
Upon returning to school in the fall I got to work on a project that I called “A Community in Song.” My idea was to reach out to the parents in my school community and gather children’s songs they know from the many countries my students were from. I made a flyer in both English and Spanish that I handed out to families at all of the back to school events. I also went to those events with a portable digital audio recorder in the hopes that I could collect songs in the moment if anyone showed interest in sharing one. I quickly abandoned that method when I realized that no one was going to feel comfortable being asked to sing into a microphone in a public place. I was never contacted by anyone from my flyer either, possibly from lack of interest in the project but more probably just from a lack of family involvement in the school in general. I became the chair of the Family Involvement Committee that year in order to address that problem.
If I wasn’t going to be able to collect songs from the community itself, I decided that the next best thing would be to focus on a single culture and collect as many songs as I could find. I chose to focus on the music of Ethiopia and their official language Amharic, both because I had already worked through a song from that culture, and because I saw the greatest need for an Ethiopian song resource in my area. My early research led me to this census data on Amharic speakers living in the US:
After California, the most Amharic speakers reside in Virginia and Maryland, and DC is only a few more states behind. This makes the DC-Maryland-Virginia (DMV) area the single largest community of Ethiopian Americans in the United States. In fact, the county in which I teach (Montgomery County) has the most Amharic speakers of any county in the US. So the community was definitely there, I just needed to find the best way to access it. I started by contacting Helen Boxwill, a former employee of the Ethiopian Department of Education who I was put in contact with through a family friend. She was of the opinion that partnering with the Department itself would not work, as they likely did not have any databases of music traditionally taught in schools. She told me that there are over 80 languages spoken in Ethiopia, and each school teaches in their own local dialect. Next, I looked into local Universities. Howard University has a department of African languages, and their Amharic courses are taught by Professor Tafessework Gebeyehu. My alma mater, the University of Maryland, has an Ethiopian and Eritrean student organization. I e-mailed both, explaining my project, what I hoped to accomplish, and asked if anyone might be willing to help. I heard back from both: Professor Gebeyehu put me in touch with one of her students, and the president of the student organization at UMD passed on the contact info of a member who was interested. Now I had two translators to collaborate with, and my project could begin.
Part 3 - First Sessions
I started collecting songs with the help of two translators: Marlina, an undergraduate student at UMD, and Eden, an undergraduate student at Howard U. I prepared for our first meetings by taking some advice from Helen Boxwill, and looking up YouTube videos of Ethiopian children’s songs. I found a number of videos that seemed to be geared toward children and sent a handful to each of my translators in case they wanted to prepare ahead of our meetings.
Here is what I sent Marlina:
And here is what I sent Eden:
Eshruru Addis Ababa Abebaye Hoy Clapping Games
I first met with Marlina in a private study room at a local library. I spent the first few minutes just getting to know her a bit so we would feel comfortable working together. Out of the 8 songs I had given her, we worked on 5 of them in that first session, which lasted about 2 hours. She seemed skeptical when I asked her to speak the lyrics to the song so I could write them down, and I explained that I was using the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is about sound, not spelling. She actually seemed pretty interested in it and showed me the Amharic fidel (alphabet), explaining how Amharic is a phonetic language too. Each symbol in the Amharic fidel corresponds to a consonant followed by a vowel sound. There are 7 common vowels in Amharic and 31 consonants, which together form 217 fidels. One interesting point to mention is that the symbol for a given consonant only changes slightly depending on the vowel paired with it. I liked learning these things from a native speaker of the language. Marlina grew up in Ethiopia, and moved to the area with her parents when she was a child. She actually recognized most of the songs I had sent her, particularly the song “Tsehay Feneteketch,” which she remembered being played on the TV on Sunday mornings.
