Where children learn to sing again

Young teacher nurtures a fledgling choir and shows rural students that music belongs to them too.

In a small rural school in Central China, a group of children stood in a dim meeting room, raising their hands in unfamiliar signs — do, re, mi, fa, sol.

Their teacher, Wu Yuzheng, had never practiced these gestures herself until Edit Lanczky, a music teacher from the Liszt Institute–Hungarian Cultural Center (Beijing), arrived in Macheng city, Hubei province, earlier this year and introduced an idea rarely heard of in local classrooms: the Kodaly Method.

It was hard to imagine that the method, developed by Hungarian music educator Zoltan Kodaly in the last century, could take root in a school where most children had never sung a complete song.

Wu, now 28 and in her fifth year of teaching, began her career at Macheng No 2 Experimental Primary School in Hubei after graduating, where she was teaching music by the textbook.

However, when she lost her role as choir director last year she hoped a new environment might give her a fresh start, so she applied for a one-year placement to teach at Huangshi Primary School — about 70 kilometers away from the Macheng campus — on one condition: she would teach music only, because generally, teachers who volunteer in rural areas are also required to teach Chinese and math.