Music education

I have groused about Jordan's schoolwork before, but I tell you what, the musical education he is getting is extraordinary. He is getting this education through the Northwest Boychoir and through his piano lessons, which make a particularly excellent combination since his piano teacher is also his choir director.

The Boychoir teaches music in terms of solfege, which is the way Julie Andrews teaches the von Trapp children in The Sound of Music. In this system, you first sing a song in terms of the do-re-mi syllables. The first two lines of "Happy Birthday," for example, would be sung as "sol sol la sol do ti, sol sol la sol re do." Then, once you are good at singing a tune on solfege, you add the words. This is powerful because you start to internalize the intervals between notes, which, for a singer, are more important than the notes themselves. Once you learn what "do re mi" or "sol do ti" sounds like, you can sing those combinations in other contexts, in songs you don't know already. Next, you learn that the solfege syllables match particular notes in sheet music. At first, someone tells you the base note (the "do"), and from there you figure out the rest: the one up from that (in that scale) is the re, then the mi, etc. Now you are starting to be able to use the solfege to analyze written music. Eventually you learn how to identify the "do" from the key signature, and what to call notes that are not in that key, and then you are becoming quite musically literate.

Jordan is outstandingly good at this. He is especially good at translating songs into solfege. He is so good at this that he can sit in the back of the car listening to a pop song, and sing the correct solfege syllables along with the pop song. This is quite a thing in itself: it's a way of knowing the structure of a song, what intervals it is composed of. But not only that: Because he is also learning piano, including scales, he can then walk from the car straight into the house and over to the piano, and play what he was just hearing. Because any scale is the do-re-mi. And he can play it in any key you want. Knocks me out every time. This is a learned skill, obviously, but also, Jordan has an amazing ear and a practically photographic (?) memory for music. Today I played him Bach's Minuet in G two times, and he reproduced the right hand with essentially no errors. He just sat down and played it. He has heard it before, but never tried to play it before.

Boychoir has levels, and Jordan has moved up quickly. He spent the required four months in the Prep Class, and then one quick year at the Intermediate level, and has now tested into the Advanced Choir, one level below the top. The test was delightful. Here is the first page that they were supposed to analyze, as it was handed to the boys on test day:

This was a joke! The image is good enough to zoom in on and it's hilarious... but the best part, to me, was watching Jordan try to share the joke with various friends of his, who just didn't find it all that funny because they don't read music. Woohoo! Jordan has become a music nerd! And actually I am serious in my cheering, because to be a nerd is to have a sense of identity around an activity, and I love that music is becoming this for him.

The real test included writing in the solfege and rhythm (using a numbering system) for a few lines of music, and doing rhythm and solfege "dictation" - listening to something being played, and writing down the rhythm or the solfege of what you heard. For example, the teacher would play two notes on the piano, and assuming that the first note was the do, you would write what the second note was (sol, fa, or whatever). Sometimes it was three notes, and weird combinations, like "do me te," in which "me" is a half-step down from mi, and "te" is a half-step down from ti. Yowza. Jordan totally nailed this. Now, in Advanced Choir, he is singing more difficult music, and there is more attention to his individual development as a musician. He will probably be in Advanced Choir for a year and then move up to Performing Choir at maybe age 11, giving him a couple of years to sing at a professional level (including performances with Seattle Symphony, recording sessions, and tours) before his voice changes. After that, he wants to be in the high school rock singers' group, which would be awesome.

There are three Boychoir music directors and they are all incredibly good, but Jordan has a special relationship with Ben. They hit it off from the start. Jordan says, "Ben really gets me," and I think that is so true: he sees what Jordan is good at, and sees what he is ready to learn, and has the skill to translate that into activities that advance him. Jordan says that both piano and Boychoir are "hard work, but encouraging," unlike school, which is more discouraging to him. I see this when I eavesdrop on rehearsals: Ben is very demanding, but his demands come from a place of knowing what the boys can do and wanting to see them reach their potential. I think that they feel that and are grateful to have their best selves seen and called forward. I am sure Jordan feels that way. We are so grateful to have people like this in Jordan's life.

We expect Aaron to enjoy music just as much as Jordan does; he also has a great ear and has always loved to sing. He will audition for the Boychoir in the spring.