Just how important is music in our education? Read through the information that follows, and click on some of the underlined links. You just might be surprised at where it may take you as you develop your own "music education".
Did you know that:
Music lessons have been shown to improve a child's performance in school. After eight months of keyboard lessons, preschoolers tested showed a 46% boost in their spatial IQ, which is crucial for higher brainfunctions such as complex mathematics. - Frances Rauscher, Ph.D., Gordon Shaw, Ph.D, University of California, