Songwriting at the Translators Training Course

In my first two days out of the Director's office, I had the opportunity to be an ethnomusicologist again. This week is the conclusion of the annual Translators Training Course (TTC) at the Ukarumpa Training Centre. TTC is a rigorous 4-module course set that gives Papua New Guineans the basic skills to begin work on Bible translation. In this final week of this year's course, students in the first and second modules spent time hearing presentations about various methods for getting the translated scriptures into use in their villages. On Monday morning, students heard about storytelling, children's games, small-group Bible study methods, audio recording, and music. It was a good panorama, with many practical ideas to try out in the village. To get a sense of what these students are facing, imagine being in a place which has never had the Bible in the primary language that people use every day; not only that, but literacy levels in any language are generally low, and people don't spend much time reading any books at all. And even when the Bible is translated, there are no supplementary materials available in that language—no Sunday School curriculum, no daily devotionals, no Christian radio station. Translating the Bible is one part of the evangelism and discipleship task, but it is not the single thing that makes everything else automatically fall into place. The task is huge.

Following the morning's presentations, the students then selected an afternoon workshop based on one of those topics. Twelve people, representing about nine different languages, chose to attend the workshop on music. I've led a lot of these workshops in PNG, but most often I'm all on my own as the teacher. This time, I was really happy to be working with another music teacher, who will be taking on some of the music work I've done, after I leave this month. 
 

Working on new song composition

In the workshop, we spent some time talking about songwriting in general, sharing tips about using your imagination to put yourself into a story, and then writing a song from the sensory images of the story. We talked about typical structures of songs, and how to create a new song within the expectations of a certain style. For the lyrical content, we focused on a couple of the passages that the students had been working on translating during the first two modules: Genesis 1–3, and Genesis 22. We talked about how to pull the big ideas out of those passages—not to get lost in the small details, but to see what we learn about God through those stories. We listened to a few examples of songs that are based on those passages, and then the students spent the remaining hours of the afternoon composing new songs. None of the students had ever written a song before, so this was a brave undertaking for them.

Explaining and performing the new songs for the whole group

On Tuesday morning, all of the students gathered together again to demonstrate what they had learned during the afternoon workshops. We saw demonstrations of storytelling, Bible memory games, drama, and dramatic audio scripture recordings. I was really proud of the students in the music workshop, all of whom composed at least one song, and all of whom were courageous enough to sing their new songs for the whole group. Pray with me that the students will take this enthusiasm back with them to their home villages this week, and that they will continue finding ways to strengthen the Bible translation process through the skillful and excellent use of music.