By Nathan Park
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The human world is not as vast and disconnected as it once was a hundred years ago. Some of the most unique and outrageous cultural exchanges, from South Korea’s “Gangnam Style” to the 2012 Winter Olympics, have brought appreciation of different ethnicities to popular culture. However, one rarely sees international barriers being broken in a chorus room. Fine Arts teacher Keane Ishii has helped the lower level chorus, Choice of Voice, and higher level chorus, Prima Voice, gain awareness of cultural and artistic diversity through teaching them to be multi-lingual singers.
“Language is not a different code, you know? It is a different way of thinking; it’s a different way of expressing yourself. Besides that, especially with choral music, it’s by nature an international thing,” explained Ishii.
In chorus, students are exposed to exotic languages that they did not realize existed or are rarely spoken today. “It’s interesting. I’ve probably learned more in (chorus) than in Japanese. It’s great because it’s a wide variety of languages, languages that half of them I didn’t even know existed. Like Latin, no one goes up to you and say they can speak fluent Latin,” said Choice of Voice member Sophomore Genevieve Castaneda.
A common philosophy in chorus is that in order to fully understand a language, one must find the musicality in it. “Singing or learning different languages definitely gives you an appreciation for how musical a language can be. There’s different phonetics and different vowels, different consonants. You really learn to appreciate the beauty of language in general,” explained Prima Voce member Senior Daniel Bayot. According to Ishii, music is a collection of sounds that work together to make a pattern or style, which is what languages are composed of. “When you try to imitate someone from Italy or Russia, you make it a certain way and it’s kind of funny, but the reason why it’s funny is because there is a particular music to language,” observed Ishii.
In appreciating a culture’s language, choral students have come to respect the regions where it originated. They have broken stereotypes of foreign cultures from regions like Africa being intellectually inferior to western cultures. “It helps you to respect other countries and their languages because, a lot of them are really complex and so, for a group of people to have a complex language they have to be really smart,” explained Castaneda.
When choosing pieces for the chorus to sing, Ishii looks for songs that explore different human emotions, while having a cultural significance. When performing these pieces, students truly experience the life of the people from foreign countries and see it through their eyes. In having this empathy, they realize how small the emotional gap is between cultures. “One of the biggest things about singing songs in different languages and delving into these foreign texts is that sense of humanity as one. Since there are so many universal themes in all these cultures such as love and friendship, to name a couple, we realize how small the world is and how similar we all are,” explained Bayot.
Other than providing cultural awareness, the pieces Ishii picks are meant to evoke strong emotion in a controlled way. He hopes that these songs will guide students to be more aware of their own feelings. “From an artistic standpoint if you have a variety of pieces that explore different emotional places, like from great joy to great sorrow, even embarrassment, anger, if you are able to explore those in an artistic way, a conscious way, I think it makes you have a better sense of yourself and your own emotions,” explained Ishii.
So far this year, the choruses have sung in more than eight different languages including, Hawaiian, Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latin, French and several African dialects. It has been a challenge to learn how to enunciate all these different vowels while following the rhythm of music. This difficulty has taught students that they need to have determination and self-imitative in order to achieve their goals. “What that does is if you want to be able to build your vocal range, you have to be able to work for it. You can apply that to life, you really can. If you want something in life you have to be the one to work for it,” stated Castaneda.
Though pronunciation can be an issue, singing in different languages helps students take their mind off the actual words and allows them to focus on the correct pitch. “If they only sing English, they don’t learn to tune correctly, because they aren’t thinking about the vowels, they are thinking about the word. For example, if they are singing a word like year, you know? In English, you might be doing yearrrr with the r in at the end, but if it was a different language then you would be singing the vowel, which is more important,” explained Ishii.
The effort to become a multi-lingual chorus has not only improved the talent of chorus students, but also closed the gap between the world’s cultures. At every concert, each piece they perform teaches society the lessons of empathy and understanding that they learned through chorus class.
