ملاية لف محمد عبدالوهاب عبدالفتاح - Melaya Laf_ Mohamed Abdelwahab Abdel...

Story by Jonathan Berk

Jonathan Berk Writes about teaching system of Dr. Abdelwhab for Deaf Students

Dr.Mohamed Abdelwahab Abdelfattah

is trying to teach his students, but they aren’t listening

He holds a violin high above his shaved head, and a few eyes follow upward.

“Okay, now we will play together, just the red string,” he says in his Egyptian accent and hint of a lisp. “If not together, will be no good.”

His students are watching his hand now as he plucks the violin’s lowest string, the G. The tuning isn’t true, but he doesn’t mind.

The class mimics their teacher’s motion, and a few low-pitched plucks ring out around the room. They are not together.

“Bravo!” he exclaims. He claps his hands and a smile turns up his thin black moustache. Three young women in the room – other teachers -- raise their hands and rotate them rapidly back and forth: applause for the deaf.

Not all of Abdelwahab’s students are deaf – some are merely hard of hearing – but devices are visible in every pair of small ears in the room. At the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, cochlear implants and hearing aids are in no short supply.

“Hearing” is a fluid concept for the nine children in the room. Some, aided simply by amplifiers, can hear sounds roughly as they are. Others, profoundly deaf, have ears adorned with tiny microphones and implanted electrodes that send impulses to the auditory nerve. These students are learning to hear, or perceive sound, in the limited way cochlear implants allow.

Behind Abdelwahab, on the front wall of the room, hangs a white board on which he has drawn a row of four colored circles. The largest circle is red, representing the violin’s lowest string and the subject of today’s lesson. Following the red are green, yellow and blue circles, each smaller than the last, matching the real strings of the violin. Mastery of this concept, he hopes, of the circles-as-strings, will be one building block toward much more.

Beyond trying to teach his students the fundamentals of music, Abdelwahab wants them to hear what they are playing by seeing it. He wants to give them a new way, through colors and visual patterns, to appreciate sound and music, and ultimately to integrate their world with the “hearing world” around them.

Toward these lofty ends, he is arming his students with spoons and spatulas, bowls and lids, shapes and colored circles, and making them into an orchestra.

Again holding a violin, Abdelwahab puts the “red” string into some rhythmic context. Rhythm is another building block that his students will need.

He counts off: “One, two, three, four. I would like your hand to move like so,” he tells them as he drops his hand to the string and raises it again in exaggerated pizzicato, or string-plucking, technique. A little girl smiles up at him from the front row. She’s wearing red and white glasses and a red headband. He counts off again and she plucks her own violin, beaming.

When Abdelwahab came to the school in Allston, Mass. a few months earlier, he had just arrived on sabbatical from the Cairo Conservatory. He was beginning a one-year residency at Boston University’s School of Music.

In Egypt, he had won a competition for a fellowship, to send him abroad. He is here now as a composer, as a “visiting scholar.” But composing music is only part of what Abdelwahab hopes to accomplish – a composer is only part of what he calls himself.

His initial reception at Horace Mann was lukewarm. The administration was hesitant at first to accept his proposal to teach music to some of their students – to carry out his “Visual Music” project. Maybe it was his foreignness or the foreignness of his ideas that gave them pause. They decided to let Abdelwahab try his classes, and people began to warm to their Egyptian visitor. The way Abdelwahab tells it, his students enjoyed their music lessons, and the positive response made its way to parents, teachers and the school administration.

Now, in late March, the spring semester is two months old, but weekly music sessions with “Dr. Mohamed,” as his students call him, are just getting started again.

The composer and teacher had been ready to return. His extended winter hiatus had brought new instruments – actual violins and an upright piano – that would be welcome additions to his supply of teaching materials. The violins were the gift of a generous donor -- from a nice man with a lot of money, as one of the school’s many caring teachers explained to a student.

Abdelwahab walks from table to table around the classroom, a large multi-purpose space off the third-floor library, to give all of his students their turn to pluck. He is good-natured but critical – not everyone’s attempt is rewarded with a pleased “Bravo!” but many are. Those who don’t quite catch on still receive encouragement: a small smile, a sympathetic shrug of the shoulders and tilt of the head.

“Now can we play together?” he asks of his students.

Playing together is perhaps what these nine students, and the other students in his pre-kindergarten to fifth grade music classes, will have to learn above all if they are to form an orchestra.

Forming an orchestra – one entirely of deaf and hard-of-hearing musicians – is something Abdelwahab knows he can accomplish; he’s done it before, in Cairo three years ago, and without a single violin.

Because of his reputation in Egypt as a composer and experimental musician, opportunities to assemble his first orchestra of the deaf presented themselves. He began training students, all entirely deaf, in January 2005. By the end of March they were a percussion chamber ensemble performing on traditional Egyptian kitchen tools at the Cairo Opera House.

The concert that day, he says, drew an audience at the hall unlike that for any other of his musical works. Even the opera house staff attended, wanting to hear “Abdelwahab’s deaf orchestra.”

Sitting in a Kenmore Square café on a February afternoon, Abdelwahab explains that he sees himself not only as a composer and musician, but as a researcher and scientist. His work with the deaf is just one part of an overarching goal to apply music in society as something more than entertainment – to give music a more functional role.

The beginning of an idea came to him one night a few years ago in a place “not awake and not asleep.” He thought of using color, somehow, in his music. He now says his term for this translates to something like “colorization,” but he doesn’t know if that’s the correct English word.

His idea grew, drawing on so much of his previous training in photography, medicine, physics and education (he calls his interests those of 10 different men). Years earlier as a graduate music student in Austria, he had been encouraged by a professor to first use visual media in his compositions. Later, as a professor himself in Cairo, he was coining synesthetic terms like “sound scenography” and “visual solfege,” the latter his musical notation for the deaf.