Next, I met with Eden in a study space at Howard University. The room was not ideal for collaborating: It was dimly lit and the vent that was heating the room was sort of noisy, but we made it work. Our session went by very differently than it did with Marlina, and in the two hours we worked together that day, we got through 10 songs. Eden was looking forward to working on her English with me. She, like Marlina, grew up in Ethiopia before moving to the US. She had been in the US for a few years less than Marlina, but her English was very good already. We worked on some simple songs that were originally in English (like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and Row Row Row Your Boat) and built up a good working relationship. I eventually decided to not use any of the songs we had worked on that were not originally from Ethiopia, but it was good practice for the both of us.
Part 4 - Sessions with Eden
The next few sessions with Eden went really well. Each session lasted for about 2 hours and we worked on anywhere between 5-8 songs each session. We continued to meet in the same study room, which was the most convenient for her, and I found it did not impair our work as much as I thought it would. Eden took a very different approach to teaching me the pronunciation of the songs we worked on. Instead of having me speak the words back to her that I had written down in IPA, she wanted me to sing the words with the recording. This could be challenging for me when I had only just written down the pronunciation and then needed to sing them back at tempo with the recording. Eden wouldn’t let any mistakes slide, and would have me sing certain sections over and over again until I could do it correctly. I actually really liked the way we worked together, and felt as though it was a good exchange. Eden recognized most of the songs we worked on together, but didn’t feel comfortable sharing other songs she remembered from her childhood, or maybe just couldn’t think of any other songs to share. I wish I could have collected some songs directly from a person instead of a recording.
My last session with Eden was used as a review of everything we had done. I showed her the draft I had put together, including the songs I collected with Marlina, and she listened to me pronounce each one and read the translation to check for errors. There were a few, but for the most part it looked good. She was confident in the pronunciations and translations she had given me. After 5 sessions, our time working together had ended.
As for Marlina, it turned out that our first session was also our last. Although I reached out to her many times, suggesting more convenient locations for us to meet, or asking if there is a time that works better with her schedule, I never heard back. I wish I knew why. In any case, I had a pretty solid first draft to work with, and it was time to move on to the editing phase.
Part 5 - Editing with Professor Tafesswork Gebeyehu
After completing a first draft of the song resource, I e-mailed it to two people for editing. One went to Katie Murphy, the music coordinator for Montgomery County Public Schools, and the other went to Professor Gebeyehu at Howard University. The plan was to get each of them to offer any final edits and then send the final draft back to Katie Murphy so the resource could be distributed to all of the general music teachers in my county at a required training day in August.
A few weeks after sending the draft to Professor Gebeyehu, we met at a café to go over her edits. The meeting itself was very productive. She gave me a lot of notes on pronunciations and translations, and even changed the words of a few songs, which she said were not quite the way they should be. When I showed her the source material I was using, we discovered the problem: a bunch of the videos I worked on with Eden were most likely produced by an English-speaking group. The woman singing had an English accent and the titles were in English, which would explain why so many of the other songs in the video series were not traditionally Ethiopian. Two songs in particular were not the way they should be, and those were "Hoya Hoye," and "Abebaye Hoy."
I already knew that "Hoya Hoye" was a traditional song sung during the holiday Buhe, but Professor Gebeyehu taught me that there are many versions of that song, sung in the many dialects of Ethiopia. This might explain why my students gave me conflicting translations of the text when I did this song with them the previous year. Professor Gebeyehu gave me new words, and even some new melodic fragments in both "Hoya Hoye" and "Abebaye Hoy." It seemed as though I would need to completely redo the work I had done on the songs and start over. I know that it’s better to start over than to present songs that are inauthentic, especially songs that are important to Ethiopian culture, however it was disappointing to know that the work I had done on those songs was incorrect. On the bright side, Professor Gebeyehu promised to send me authentic recordings of the two songs to help me piece together what I had with what she told me at our meeting.
Overall the meeting went very well and once I made the changes we discussed, I had a pretty solid song resource to present to my fellow music teachers.
