Teaching Abroad: Reflections on Teaching Music Theory in China
Posted: November 21, 2019 by Gabriel Fankhauser
Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of blog posts in which 大象传媒 faculty will report on their experiences teaching abroad.
Dr. Gabriel Fankhauser is Associate Professor of Music Theory.
Darth Vader's theme ("Imperial March") lies among countless musical examples that I use to teach how harmony and other structures in music can convey meaning. With its dramatic shift from a minor triad down a major third to another minor triad — harmony that John Williams likely "borrowed" from Wagner's Tarnhelm motive — the ominous theme has served a pervasive role in American pop culture for the past 40 years. That is why I was a little surprised when I referenced Star Wars in a class that I was teaching in China and received only blank stares.
In May 2015, I taught a course at the University of Liaocheng, in the northeastern Shandong province, nearly 300 miles south of Beijing and 600 miles northeast of Shanghai. Relatively rural and non-traditional for China, the city of Liaocheng still has 600,000 people (more than Atlanta), with the greater Liaocheng prefecture at 6 million. I had planned my course as a music appreciation course, one that would touch on developments in music without going into too much technical or philosophical depth. Shortly after I arrived in China, however, I was excited to learn that my students would be upper-level music majors! That meant that I could delve into deeper material, with students being at least a little familiar with the repertoire and able to read some music — an important first step toward music analysis.
I was also told that the students spoke some English. I was perhaps overly optimistic about this claim. When first I walked into the School of Music, I was greeted by a music major. "Michael" — his chosen English name — spoke practically no English, which I feared would be typical of the students in the class. My Chinese college students had studied English for the past 10 years, but they were taught primarily to translate writing using what seemed to me like 1940s vocabulary and a grammar that I'm guessing their English teachers probably didn't understand. Spoken English, it appears, is not emphasized in their curriculum. Fortunately, "Hunter" was assigned to be my class translator. His English was excellent. As an education major with little experience in music, he was perhaps challenged more by translating my specialized music theory terms into something that he could understand and then communicate to the class.
Hunter and I would prepare lectures most evenings. I thought about how Hunter responded to my questions. I'd ask a question, and he'd reply with something like a short, descending "Hm," the way we might shrug and mean "not really." But I learned that it's more of an "ng" sound, which means "yes." I also perceived that many Chinese prefer to respond with a polite "maybe" over a decisive "no," something I have observed in other cultures.
My courses generally involve lots of listening, and I regularly turn to online resources like YouTube for showing musical scores while listening to recordings. I knew that online access would be very limited in the classroom, as it is throughout China: no YouTube, no Facebook, no Google anything (no Google Translate, no Google Maps), no Hulu, no Netflix. The first three were blocked by the Chinese government as "inappropriate." So, I prepared music, videos, and PDFs on my laptop to take into class on a thumb drive. However, I found that the classroom computer could open neither PDFs nor Word files that were created after 2003. Challenges continued to increase. All the characters on the computer were in Chinese, of course, as was everything else, but I managed to navigate based on the icons. At least the room was equipped with a basic piano, which has a universal keyboard.
My first lecture on May 11 was an exhausting three hours, but it went well. I started with basic concepts (like keys, meter, and solfège) and found that most students seemed to understand, even if the English terms were new to them. So, I quickly started getting into much deeper concepts: What are the goals of harmonic analysis? How does analysis clarify meaning? The highlight, at least for me, was intro