Do Re Mi

In everyone’s favorite movie, The Sound of Music, Maria teaches an unruly brood of children about music. “When you read you begin with a-b-c,” she sings in her crisp and clear voice, and “when you sing you begin with do-re-mi.”

Swampscott musician and teacher Heather Bissell has given a lot of thought to the best possible way to teach music, and her methods—fun, yet highly effective—remind me of that scene in the field when Maria whips out her guitar and transforms the Von Trapp children into musicians.

In her Banks Road studio on an afternoon last week, she led four young children in a clapping game that resembled that childhood stand-by, duck-duck-goose. Except in this case the participants had to master the difference between quarter notes and half notes and steps on a diatonic scale, tasks left to more advanced students in traditional music programs.

“They love it,” says parent Nicole Nichols, whose two children attend Bissell’s studio. “They don’t realize they’re learning anything and they repeat it all in the car on the way home.”

Bissell’s innovative methods were on display throughout the lesson. The little girl who ran around in the circle game was also able to transform a song she had memorized from a C into a G chord. Those familiar with music lessons know that chords as traditionally taught are memorized by students with considerable ability in reading notes.

“The type of musical education I offer is quite different from most traditional methods,” says Bissell. “The ear is ready before the eye.” Students “learn the relationship between the sounds … and then apply it to the keyboard as an integral way of creating and playing music, not something imposed at a later day, just to memorize.”

“A lot of what students learn in traditional music lessons is often like a typing class.” Bissell emphasizes that her goal for her students is to be musically “literate.”

She adds, “I want them to get to the essence of music.”

“Kids learn an instrument and it’s a dead end.” She sees too many kids who hit their teenage years, want to play in a band, and don’t know how to make music with other people.

Bissell’s methods are the result of years of training and education. A musical prodigy, she grew up in Aroostook County Maine, a location “quite isolated from most of the arts.” This meant travelling 2-3 hours to Orono for lessons, driven by her father, her first music teacher and an oral surgeon who also plays brass instruments.

At fifteen she entered the University of Southern Maine on a music scholarship. Unlike a lot of musicians who choose between performance and teaching, Bissell has always been drawn to both disciplines. She received a Masters in Music from the Ference Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, Hungary in 2010, where she both performed and taught, and another from the Hartt School of Piano Performance and Pedagogy, in Hartford CT in 2005. Her Master’s thesis is a considered reflection of both the Suzuki and Kodaly method of music instruction, both of which emphasize learning early and by ear. She is certified in both methods.

Bissell has been teaching and performing music in one form or another for well over a decade. While small children learn happily with Bissell, she also teaches more advanced piano and voice lessons, “from Chopin to rock.” She also currently teaches at the Winchester Community Music School, and the Portsmouth Music and Arts Center in Portsmouth, NH.

“I look at the Greenwood Ave building and I would love to turn it into a music school,” she says. “Music should be for everyone.”

For more information, visit Bissell’s website at:  http://singplaymove.com/Welcome.html