On the steps outside of the Horace Mann School after a morning of classes, Abdelwahab struggles for the English words to explain what he is doing with the senses. He strokes his pant leg, then the concrete step underneath. ‘Smooth’ and ‘rough’ are the words he is looking for; they are just two of the many qualities, along with color and shape, with which he has endowed sound.

He emphasizes his students’ reliance on visual memory. Without the aural, much of their entire life has been seen and nothing else. The better he can translate musical ideas into visual symbols and patterns, the more, he thinks, his students will enjoy making music and will learn from it. He wants them to “see the sound” and not just see that they are doing something with pots and spoons and little colored circles.

In early April, five weeks into his lessons, Abdelwahab is standing at the whiteboard preparing for a class with kindergarten students and first-graders. He is looking sophisticated today: an Egyptian 40-something (he says he is still too young to talk about his age) in a dark leather jacket and darker turtleneck underneath.

He is drawing a series of shapes on the board: a top row of four circles, labeled #1; a row of four dashes underneath, #2; and four triangles under that, #3.

Today the lesson will be on rests, or silent beats. His young students file in with their round-faced young teacher, Caitlin, and they spread out to the tables around the room. On a table in front of each child sits a metal mixing bowl or sauce pan lid, begging to be banged with the spoon or spatula lying next to it.

The kids waste no time, and the air is quickly filled with noise. They clearly are having fun.

Abdelwahab reins them in after a minute and soon has their attention. He points to the top row of shapes on the board and slowly counts to four as he moves his hand from one circle to the next.

Each circle means one single strike of an instrument. The class has done this before – it doesn’t pose much trouble as they bang together on their teacher’s cue.

On to the second row of shapes on the board – the four dashes. Pointing along the row, Abdelwahab turns to his students and waves his hand to motion a count of “One-two, One-two, One-two, One-two.” It is clear that “One” is something big and “two,” something much less.

He works his way around the room, at each student smiling encouragingly and quietly motioning with the utensils in front of them: strike on one, off on two, strike on one, off on two.

At a table near the front of the room, Abdelwahab works with two girls. One of them, Casey, raises her serving spoon and strikes her metal bowl with a clang that causes Caitlin, standing nearby, to jump backwards in shock. She laughs and the class breaks out in giggles.

“Together,” Abdelwahab announces, having returned to the front of the class. He raises fingers to conduct four introductory beats as he widely mouths the numbers in a loud whisper.

A room-full of little arms, spoons, and spatulas come down with a bang and then are silenced with the upward motion of Abdelwahab’s arm. Not everyone has mastered the “One-two” progression quite yet – a few straggling clashes ring out on the intended off-beats.

“Not yet together,” Abdelwahab says. He raises his hands. “Again,” he says.

The routine is repeated and there is improvement. Together, they are getting better.

Despite the noticeable progress of Abdelwahab’s students over just a few weeks, some at the school are skeptical of the true value of his lessons.

Shaaroni, a student teacher at Horace Mann whose fourth-grade class is learning from Abdelwahab, appreciates what he is trying to do, but she questions the utility, for the kids themselves, of some of his methods.

She explains, one morning while watching over her students’ lesson, that some of Abdelwahab’s activities – those involving visual patterns, those with percussion – can be of value for her deaf students. She knows very well that they feel the vibrations of striking a metal mixing bowl with a wooden spoon. The act holds some sensory significance for them.

What Shaaroni questions is the more specialized training that is soon to come. Thinking of the stacks of violins in their cases waiting to be played at the front of the room, she wonders what playing these instruments – instruments so firmly based on tone, so aural -- will mean to the deaf students.

But as Julie, a young teacher of second-graders, puts it after her students’ class with Abdelwahab, for those who can hear at all, making noise, and eventually music, should bring the same satisfaction as for any child. And for the deaf students, even if the music doesn’t mean much to them in the end, and all they’re doing is pulling on some strings with their fingers, the class is still 40 minutes for them to play with something new.

As Caitlin’s kindergarteners and first-graders continue their lesson, Abdelwahab begins to conduct a new rhythm for his students to try.

“One-rest-rest, One-rest-rest,” he says, waving his hands in a triangle through the air. His movement matches a row of triangles on the board behind him representing the rhythm of three.

His students come up to the front one-at-a-time with their bowls and spoons -- each bangs a beat and then rests for two, as their conductor has shown them.

Soon, Abdelwahab is ready for a few students to try the new rhythm together.

He calls four up to the front and conducts as before.

“All together – you’re a team now, a musical team,” Caitlin says and signs to the group in encouragement.

A minute later there is applause from the class. Abdelwahab smiles and shouts excitedly: “orchestra, orchestra!” he announces. His students are on their way.

Later that same morning, a group of fifth-graders is standing at the front of the room. Two boys cradle violins in their arms like banjos, two girls stand nearby with their fingers poised over the keyboard of an upright piano.

From this quartet, heavy chords begin to reverberate around the room. The notes aren’t perfect, nor are they pleasing to the ear. But they are being produced, and this speaks volumes about what these students, and their teacher, have accomplished.

Abdelwahab won’t be at Horace Mann long enough to know whether his work there has had a lasting effect on his students. He likely won’t know if they learned to appreciate music or if their world and the “hearing world” came any closer together from his efforts. What he should know, and with some certainty, is that he helped to create music where there wasn’t music before.

Standing in the room after his fifth grade class, Abdelwahab’s mood reflects his students’ successes that morning.

“Together,” he says. “They can do anything.”

Jonathan Berk