A Phone Interview Conducted by Elizabeth Harden
http://www.waldorfresources.org
January 31, 2001

Mary Thienes-Schunemann, a former Waldorf Kindergarten teacher, Music Educator and Teacher Trainer, is now a stay-at-home mom who founded naturally you can sing™ productions "for people who want to integrate the mind, body and soul through singing, through freeing their voice." Mary's first project for her production company is to produce a series of seven songbooks with accompanying CD's. The purpose of the series, entitled Singing With Children, is to encourage and enable parents and care-givers to sing, sing, sing to the little ones in their lives.

Mary emphasizes that the accompanying CD's are for parents and teachers to use to learn and memorize the songs so they can in turn sing them to their children. The songs are all sung either a cappella or are very gently accompanied by a kinder lyre, drum, or kalimba -- thus the spotlight is focused on the melody and the words - not the music.

The first book in the series, The Wonder of Lullabies, contains 18 songs representing an eclectic selection of lullabies from all over the world. The second book, Sing a Song of Seasons, contains a full 48 songs! All four seasons are all well represented and there is a nice balance of slower melodic songs and lilting, playful tunes. Books three, four, and five are already in the works: The Singing Baby - songs and body games for infants and toddlers is due in this Spring. The Christmas Star - songs for the Advent and Christmas season will be available this September. This is the Way We Wash a Day - work and activity songs to sing with young children is slated Spring 2002.

WR: Your literature states that your CD's are specifically for adults to listen to and then to sing the songs to their children. What effect would it have if someone bought the CD and played it for their children?

MTS: I can't control whether that would happen or not. I would say that comparing it to the other CD's and tapes that I've heard out there for children -- music that you can plug into their chairs, that you can plug into their mattresses, that they are playing in day care centers -- there's a lot of sentimental schmaltzy music that's backed up with synthesizers. I'm sure some people are going to choose to play my CD's for their children. But my purpose and wish for this entire series is to help adults gain confidence in their singing voices so that they can sing with their children. That's really my goal, my wish and my mission -- to get people singing.

WR: I've been told my entire life that I have a terrible voice. I do sing to my children and I love singing to them, but I feel very self-conscious about it. As my children get older I find myself not singing as much as I used to and feeling self-conscious about it when I do. I feel that they should have good music; they should hear someone who knows how to hit the right note or even how to hit different notes.

MTS: Well, I think that that's true -- but in addition to hearing you sing. One of the things I talked about in an earlier songbook was that the child, especially from birth until about eight, experiences what you are feeling and thinking when you sing. They're not thinking, "Oh, she's singing in tune or she's feeling self-conscious." They're getting the love from you when you sing. And that's what they'll remember.

Part of the reason why I'm starting the series with young children, and more specifically for the parents of these young children, is in the hope that they'll build their confidence up when their children are little so that by the time the children are older the parent will feel more comfortable singing. I've heard some really nice stories from people about how children start to develop compassion for their parents. A friend of mine, her daughter said to her, "No Mommy, that's not how the song goes" and my friend immediately felt mad. But instead of showing this she said "Oh, well, can you remind me how it goes?" So her daughter sang it for her and the mother said, "Well you can teach it to me and we'll sing it together." The more that that kind of invitation can happen -- to explore the singing and the words and the music together -- the better.

I think it's also important that children do hear quality singing and that they go to live concerts of people who use their voices well so they know what's possible. And hopefully they'll have someone in their life who can educate them about different kinds of singing and that they'll get to hear all genres from opera to classical singing and jazz. There are so many different ways that you can sing. With this exposure children can learn to develop discernment and discrimination about how one can use their voice.

When I finish these seven books for the early years, I'd like to go on to the older children. Maybe even grow it into some kind of program for children when they're in Middle and High School with world music and how to listen for specific things in the music.

I know that it all happens at home first. I know many parents have to continually try to overcome the shyness and the anxiety and the self-consciousness about how they sound. We just have to keep pushing that feeling away!

So many people, and teenagers especially, are listening to CD's in which mistakes are edited and everything sounds perfect. The comparisons that we're all making are actually mostly untrue because very few people actually sound like they do on their recordings. They add a lot of re-verb and they add a lot of this and a lot of that so that by the time you hear it, it's not the voice that the person actually put out into the microphone.

