We all speak foreign languages to some degree if we’re musicians. The main language of Western classical music is Italian; though French and German also play a significant role. Most of us know that D.C. al fine means to go back to the beginning and play until the word fine , which means “end”; perhaps slightly less will know that “D.C.” stands for da capo and that its literal meaning is “from the head,” which in this case means the beginning. Most musicians will know the term and the concept of the word rubato , which (musically speaking) means to stretch time and not play in a metronomic fashion; maybe fewer will know the origin of the word, which comes from the Italian verb rubare , meaning “to steal” and making the literal meaning of rubato “stolen.” Terms like staccato , legato , and even the name of the piano (originally the pianoforte , the literal meaning of which is the “soft loud”) all come from Italian and have developed their own connotations for English speakers.
Teaching students whose primary language is one other than English is a bit of a different story. Los Angeles is a concentrated melting pot of all nationalities and languages; it is virtually impossible to have a music career here and not have clients and colleagues who speak English as a second (or third or fourth) language. I have an advantage in that I speak two other languages; not perfectly, but fluently enough. An obsessive Francophile since childhood, I was stymied by the fact that my school, like many American schools, only offered foreign language instruction in high school. Since I desperately wanted to learn French, I found my grandmother’s old textbook and tried to teach myself, not realizing, for example, that the word for “pen” was no longer the elegant (but outdated) la plume but the more modern le stylo . Once I was able to study formally, I was an obnoxiously dedicated student and studied in college as well, also taking two years of Italian from a lovely teacher named Mariella Parati, whose last name means “wallpaper” in Italian. But I digress.
Emilia
Emilia was a Hungarian student. She was playing just for fun, so was understandably resistant to any suggestions I might make as to how she might update her lexicon for English usage. This put the burden on me to learn her vocabulary. Teaching her was the first time I had to use the fixed do system: C = do , D = re , E = mi and so forth, with the substitution of si for the ti I had learned (so that B became si ). To additionally complicate matters, as opposed to the solfège sequentials for sharps and flats for moveable do that I was at least somewhat familiar with ( do-di-re-ri for an ascending chromatic scale, do-ti-te-la-le for a descending chromatic scale), she used the Hungarian terms for “sharp” and “flat,” bemol and diez , so that “D sharp” was re diez , for example. It gave me a whole new appreciation for how music students and foreign language speakers might struggle with learning note names as I faltered and made mistakes while learning this new terminology, made even harder by the fact that I was fluent in another system.
Emilia was not the only fixed do student I had; I had two Mexican students that also used it. One, Sofia, was the grandmother of another student; she was also legally blind. Her teachers in Mexico (“they were angels , I tell you!” she said), had gone to the immense trouble of transcribing her pieces by hand in drawing notebooks, so that one measure filled an entire page. Given her visual impairment, I was hardly going to insist that she learn our American alphabetic system. She used the Spanish names for “flat” and “sharp,” bemol and sostenido ; Emilia’s re diez became Sofia’s re sostenido .
Daniela
Another Mexican student was Daniela, who was in Los Angeles studying acting and music. Her musical theatre school only offered singing, so she came to me for private piano lessons. Since she wanted to work professionally in the United States, I knew she needed to learn our alphabetic system, as well as our rhythmic values terminology. Our American note value names (whole, half, quarter, eighth) are based on fractions, while the Spanish names are based on visual cues – la redonda (“the round”) for a whole note, la blanca (“the white”) for a half note, la negra (“the black”) for a quarter note – so it was tough for her at first. I admit that I was relieved not to have to learn a whole set of different names for rhythmic values! And since at this point I was already pretty comfortable with fixed do from my other students, I was able to help her transition much more effectively than I would have been able to otherwise, and with much more empathy and understanding of how difficult that switch can be.
