ROCCO PRIOLETTI
Staff Writer
Before the concert halls and orchestral accompaniments, Cabinet of Wonder began as hushed and intimate an idea as a Mother Goose nursery rhyme.
“Well, when it first began, I was just one isolated mother of a teenager,” singer-songwriter and activist Natalie Merchant said, detailing her move to Troy, New York, with her daughter. Not knowing anyone in town, she decided to volunteer with Head Start — a federal agency program providing early education for preschool-aged children from economically disadvantaged families — to foster community and purpose.
“I thought I would just work a couple hours a week, go in one day, meet some children,” Merchant said. “It turned into three full days a week for three years.”
Prior to Merchant’s work with Head Start, the program lacked a dedicated arts curriculum. As Head Start’s artist-in-residence, she cultivated just that throughout her three years teaching traditional music and poetry to 400 children.
This experience in the classroom set the project’s eight-year-long development in motion, which resulted in Cabinet of Wonder — Merchant’s 17-song, multimedia educational initiative inspired by the nursery rhymes and traditional poetry of Mother Goose.
At 3 p.m. Sunday, Merchant will join musicians from the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Principal Pops Conductor Stuart Chafetz, to unlock the “Cabinet of Wonder Live!” in the Amphitheater.
Merchant introduced “Cabinet of Wonder Live!” to thousands of children in Chicago during her free public performances in collaboration with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
“We bus them into the symphony hall, and it was mayhem. It was beautiful mayhem,” Merchant said. “The kids knew the words to every single song. They were singing along — they knew the rhymes, they knew the names of all the instruments and the orchestra, and they were all under the age of 6.”
Whether in a vast concert hall or the immediacy of a classroom, the audience reaction to Cabinet of Wonder remained the same.
“I had children running to the edge of the stage, screaming, ‘We love you, Miss Natalie. We love every song you write,’” Merchant said. “… It’s love and trust, which, it’s a phenomenal feeling to have.”
In 2025, Merchant partnered with the National Head Start Association to open the Cabinet of Wonder into Head Start classrooms nationwide. Her teaching guides and enrichment tools are accessible for nearly 750,000 students nationwide and free for everyone online.
For Merchant, the mission behind Cabinet of Wonder is to make kids “fall in love with language and music.” She developed the material over time through classroom experiences, seeing what students resonated most with and solidifying the classroom around it.
“A lot of the teaching guide is drawn from these spontaneous conversations I had with the children about when we would dissect the poems and we would talk about the meanings of the vocabulary words or the idioms,” Merchant said.
Merchant recalled a story from teaching abstract concepts and unfamiliar historical contexts; she wanted children to imagine a world before electricity by introducing a candlestick holder to the classroom.
“I would say, ‘The candlestick makers were really important to a village, you know? You had no lights. You had no electricity. You had no car television.’ And they’d say, ‘Was that what it was like when you were a little girl?’” Merchant laughed.
Through Cabinet of Wonder, students learn history through creative and artistic thinking.
“All that language and all those concepts are found in these rhymes that people are, for a large part, abandoning because they feel like they’re archaic and they won’t appeal to the kids,” Merchant said. “Which is nonsense, because it’s playing with language; children love it. They get the reward at the end of every other line with a rhyme. It builds neural pathways, strengthens their brains.”
Dr. Dana Suskind, founder of the Thirty Million Words initiative, wrote a scientific paper with her staff about the curriculum and applauded the “field-tested” nature of Merchant’s classroom implementations.
For Merchant, an education in the arts began early — and close to home, too. A Jamestown, New York, native, Merchant first visited the Institution sometime around 1970.
She recalled attending the symphony performances weekly with her mother during the summer, remembering the overall atmosphere of the Institution’s art-devoted community. From overhearing pianists rehearsing in the many brown practice shacks to seeing ballet dancers skirting off to rehearsal, Chautauqua Institution’s diverse artistic offerings left an impact.
“It really showed me there was a big world out there and there were a lot of creative people and ways of expressing yourself and this long tradition of the arts,” Merchant said. “Even standing in Bestor Plaza, looking at the fountain … Probably the first sculpture I ever saw in my life was the bas-reliefs on Norton Hall and Bestor Plaza, and they filled me with a desire to see more art and to make art.”
Now, Merchant returns to the Amphitheater, looking out towards the audience. As someone who grew up in Chautauqua County, Merchant held community outreach in utmost importance, especially when access to the arts is limited both economically and geographically.
“I definitely wouldn’t be the artist I am, or the person I am, if Chautauqua hadn’t been part of my life,” Merchant said. “I applaud that and encourage [that] it [is] expanded to more.”