One of my teachers said, "This a very good idea, it's a very quality project and product that you're producing, but you have to continue to tell people that playing these CD's in a CD player to their children is no substitute for actually using their voice with the children." These are two very, very different things.

WR: I would agree that it's not a substitute and I understand the implications of having live music versus recorded music and the whole life and depth in live music. But, well, we travel a lot and so we listen to lots of music in the car. Also, my husband and I come from very different generations. We have enjoyed learning and exploring different music. We've enjoyed sharing the different generational and different cultural experiences that we've had through music. And I feel that our children have benefited from the different flavors of music that they've been exposed to.

MTS: Oh, yes, there are many kinds of music that people will be exposed to only through recordings and I'm not saying not to do that. Using them educationally and for pleasure is a fine thing to do. I have a huge tape and CD collection at home because I love world music. So I listen to music quite a bit. But I sing everyday as well.

WR: You're saying there's a quality in singing that cannot be replaced by playing recorded music to your children?

MTS: Yes. If you go into the life between death and rebirth and look at this picture of how we build our intention for our next lifetime: as we spend time, so to say, in the different signs of the zodiac, there are beings that live and abide there that sound lives in and emanates from. Different parts of our body are built up in these cosmic regions. As we come down through the spheres of the planets the same thing happens, and our astral body and our etheric body are built up. You can look at it then, that when we're here on the earth every time we sing we're really calling on these forces that our physical, etheric, and astral bodies, down to our bone, are built up from. We're being blessed; we're being regenerated and rejuvenated and calling on those forces that blessed us and built us up before we came down to the earth. There's a touching in with this pre-birth work that we did and these pre-birth intentions. Singing is one of the most direct ways to do that. Through singing, through creating music, and through the work with the arts - those are the doorways.

That can be put more simply too because when I talk with people about this picture, there's this light in their eyes that goes off. Whether people believe in reincarnation or not or whether they believe in life between death and rebirth or not, there's a tremendously deep feeling and love for music that most people on the planet have. Even though it might be different streams, different sounds of music that they're connected to, music has the potential to touch one of the deepest places in the human being. And if we stop singing, we lose contact and connection with that deep place. We cannot connect with that place by listening to CD's.

WR: I have often said that I would trade any two of my other talents if I could sing. Hearing someone with a fabulous voice does touch something inside of me; I really envy people with beautiful voices.

MTS: The school of singing that I'm trained in is the Werbeck schooling (or Uncovering The Voice). A primary tenet of it is that everyone has a voice and that everyone can sing; it's simply a matter of removing the hindrances that are in the way so that your voice can be freed. The woman who started the school, Valborg Werbeck, was an opera singer in Sweden. She lost her voice through her opera singing because it's a pretty strenuous life. After she lost her voice she retrained herself how to sing again in a more natural way. She remembered how she used her voice as a child: she had very free breathing and she used her nose and her nasal passages and her head space. She retrained herself how to sing and then went back into the public life and sang publicly again.

Around 1912, she met Rudolf Steiner and they worked together and collaborated for a period of about 12 years. Then she continued on with her own work and research after he died. She worked 30 years performing and 30 years after that with people who were ill. What she said was that she could hear in a person's voice, in how they spoke and when they sang for her, what ailed them -- physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Then she would prescribe specific exercises for them to do to help them come into balance again. People said she was "Clair-audient".

I've met some people who worked with Frau Werbeck who feel that she saved their life. One of them was a man who went to her because he had a heart problem. She wouldn't see him and she wouldn't see him, and finally, finally she agreed to see him one day. She had him sing for her and she listened to him do the sound "o" in several different ways. Then she said, "What do you think is the matter with you?" And he said "Oh, I think there's something terribly wrong with my heart. I'm getting all these palpitations." She had him sing a bit more and then she said, "Your heart is absolutely fine. But there's something else out of balance and I could help you with that if you would like to." The next day he went to the village doctor (this is in Southern Germany) and the village doctor said, "Why are you here?" and the man said, "Oh I have problems with my heart!" And the doctor asked, "Well have you seen Frau Werbach?" The man said, "Yes" and the doctor said, "Well what did she say?" And the man said, "Well she had me sing 'o' a lot and she said my heart was fine." And the village doctor looked at him and said, "Well, your heart's fine then!" She was quite an extraordinary woman.

