Monday, June 23, 2008

The things I remember...

Back when we were little, my sister Emily and I took Suzuki Piano Lessons. I could spend days talking about the many and conflicted feelings I have about piano and suzuki, but we'll skip that part, and get to the point. Suzuki is a method by which kids learn songs by hearing them over and over and over rather than by reading music. It's designed for kids too young to read music. As a result, Emily and I listened to a TON of classical music as kids. Either to make the music more memorable or more interesting for small children, a lot of the songs had words attached to the melodies that were of interest to small children. For example, there was a song about pizza, one about a horse named Flicka, one about a goose that was dead and going to be made into a feather pillow, you get the idea.
So the other day I was hanging out in my classroom with Tomoko (the woman who helps run JAFCO) and she was going through some of her English supplies and we were discussing what was and wasn't usable at this point. She had a CD of music with kids words that she was going through and she asked me if I knew a song. She said the melody was German, but there were English and Japanese words to it, but she only had the Japanese. She hummed a bar. Instantly the words came to my head "Buzz Buzz Buzz, goes the bumblebee. Buzz Buzz Buzz Buzz Buzz Buzz Buzz Buzz Buzz Buzz Buzz Buzz Buzz Buzz Buzz Buzz. Buzz Buzz Buzz goes the bumblebee." It was a Suzuki song sure enough. The Japanese words as it turns out, translate "Buzz Buzz Buzz. The Bee flies." followed by more buzzing. Only for them, Bon is the sound of a bee flying instead of Buzz.
I was amused that I could still remember the melody and words to a song that I listened to when I was all of four years old (may be five?), so I went back through my memory looking for other songs that came up. Emily is much better at this than I am, but I was amazed at how many I could still bring up. There were the ones from the first paragraph as well as several others. I think it's weird the things we remember.

1 comment:

Larissa said...

So odd that I can't remember stuff from last week, but I can remember stuff from when I was 3.

... who are you again?