Creative performers bring songs’ sentiments to a non-hearing audience

By Asa Pittman - Photo by Jonathan Swegle

Styling: Asa Pittman - Photo by Jonathan Swegle

Photography: Asa Pittman - Photo by Jonathan Swegle

April 29, 2006

Thanks to pioneering arts educators in the St. Louis area, music performances aren’t just for those who can hear. Deaf and hearing-impaired children are getting the chance to enjoy songs and learning to experience the emotions they convey.


Soon after her arrival at the Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis six years ago, Virginia Meyer, the school nurse, suspected that students who spoke instead of signing and used hearing devices could also comprehend music. She enlisted a music expert to help her test the theory: a clarinetist and 40-year veteran of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, her husband James Meyer.


“Our first couple of years, we did a lot of little projects involving musical games and instruments,” said James Meyer of his CID involvement. He quickly learned that low-register instruments, like the tuba and baritone saxophone, best suited the students’ sensitive hearing, while high-pitched instruments, like the E-flat clarinet, irritated it. “I discovered that [the E-flat clarinet] hurt their ears,” said Meyer. “It almost chased them out of the room.”


By 2005, after five years of training, the deaf children could identify instruments and distinguish notes so well that Meyer composed a song especially for them, “Tuffy the Silly Tuba.” “It’s really a 22-minute opera,” he said. Like an opera, he said, “Tuffy” features themes and characters that evolve as the story unfolds. In the beginning of the tale, Tuffy is mischievous. “Tuffy gets into trouble because he misbehaves in rehearsal,” said Meyer. “The conductor throws him out.” By the conclusion of the play, however, Tuffy’s orchestra friends – Clarence the cello, Freddy the French horn, Violet the violin and Clarissa the clarinet – teach him to be responsible
and cooperative.


The goal of “Tuffy” is not only to entertain deaf children and teach them social skills, but also to help them understand music, said Meyer. “[The CID students] didn’t have the vocabulary of sound and association that you or I do,” he said. Although experience teaches hearing audiences to link sounds with images and emotions, he said, those who are born deaf or become deaf at an early age lack such contextual references. “Imagine watching a movie without a soundtrack,” said Meyer. “Think about all the subtext you would miss.”


To include deaf listeners, Meyer incorporated visual cues into “Tuffy.” “If I looked mean, it helped them understand that I was trying to get a mean sound,” he said.


“I think that any auditory training you do with a child with a hearing device is beneficial,” said Maggie Matusofsky, a pediatric audiologist at CID. She said each of the institute’s approximately 75 hearing-impaired students wears a hearing device: a cochlear implant, a digital hearing aid or both.


Neither technology, however, restores hearing loss or enables its user to hear normally, Matusofsky explained. Hearing aids, worn externally over the ear, amplify sound and convert sound waves into electrical signals. Cochlear implants are surgically implanted behind the ear and threaded into the cochlea, a snail shell-shaped organ of the inner ear. “[The implant] bypasses the damaged part of the cochlea, and it sends the sound directly to the hearing nerve. … It’s sending the sound electrically, so it’s very different from what you or I hear,” she said. “It requires a lot of rehabilitation [for the deaf] to make sense of sound and learn how to use it.”


Conveying the sentiments of songs through visual cues is Donna Sherrod’s specialty. She wasn’t deaf and didn’t have any friends or family with hearing loss when she taught herself sign language. Divine inspiration, she said, compelled her to pull Lottie L. Riekehof’s “The Joy of Signing: The Illustrated Guide for Mastering Sign Language and the Manual Alphabet” from the shelves of a Christian bookstore 10 years ago.


With the book, she learned to sign her first song, a gospel tune by Juanita Bynum. “If I couldn’t find a word in the book, I’d look up its synonym in the dictionary then look for the synonym’s sign language equivalent in the book,” Sherrod said. By 1998 she had learned to communicate in her new language so well that she founded a mime and sign language performance group for youth called Signs and Wonders. “I do it as ministry,” she said of the group.


Elementary school students from East St. Louis District 189, where Sherrod is a substitute teacher, comprise the majority of Signs and Wonders’ performers. Sherrod meets with as many as 35 normal-hearing kindergarten through fifth-graders at East St. Louis’ John DeShields Community Center every Friday for practice. During the hour-long rehearsals, Sherrod teaches the children to sign a song and execute an accompanying dance or mime routine.


Although the musical genres of the Signs and Wonders performances vary, said Sherrod, the young artists always use their facial expressions and body movements to convey each composition’s emotional nuances. The goal, she said, is to help deaf audience members feel the sentiments of the song. “Once they’re good enough [at their routine],” Sherrod said, “I take them over to Christina at the Village Theatre.”


Actress and singer Christina Fisher and her husband, legendary jazz guitarist Eddie Fisher, created the Village Theatre in 1996 to fulfill a need in their Centreville, Ill., community. “We just didn’t want another tavern to move into the neighborhood,” said Fischer. “Since my husband and I were in the arts, we thought to open up some kind of entertainment establishment.


“We just sort of found each other,” said Fischer of her initial meeting with Sherrod eight years ago. “She needed a space, and we gave her space to do her craft.” Today, Sherrod no longer holds sign language practices at Village Theatre, but the Signs and Wonders kids, said Fischer, regularly perform on “Star Showcase,” the cable access show taped at the theater twice a month. “[Signs and Wonders performances] might be done once a month, I would say, at least eight or nine times a year,” she said.


Signs and Wonders’ contribution to the amateur variety show, said Fischer, expands its audience. “We know that deaf children do watch,” she said.


For Sherrod, fusing sign language with music is an opportunity to unite the cultures of the hearing and non-hearing worlds. “I love it,” she said. “I believe it’s my purpose.”

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