Jorgen Schriefor, the man who she handed her school over to, this "Uncovering the Voice" schooling, lives in Germany. He came to America for 15 years, to California, and worked with some of us. There are some of us here in America who are trained in this work and teach here. I've had some tremendous things happen with people's voices through doing very simple, and often very strange, combinations of all sorts of vowels and consonants.

WR: It's a form of therapy?

MTS: There are different streams of it. There's a therapeutic stream; there's a pedagogical stream for working with the children; there's an artistic stream for people to perform; and there's what I would call a hygienic stream. And for me, I think that the most important part of it is what it has to give for the therapy and the hygiene.

WR: What do you mean by "hygienic?"

MTS: By hygienic I mean exercises one can do for what I would call a daily tune up... just like we brush our teeth each day and wash our face each day, the hygienic exercises serve to create balance, calmed breathing, and improve general sense of well being by strengthening the etheric forces.

I saw it work with the children. They would actually oftentimes rather do the exercises than sing songs. It was amazing to me to see how concentrated 3rd through 8th graders could be to do some of these exercises during music class. I would say that fundamentally the main challenge that everyone of us, including myself, has to work on in terms of our voice is our breath.

WR: Controlling the breath?

MTS: Not controlling the breath ... I would say allowing the breath. Because even saying the word control -- your body does a certain thing. I tightens up and reacts: "Gosh I've got to control my breath!" But if you talk about "allowing the breathing" it gives a different image. And the body feels differently when it hears that word.

WR: Sure, it does! So, what does that mean, allowing the breath?

MTS: It means opening the body so the breath can stream in. I have an exercise where I talk about opening your mouth and jaw; relaxing your jaw and relaxing your knees and relaxing the diaphragm and thinking about air being heavy; just letting the air drop into your body rather than having to take or grab a breath in. If you think of allowing the breath and opening the arms it's a very different gesture.

The exercises have a lot of pictures with them. You bring images of how the air is all around you, you bring it into your pores, that your 
pores actually breathe -- that the bottoms of your feet are actually breathing. You feel like you're a Russian babushka in the forest with a huge round belly -- just big and round. If you look at pictures of the very great opera singers they're huge and round. I think that they're striving physically to grow this breath which actually we have to grow etherically. It's an energetic process; it's a perceptual awareness that happens. You actually grow your etheric outside your body just like you do when you have a meditative practice. One way to do it is to think about the body getting bigger physically but another is: what happens if I imagine an inch or two outside my body? What's happening with the air? Can I grow my perception outside my body so that behind the back of my neck, behind my ribs, in front of my belly I feel the air all around me? It's a very different experience than saying "grab a breath, take a breath, control your breath." It's really different.

One of the things that Frau Werbach talks about in her book [Uncovering the Voice - currently out of print] is learning to make the diaphragm flexible and movable. We're not working at making it hard as a rock. I think that many of us have this feeling in our body that we know what it feels like to feel tense and hard and like a rock. This is a very Aramanic feeling that many of us feel today. Working with our breath in this way to expand the Etheric out gets rid of this rock feeling in the diaphragm and helps it become more flexible and movable. One of the things that Frau Werbeck said is, "When we understand the mystery of breathing we will understand the mystery of healing."

I think that in the Waldorf movement, in general, that this principle is not worked with as much as it could be. We talk about the breathing of the day and the breathing of the lessons and the breathing of the week but we don't take it into our own bodies. Our own physical breathing and our breathing as teachers and as parents. I think that's an important thing to remember every day.

WR: Our own physical breathing?

MTS: Yes, and relaxing and just letting it be. There are some eastern techniques that one can bring into an evolutionary process to meet what 
we need today -- and I think that they can be really helpful. There's a Buddhist monk that I listen to -- Thich Nhat Hanh. He's quite well known in this country now.

He talks about becoming mindful of your breathing; to spend just a few minutes every day paying attention to your breathing. Not doing yogic in and out of the right and left nostril breathing because that's just way too much concentrating -- but to just be mindful: am I relaxed? what's happening with my shoulders? are my knees loose? is my jaw loose? Simple things like that yet it goes so deep.

