Extraordinary Teachers

Jean Sinor (1946-1999)

Remember her with me.

We wide-eyed sophomores wander into our classroom, the first day of our Elementary Music Methods class. We’re on our way to learning how to be music teachers. Our professor stands at the door, greeting each one of us with lingering eye contact. Her friendliness disarms me. She doesn’t let us get comfortable in our seats; we’re invited to sit on the floor in a circle on the round rug, and she launches us into a pentatonic call and response song. By the end of the first class, she knows all of our names, our major instruments, and where we’re from.

There are some humans that are so gifted that they become what they do. Pick up a guitar, become the music. Paint, the world gets new colors. Teach college sophomores a folk song and they become joyful second graders again.

Professor Jean Sinor, the best teacher I have ever known, was an expert in the Kodály Method, which is a philosophy and approach to music learning developed in the mid 1900s by the composer, Zoltan Kodály. His philosophy of music learning was based on this idea: music is for everyone. That’s his fundamental claim: music is for everyone! At the time Kodály was working, music was not really for everyone. It was for those who had money, those who were the correct race or ethnicity, those who were talented. Kodály believed that developing musicianship in children helped them to develop into well-rounded adults, that music was “spiritual food.”

“Teach music and singing at school in such a way that it is not a torture, but a joy for the pupil; instill a thirst for finer music in him, a thirst which will last for a lifetime! If the child is not filled at least once by the life giving stream of music during the most susceptible period-between his sixth and sixteenth years-it will hardly be of any use to him later on. Often a single experience will open the young soul to music for a whole lifetime.” (From a 1925 lecture, Zoltan Kodály)

In teaching us how to be teachers, Jean Sinor showed us how Kodály was right. She embodied this belief. In her own teaching of teachers and children alike, she taught from the heart. She was kind. She was interested in us as humans. Us – not what we could do or what grades we earned or what outfits we wore or how musically talented we were.

Kodály’s method includes learning to hear and listen via a system of syllables called Solfège (do-re-mi, made famous by Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music) and hand signals (made famous by the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. What a brilliant way to communicate with aliens, by the way, through music, right?). Kodály believed that folk music (the “music of the people”) contained everything necessary to give children a musical foundation and a lifelong love of music, and Solfège was one very good way to get there.

Jean Sinor had a way. She taught by showing us, not telling us, how teaching works. Yes, lesson plans and goals and teaching tools. But something important and intangible as well, something heartfelt. She just knew, and she convinced us that we could know, too, if we let music sing for itself. Let it land in our students, let the experience be what it is and allow the students to let their own innate musicality come forward.

“Well, we could be related,” she said to me as I was leaving class the second or third day, my mind full of pentatonic folk songs and amazement at her ability to fascinate us. “You’ve got some Hungarian in you,” she said, pointing to my printed last name.

“I do!” I told her about my great-grandmother’s dumplings and kiffles, and that I understood the vital importance of sour cream.

Jean Sinor taught me that a love and affinity for music can run in our very biology, that it is passed down through generations and this is why teaching with folk songs works and is so powerful. It’s a way for children to remember that internal tonal memory is part of who we are. My gratitude to her for showing me that music is for everyone is boundless. She gave my teaching purpose, she gave me the fundamental ideas for creating a music school, and I am forever grateful to her.