Part 6 - Grad School Contacts
This past summer I made some great contacts through my graduate program at Teachers College, Columbia University and through friends in the New York City area. Probably the most important contact I made was Professor Marsha Baxter, with whom I took the Comprehensive Musicianship I course required for my program. She agreed to sponsor my research and is allowing me to take an Independent Study to work on the project in the spring. I will also be utilizing her help in applying for a TC grant to fund my proposed research, which right now would include meeting with professional translators in the DC area, collecting more Ethiopian songs from my school community, and possibly paying a graphic designer to create a more professional layout of the resource so it could be published.
One of the other students in my program, Danielle Steele, introduced me to Mollie Stone, Director of World Music at the Chicago Children’s Choir. I was encouraged to contact her about my project, as it falls in line with one of their own projects to collect authentic music from around the world. I also met Cory Owen through some family members living in the city. She is the Assistant Dean of International Advisement & Diversity Initiatives at The Julliard School, and she told me that there may be some opportunities for us to collaborate on my project. I e-mailed both women and have heard back from Cory. She said that she would see if any students are interested in collaborating once the semester starts, and I plan to follow up with her soon.
Part 7 - Conferences and Grants
The beginning of the school year brought with it a lot of new things to balance. I was now at a brand new school with a new curriculum that I needed to learn how to teach, plus I started my first online semester of grad school. Despite this, I had a lot of new things I wanted to do with the project. I started by applying to the grant offered through my grad school with the help of Marsha Baxter. In addition, I applied to the Give a Note Foundation's Music Education Innovator Award, which I found out about through my school district.
Before hearing back from the grants, I was able to present at the Maryland Music Educator's Association (MMEA) Fall Conference. It was a great chance to test out some of the songs from my resource with other music educators, as well as put a few copies of the resource out into the world. Hopefully I will get some feedback that can inform my future edits of the resource. I was also really glad to see one of my undergrad professors and my district music coordinator at my session to support me. They both gave me fantastic feedback which was really encouraging.
Not long after, I heard back from the Give a Note Foundation. I got the grant! $4000 to complete my project, which is double what I thought I could raise in grant money. I can now expand the project and take it in new directions, which is so exciting! I now have to work on getting everything together by the time I start my independent study with Professor Baxter.
Part 8 - Expanding the Project
Since getting funding for my project, I have been coming up with ideas for expansion. I have made social media accounts for the project to start connecting with a wider audience. I also had the idea to use some of the grant money to fund a children's book of a traditional Ethiopian folk tale, paired with a song from the resource and illustrated by a local Ethiopian-American artist. This would be in addition to hiring professional Amharic, Oromo, and Tigrinya translators to help complete the resource, and hiring a graphic designer to professionally lay out the final product for publishing. I may even have enough money left over to purchase some traditional Ethiopian instruments for my classroom!
I am also getting the chance to share my research through interviews with the University of Maryland School of Music and The Washington Post. Not only will this give my project some added credibility moving forward; it many also open up new connections and opportunities to grow the project. Here is the UMD article:
The Washington Post article should be posted any day now! I will write an update once it is published.
Update: Here is the Washington Post article!
Part 9 - First session with Hana
I recently had my first session with Hana Assefa, who is an MCPS translator fluent in English, Amharic, and Tigrinya. I was able to meet her in person a few weeks ago so we could get to know each other a bit and so I could tell her more about the project. She was so excited about the project and seems to be a perfect collaborator! Hana is a mother of two children and she often sings Ethiopian children's songs with her kids. We planned to meet every other Saturday for a 2-hour session at a cafe halfway between our homes.
When we met back up for our first session, we began by going through the current resource. Hana found a few mistakes and we decided to cut a song from the resource that may not be as authentic as I originally thought. It was a good warm-up for the work we were going to have to do collecting new songs, especially since I needed to assure Hana that it is ok to correct me when I'm wrong. She wanted to be so polite about everything and it took some time for her to trust that I wanted her to be completely honest.