When we as a parent, we as a care-giver, we as a teacher pay attention to our own breath, we'll start to pay more attention to the breath of the children in our lives. And it will have a more health-giving effect on them as well because they'll breathe more freely. Because we all know that life is on fast forward and we're just jammin' full tilt ahead. It's just really a fast, stressful time to be living in and it's having an effect on children. I think that we as adults have a huge responsibility to remember every day to slow down and take time for ourselves and take time for our children. And their breathing will be healthy. The thing is that we won't see how these habits will affect children until they become adults.

That's another reason why I'm focusing these first seven songbooks so intensively on adults singing with young children: their organs are growing, they're growing their etheric bodies and their health system for their bodies for life. If I can get more parents and teachers to pay attention to how they sing and breathe with these children, the better. The better the children will be for it and the better the adults will be for it. We'll all just feel better.

WR: Okay, it's important to sing to our children and you're talking about the breathing, but how important is our attitude when we're singing?

MTS: I would say it's very important. I think that we all know what it's like to hear someone sing a song when they're angry or when they're in a hurry or when they're doing it because they have to. It generally doesn't feel very good. But what's happening in our feeling and in our thinking rides out on the tone that comes out of our mouth. So yes, the more present we can be when we're singing to the children the better because they of course, on an unconscious level, sense what's happening to us when we're singing.

And yet if we don't feel in the right mood to sing... I have a teacher who said you have to sing no matter how you feel. I've tried to make myself do it and the truth is that if you make yourself sing when you don't feel like it... when you're feeling depressed or angry or sad or whatever -- you'll feel better within a few minutes. I think that if you're doing it as a kind of therapy for yourself when you're with the children that that is okay. It's acceptable because it gives you an outlet to express yourself and the children can feel you diffusing. I think that that's okay for them. I think it's much better than to just hold it in - not sing, not speak, not do anything. There's the feeling of a volcano about ready to explode.

So yes, intention, mood is important. Many moods are important, and that's why in the Wonder of Lullabies, Sing a Song of Seasons, and The Singing Baby that's going to be coming out in April, a variety of moods are represented.

WR: On the WE Homeschool discussion list some parents have brought up the fact that they have experimented with discipline through singing .. Trying to get a child out of a bad mood or talking about the behavior they'd like to see in their child through singing. It's just freelance singing but they put it in a song....

MTS: (singing) Now it's time to get up now; now it's time to get dressed, dear. (laughing) 

Yes, that is my wish that people will come to a place where they feel comfortable enough singing in the moment so they can say, "Oh, my gosh, Sally is flipping out, we're at the supermarket. I need to finish shopping. What can I do? Oh let's sing a silly song." Yes, that is great! It's very, very great!

That is one of the reasons why in the Waldorf Kindergarten songs are sung at transition times when things are going to change. That also helps with discipline problems. And I think, too, the aspect of bringing humor into the discipline and into the song that one might sing for that is really helpful. Because when children see that you're mad they know they've got you. If you can lighten it up and shift it, it's a good thing.

WR: What is it about a song that makes it easier for children to transition into cleaning? What is it about the song that does that that other things can't do?

MTS: I think that children hear people talk at them all day long. They can zone it out; it's like Muzak for them. But hearing a voice sing around them is an unusual experience for most children. And oftentimes I've had the experience where when I've sung with children, everything stops - whatever activity is going on, it stops and they look. And they wonder what that sound is. It seems to me there's this kind of lifting out the everyday, ordinary "Okay Sally we're gonna' get dressed now and then we're going to go to the store and then we're gonna' do our shopping and come on now and we're gonna....'" There's this pitter-patter that we keep up in our daily interactions with children. Bringing in the songs changes the mood, changes the flavor. It changes the way that they have to listen and something gets lifted in a way that is much harder to lift when you're speaking. 

WR: But they don't become inured to the song? That doesn't become Muzak if you use it too often?

MTS: I don't think so. Muzak plays all the time. It doesn't stop. It plays everywhere. It's two very, very different things. It can't be compared to Muzak being played in the supermarket.

I have a friend who sings to her children all the time. And when one of her daughters was three or three and a half, she had never taken her to the supermarket. She took her to the supermarket with her and there was Muzak playing. The daughter looked around, very confused and said, 
"Mommy, what is that noise I hear?" And my friend looked around and thought, "oh my gosh it's the Muzak playing in the supermarket and to her it sounds like noise." It sounded like white noise. She couldn't place it.

