World music is one of the must-do topics in my curriculum. Children should start lisetning to exotic sounds from a young age, it is a great way to nurture their awareness towards cultural differences; instruments we are familiar with may not be popular in other countries. When children listen to a new sound, sometimes they laugh at it because it's too new that they feel a little uncomfortable hearing it. When they laugh, I asked them, "Do you think a boy from Bolivia would laugh when he listens to the sound of a violin? Perhaps he's never seen a violin in his life; just like how you've never seen a charango or zampona before. How would you feel if he laughs at you when you play your instrument?" Immediately, they get the idea - Learning world music is learning to respect differences among cultures.
When we listened to a song from Bolivia - La mariposa (The butterfly), we learnt about two common instruments from South America, the Zampona and the charango.
The Zampona resembles one of my favorite instruments; I love its exotic sound. This is the video I showed in class - It's not taken from a formal performance, but I used it because of the good sound quality. A boy from one of the classes used straws and rubber bands to build a Zampona himself after watching the video! =)
Although the sound of a charango is not very unique (as it looks like and sounds like a guitar), children remember the charango more because of this video I showed them when I introduced it in class:
You may wonder why I turned on the Discovery Channel during music class. In fact, some old charango was made of armidillo shells. My students looked really concerned when I told them about how, a long time ago, people used to kill the animals and make instruments using their skin or shells; they are glad that people are not doing it anymore now.
Here is a video I didn't have a chance to show in class. It gives a little background on, particularly, the Bolivian Charango. A nice charango tune accompanies the video.
