When Tracy Chen was 7 years old, she began vigorously practicing violin and piano in her home country of Taiwan because of the expectations set
by her parents.
Chen’s parents put her in an early music conservatory program with the hopes of her becoming a professional musician. Chen said the stress and constant practicing was both emotionally and physically abusive.
“You always need to be competitive in the program,” Chen said.
The competitions within the program not only included her school and her city, but included various cities around Taiwan that offered the same
conservatory program.
It meant that the competition level was always high and the standards for achievements were always present.
“[Parents] want you to be the top. Most students practiced 3-4 hours daily,” Chen said when talking about her fellow 7-year-old friends.
However, Chen continued practicing and competing to move forward in her musical career. That is, until she turned 13 and was injured in the second round of one of the competitions.
“I was [still] expected to play the high virtuoso pieces,” Chen said.
She said how prevalent this idea of playing through the pain was in her instructors and parents.
Since then, she left the program, moved to the U.S. and this semester started her own piano classes program at San Jose State called the Young Musicians’ Project.
As a music graduate student, Chen is required to work on a masters project or thesis that relates to her field of interest and focuses on social justice.
Based on her background, Chen said she decided she would create a program to teach music to kids the way she wished her teachers taught her.
The Young Musicians’ Project aims to provide private and group lessons to youth from low-income backgrounds and currently has eight students enrolled. The program offers lessons to children between the ages of 7 and 10.
She was originally inspired by the Orff Approach, a developmental approach used in music education. It combines music, movement, drama and speech into lessons that are similar to a child’s world of play.
Chen was inspired by this new approach and wanted to test it out at SJSU.
“If I can borrow more general music ideas, I can create a better curriculum which [kids] still have fun while they’re learning piano,” Chen said.
Chen said this form of group practice is better for kids, rather than how her own teachers taught her when she was taking lessons back home.
“If I played wrong or did not finish the song, [my teacher] would throw the [sheet music] book over to the door,” Chen said.
She said the teacher would then make students walk outside to get the book and would not allow them back into class.
“That’s why the [Young Musicians’ Project] is here,” Chen said.
Chen said she wanted to step away from the standard way of teaching kids, rather than having them lose interest in learning piano after seeing the “boring black and white keys” of the instrument.
“They don’t need to play fancy songs,” Chen said.
Instead, she said all the children need to do is have fun and practice as a group.
Li-Leng Au, the mother of one child in the project, said she supports the project mainly because she believes that music helps kids think outside the box and helps them academically.
“She’s really loving [the class],” Au said. “This is a really good skill for her.”
The project falls under an umbrella program at SJSU called the Community Music Institute, which aims to empower youth throughout the Bay Area with access to an affordable music education.
The SJSU program is based off El Sistema USA, which was a music-education program founded in Venezuela in 1975 by Venezuelan educator, musician and activist José Antonio Abreu. El Sistema USA later adopted the motto “music for social change.”
Diana Hollinger, music education area coordinator, oversees the Young Musicians’ Project and the rest of the projects that fall under the Community Music Institute.
Hollinger said music education can be used for social justice and can allow kids, specifically impoverished kids, build an interest in going to college. She said that she was the one who pushed Chen to focus on helping low-income kids.
“You bring music education, the very best music education to the poorest kids and it can change their lives,” Hollinger said.
Hollinger said her vision for social justice in music education within the institute is trying to grow in the community to serve underprivileged kids. This includes the Young Musicians’ Project.
Chen similarly said that once you give the kids access to music education, their interest can grow in different music programs, but it needs to start somewhere.
“If you never give them the chance, they wouldn’t even know that they can do it,” Chen said.
However, the program faces financial and enrollment issues.
The program itself is free of charge, but both Hollinger and Chen said when a class is advertised as free, it doesn’t always mean it will bring in more kids.
“The idea was to give free, private lessons to kids who could not afford them,” Hollinger said.
“We had a really hard time institutionalizing that.”
She said the institute was not bringing in enough kids who were necessarily poor, even though that was the aim of the project.
Hollinger explained she wants the Young Musicians’ Project to be incorporated more into an overall umbrella project with other projects in the Music Institute. She is currently pushing for Saturday school at some point.
With all of these different projects Hollinger started, she wants them all to be institutionalized into one project and be run efficiently, even after she is gone.
“I’ve just been starting all of these things because I have a passion for them, but also they can’t survive without me,” Hollinger said. “I won’t be here forever.”
With the Young Musicians’ project still in its early stages, Chen is still learning about what works and what doesn’t, which is what she wants. But she wants to learn how to properly teach kids music and piano in a stress-free environment.
Chen said through the program, the kids are using music as a tool to get introduced to the college world.
“It’s really my honor and privilege to see those kids because of this program,” Chen said. “They’re not here to learn music they are here for a purpose, I want them to go to a good college.”