WR: There is a big difference between singing along with a song and singing a song yourself, isn't there?

MTS: Well it depends on whether it's a friend that's singing a song or you're singing with a tape. You know those are two different processes. My series was created so that people would sing along until they know the songs.

A woman called me the other day and she was very concerned. She asked, "Are some of the songs catchy songs? Will I be able to remember them? So many of these Waldorf songs I can't remember because the melody -- I can't follow the melody -- there's not anything catchy or memorable about it." And I said, "Yes some of them are catchy and you will be able to remember them." (laughing)

WR: But that's a great question though!

MTS: Well, it is a great question because a lot of the pentatonic and mood-of the fifth songs that are so highly advocated in the Waldorf world have a floating base to them. They're not easy to remember. So I'm striving with the songs that I'm writing - because I want to write more and more of the songs that I put in these books - that they have some of that [Waldorf] quality in them but they have enough of a home base in them also so that the adults who are learning them can orient themselves and be able to remember them easily.

There are reasons why the pentatonic and the mood-of-the-fifth songs are so important because the child's consciousness is very different than the adult consciousness. They don't follow melody the same way that we do. You can hear in a young child's voice how high they can sing; the different sounds they can make. They can babble every sound that is on the planet for the first two years of their life. So they're really not living in a very dum, dum, dum, dum mode. That's why a lot of the songs for the young child are dreamy. But I was saying to somebody just today that children today don't want only those kinds of songs. They're different children today and they also want songs that have a home base and strong rhythm to them. Songs that are traditional - like Yankee Doodle. It's a very traditional song. It's not a mood-of-the-fifth song, it's not pentatonic. But children love it. There's something living in traditional songs and folk songs that needs to be embraced as well.

WR: Folk music is something that my children love. And I love the history of it. I'm not sure what you're defining as folk music but we have found so many different versions of, say Ol' Dan Tucker. It's referenced in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. And we've found several different versions on various albums. The timing is different and whole verses are different. The history seems so deep? Is that what you mean by folk music?

MTS: Yes. It's songs that were born of the folk of a country. There's a folk spirit that oversees each country. I think that in earlier times people were much more in touch with these folk spirits. And that's where these wonderful songs like "Oh Susanna" come from. Children love those songs. They touch something so deep in them.

I brought my guitar in with the kids and we did "Trail to Mexico" and old cowboy songs and they just ate them up. I think there's something very deep living in these folk songs. The people of that time sang out of their experiences of living on the land, herding the cows, herding the sheep, washing the dishes, doing the things on the land, farming.... People don't sing when they're doing their work anymore.

Another aspect to bring to it, too, is that the children I've worked with love Native American songs. They're part of the heritage of this country too and being exposed to and singing those songs touches something very deep in them as well.

MTS: No. The lullaby book has some pentatonic lullabies in it and some traditional songs and some Celtic ones. The Celtic music tends to be more modal or more pentatonic in it's nature so they lend themselves really well for young children. And Sing a Song of Seasons is a mixture of pentatonic and traditional and folk and some that I wrote -- some of which are pentatonic and some are not. Because my experience with young children is that they don't just want to sing pentatonic songs. They get bored. I think it's really important to not be dogmatic about singing only pentatonic songs with young children.

There's another angle on it. A teacher of mine who lives in England talks about pentatonic scales -- a pentatonic scale means five tones - penta means five - but it could be any five tones. In the music in Bali, for instance, they can use five tones that are not the five tones that we are using in what we're calling the Western pentatonic scale - the scale that all the Waldorf teachers use in early childhood. We say it's D E G A B D E; but there are thousands of scales in the world. I think it's really important that that is touched on. This teacher said if he ever had a child he would not play this Western-tempered scale. He would actually play eastern pentatonic scale -- one that would not be tuned in western tuning. I think it's a very interesting research point that I would love to take up with some other early childhood teachers one day.

WR: Thank you for taking the time to talk with me. Any last words for the readers?

MTS: The world of singing is wide and expansive. I encourage all parents and care-givers to bring singing into their daily lives and touch their hearts and children's hearts through song. The saying
From Zimbabwe is true:

If you can walk, you can dance.
If you can talk, you can sing!
Blessings!


copyright 2001 Elizabeth Harden
Reprinted with permission
originally published by Waldorf Resources, Inc.
http://www.waldorfresources.org