Ike
While my language background undoubtedly enhanced my ability to communicate with non-native English speakers, I found myself bumping up against a language that had no basis in the Romance languages I had studied. One of my favorite students, who sadly passed away at the age 80 from cancer, was a Japanese man from Tokyo named Ike. This was a nickname he had adopted while living in English-speaking countries, which he had done for most of his adult life: London, New York, and Los Angeles were his primary residences. He had studied classical piano on and off his whole life, and wanted to devote his time in retirement to making music.
The first time I truly realized what a language barrier can do was when I was working with Ike on a classical piece – I think it was a Beethoven or Mozart sonata. There was a syncopated rhythm that he was having difficulty with. When I counted it for him and he played while I counted, he was fine. I showed him how to count it so that he could practice, but when he played and counted simultaneously the rhythm changed back to his older, incorrect version. I was befuddled; he clearly did not have rhythmic issues. I clapped the rhythm for him and asked him to clap it back to me; he did so with no problem. I counted again and he played it correctly; I asked him to count and play and once again he slipped back to his old habitual pattern. Then it hit me – even though he had lived in English-speaking countries for years, it was still not his native tongue. For him to simultaneously count in a foreign language and play was occupying too much of his mental bandwidth and throwing his rhythm off.
Quickly, I asked: “I think I know what the problem is. How do you count to four in Japanese?”
“ Ichi , ni , san , shi ,” he responded, smiling.
“And how do you say ‘and’?”
“ To ,” he said.
“ Ichi-to , ni-to , san-to , shi-to ,” I repeated to myself several times until I had it, eliding the two syllables of ichi so that it was more of an ich . “Okay, let’s count that way!”
And it immediately worked. We counted together gleefully as he played, and his wife Yukiko came running out of the kitchen, holding her hands up to her mouth as she laughed at me counting in Japanese.
A successful Japanese businessman, Ike was obsessed with music and was a true audiophile. Two rooms of his home were dedicated to vintage audio equipment and parts; he was part of an international group of audio geeks that knew how to restore antique tube speakers and would trade information and advice online. I found this out one day when I asked him if he had a CD player so that he could listen to a piece. I remember pronouncing the word slowly and distinctly, just in case he didn’t know what a CD player was (he was 75, after all!). He gave me a sidelong look and got up from the piano. “Come here,” he said, and beckoned me into his listening room, where my jaw proceeded to drop. He put on clean white cotton gloves, took an album out of its liner and put a fresh bamboo needle in the arm of the turntable. We sat in perfectly positioned chairs and listened to a Bill Evans live album on a giant movie theatre speaker from the 1920’s he had restored, and the sound was so clear you could hear people breathing in the audience.
Once I realized what a jazz aficionado Ike was, I proposed to him that he start learning how to play jazz. “Oh, no,” he replied gently at first when I proposed the idea. “That is for masters and it’s too late for me.” When I kept pushing him and insisting that there was no reason he could not learn seventh chords and their symbols well enough to be able to read a chart, he started to acquiesce and gradually became thrilled with the project. We worked on jazz together for the next five years, and he became able to read chord symbols well enough to play through a chart. There were two chords, though, that he had difficulty with; that is, until we realized that it was not a comprehension issue, but a language issue.
The chords were dominant and diminished seventh chords. Try as he might, he could not remember their construction or keep them straight. Major 7, minor 7, minor-major 7, minor 7 flat 5 – all fine. Those were the two that were the problem. Until I realized that those two words – dominant and diminished – not only started with the same letter, but were relatively advanced and less-used English words, as opposed to the words used in the other chord names. He had no real connotation for them. We tried to find the Japanese terms for those chords, but hit a wall with Internet searches – so, instead, we substituted simpler words he did have a connotation for. Diminished 7 became “little 7” and dominant 7 became “major 7 flat 7.” He was then able to remember and play those chords.
In all of these experiences, I did have an advantage in that I have a background in foreign languages, but that’s not paramount in teaching a non-native speaker. The trick is to think outside the box and look for innovative approaches. The responsibility is on the teacher to make sure the student understands as best they can, using whatever tools they have at their disposal, and bending the rules if necessary. Music is, after all, a universal language, and creativity and empathy are universal as well.