One of the best moments of our first session was when we were looking over the song "Tsehay Demeketchi." Hana instantly recognized the song and told me that it was composed by Alemtsehay Wedajo, a living female Ethiopian composer. Hana told me how Alemtsehay fled to the United States during the previous Ethiopian regime and has since been a staple in the local community; founding the Tayitu Cultural Center in Silver Spring, MD. Even more incredible, Hana offered to call her for me and see if she could set up a meeting between the two of us! I'm also going to go to a monthly poetry night that Alemtsehay hosts with Hana.
Hana and I sketched out our plans to collect a few songs in Tigrinya at our next session. We also plan to start tackling the two songs that I previously took out of the resource until I could collect them correctly.
Part 10 - New collaborations
The article in the Washington Post really opened up a lot of doors for the project. I received so many e-mails and correspondence from individuals and organizations interested in the project and offering their congratulations, it was wonderful! I wrote back to many of them to see if they would be interested in a collaboration or at least be featured on the social media accounts. This led me to two recent contacts: Caroline D'Arista and Louise Pascale.
I had the pleasure of visiting a local elementary school in my county to see their 3rd Grade World Dancing Club, led by Caroline D'Acosta. Ms. D'Acosta is an ESOL teacher who started the club to promote cultural learning within the school. She had reached out to me about my project and we arranged for me to visit on the day they were performing for the other 3rd grade classes. The club performed four dances from Japan, Ethiopia, Italy, and El Salvador. Each dance represented one or more of the students within the club, which added to the cultural exchange. The Ethiopian dance they performed was the Eskista, in which the dancers rapidly move their shoulders in a sharp, circular motion. This dance is supposed to mimic the appearance of a snake. I was able to take some pictures and talk to the students about their experience in the club, which was overwhelmingly positive.
I was incredibly excited to be put in contact with Louise Pascale. I purchased her collection of Afghani children's songs a few years ago and used it as one of the inspirations for my own resource. We talked on the phone for a long time about her process collecting the songs as well as the challenges of getting an authentic resource like this published and distributed. I'm hoping to see her at one of the music education conferences that we both attend (she lives in Boston), and keep in touch as I finish putting together the resource.
Part 11 - Second session with Hana
I recently had my second session with Hana. As a full time mother working two jobs and going to school, Hana is extremely busy. I am so thankful that she is able to make time to work together on this project, especially since she has been such a huge help finding other resources that I can utilize in the project. I met her at her home on a Saturday morning. Her youngest child was being fed by grandma while her son played in the other room. Art and decorations from her culture could be seen throughout her home, and she was more than happy to tell me about them.
Hana introduced me to the Ethiopian tea ceremony, which includes a green mat (to symbolize grass), incense, and three cups of coffee served in small tea cups. Well-caffeinated, we began our work translating and discussing the songs we had picked out to work on this session. The first two songs we worked on were in Amharic, and the other two were in Tigrinya. At one point, Hana had her son come into the room to demonstrate some of the games played with these songs.
Toward the end of our session, Hana and I spoke about some of my plans for the project. I told her about my idea for a children's book, which she loved, and showed her some of the Ethiopian artists in DC I was interested in contacting. I also told her how I was still looking for an Oromo translator, and she was able to call up a friend of hers who also does translation work in the area who agreed to the project. I am going to have lunch with both women sometime in the near future. I met Hana's husband just before I left, and Hana told me that she would like to invite me to the next holiday celebration at her home, calling me part of the family. I was so moved to hear her say this and I am now even more motivated in making sure I create a really good, authentic music resource.
Part 12 - Setbacks
I have been reflecting on the way I write these blog posts lately. I feel like I have been focusing on the successes of the project, while at the same time ignoring or diminishing when things don't go the way I planned. I am realizing that while I do not want to seem as though I am placing blame on others, I also need to be honest about the setbacks I have faced so far with this project.
