Mr. Mike's Family Notes: Meet The Zember Family

Meet the Zember family: Dena, Jonathan, and their two sons Sela and Evan. The Zembers have been with us since Sela's first babies-not-yet-crawling class with Ms. Libby in the fall of 2022. Evan followed two years later, starting in Ms. Teresa's babies class. They're a Bloomingdale family, and at this point they've made music with nearly every teacher on the roster and own every collection in the 3-year cycle.

When Sela was born, Dena didn't have many songs to pull from. She had Twinkle Twinkle, the ABCs, Old MacDonald, and not much else. The adult songs she knew were too complex, too much range to sing while holding a baby. She was stumped. (btw, Twinkle Twinkle and the ABCs are the same melody. So she really had two songs.)

That stumped feeling is more common than most people realize. We grow up hearing music everywhere, but very few of us arrive at parenthood with a working repertoire of songs we can actually sing to a child.

Four years later, her family has a library of over 200 songs that at any given moment they could sing from start-to-finish. They adapted the goodbye song into a nightly goodnight song and have been singing it to both boys at bedtime for four years now. They use songs for redirection during tough moments. They swap out words to fit whatever is happening, whether that's getting dressed or getting out the door. The songs are not separate from their life. They seamlessly flow through it.

Dena works with young children at the National Gallery of Art, and she sees a connection between what happens in a museum and what happens in our classes. At the Gallery, families aren't there to hear the "right" information about a painting. They're there to discover something together. Caregivers are co-learners alongside their children. The learning goes side to side, Dena says, not top down. She sees the same thing in our room.

A few years ago, Ms. Libby said something that stuck with her: our role as adults is not to teach our kids music, but to show them how much fun we have making music.

Dena's mom has been part of this from the beginning. She comes to class with Sela and Evan regularly, and some of the best time she's spent with both boys has been singing together in class. One day the class sang "Raisins and Almonds," and I mentioned that the song is originally Yiddish. Dena's mom called her husband right away after class and tried playing it over the phone to see if he recognized it. He grew up with a Yiddish-speaking parent. He didn't recall the song, but that wasn't really the point. She felt connection. A song in a collection of children's music carried something from her family's history, and she wanted to share it.

Q. Is there a song from any Music Together collection that has stuck with your family?

So many. We use songs from class constantly at home, for bedtime, for redirection, for play. But one song in particular that we come back to again and again as a family is "City Blues." We loved the way Libby taught that song, holding hands facing each other with kids on laps, rocking, and giving the "boom zagazagazaga" part a lot of energy. It's been great for re-centering and getting energy out. Another song that's come up a lot for us is Don Alfredo. We love the hand motions and Evan at one point loved calling out "rapido" like in the recording and moving his body very quickly with a big expression of joy.

Q. Do you remember a song your parents or grandparents sang to you when you were small?

My mom used to sing us a song in Farsi that was meant to be soothing and comforting. She sang it a lot to us when putting us to bed. She still sings it to both boys at naptime or moments meant to comfort. I remember the melody, but being one generation removed from the language, I don't know the lyrics all that well and it didn't feel like an easy song to access when you are required to be so present as a parent. It was hard to feel like that song was really "mine." Having done Music Together now for four years and being in our second cycle of the song collections, the songs feel so personal and connected to me.

It was a true delight to re-discover "See the Pony Galloping" as part of one of the collections. That was a song I remember from my childhood. Jonathan remembered "Serasponda." It's been a joy to revisit them and to be able to pass them along to our boys through Music Together classes.

Dena's mom still sings a Farsi lullaby to the boys at naptime. A Yiddish song in a children's music collection made her feel connected to a language her husband grew up hearing. Songs from Dena's own childhood showed up again in the collection, and Jonathan found one of his there too. Every one of those 200 songs started the same way yours are starting right now.

Week one is awkward. The songs are unfamiliar. The teacher is up there trying to bring a whole room into music that nobody knows yet, and it can feel like it's not working. It is. By week four those songs will be in your car. By the end of the semester they'll be at your dinner table. That's how a family's musical library gets its foundation. It starts here, you get to build the rest.

There's room here for your family. Come see what a class sounds like.