So far, I have had two in-person sessions with Hana. She is a fantastic collaborator and I am so happy to be working with her. However, she already has an incredibly busy schedule which makes it difficult to schedule meetings. I worry that I will not get enough meetings with her before my grant money is due to be spent. On the other hand, I haven't even been able to pay her for the sessions we have had, because all of my grant money is tied up in my school district. I have now spoken to at least five different departments in my district, and so far no one has been able to tell me how I can pay Hana for her services.
My district is also pushing me to use their Oromo translator rather than "contracting out" for the work. However, I have contacted this translator twice and have received no response. I want to start working on Oromo songs as soon as possible, but I feel hindered by bureaucracy.
Hopefully, all of this will work itself out soon.
Part 13 - NAfME Eastern Conference
I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the NAfME Eastern Division conference in Pittsburgh, PA. The session I was presenting was on the methods I used to identify and collect songs for the Ethiopian Song Project, so teachers could replicate the project with their own school cultures. It was great to meet some other music educators, learn about the methods my colleagues are using in their classrooms, and share the Ethiopian Song Project with a wider audience.
The first day of the conference I attended a few really interesting sessions. One was about Project Zero from Harvard, and how their methodology of teaching kids thinking and reasoning skills could apply to the music classroom. Another session was on writing for the Music Educators Journal, which will come in handy when I eventually want to start publishing my methodology for other teachers to duplicate. The second day of the conference was similar to the first, with the addition of two inner city school visits. I loved getting to see how music programs operate in other cities/states, and the schools I went to had some really incredible music programs.
I presented my session on the third day of the conference. I met the current head of the Maryland Music Educators Association (MMEA) who was wonderful to talk to and seemed really interested in the work I was doing. I hope to work with her in the future to get more music educators to teach songs that represent their students and their cultures. I also got to talk to a few of the people who came to my session, and they had some great resources for me to check out:
Global Jukebox: A resource of authentic music recording from around the world. Includes a really cool interactive world map. https://theglobaljukebox.org/
International Society for Music Education: I should have realized there would be some sort of international music education organization, but I was surprised to hear how often they get together for conferences! I will look into the organization and maybe find some new collaborators! https://www.isme.org/
Measure of America: Interactive website where you can view statistics on a national, state, or local level. Will be great for identifying other areas of the US with a significant Ethiopian population. https://measureofamerica.org/maps/
Part 14 - New Collaborators
I discovered a great Ethiopian coffee shop near where I teach, and had to go back and put one of my translator flyers on their community board. So far, I've posted flyers on a number of community boards in the area, but I had never heard back from them. This time though, I received a response! Her name is Metsi and we met up for coffee in September. She was born in Ethiopia but has lived in the US most of her life, and she attended UC Berkley. Metsi has a passion for social justice and children; she actually met her husband while studying abroad in Senegal and working with children there. We clicked and now we're working on collecting more authentic versions of Hoya Hoye and Abeba Yehosh (which up until now I thought was Abebaye Hosh, so already I'm learning!). She is also going to go through the resource and write up all of the lyrics in the Amharic fidel, which was a goal I had ever since getting the project funded through the Give A Note grant.
One thing I really like is that we often meet at Ethiopian-owned businesses, which is something I had not considered until now but makes good sense. The places we meet are going to get our business though coffee and food purchases, so choosing Ethiopian businesses further the project's goal of engaging with and supporting the local Ethiopian-American community.
I have also been put in touch with Dominique Cheeks at the Notes for Notes recording studio in DC though a contact at the Give A Note Foundation. We are going to meet and discuss what would go in to producing an accompanying CD for the resource. I want to work with an Ethiopian-American run recording studio and Ethiopian musicians, but past that I don't know what the recording will ultimately look like.
Part 15 - NAfME National Conference
I had the honor of attending the 2019 NAfME National Conference in Orlando, FL this November. I was there with the other Give A Note grantees to present a session on innovative school music programming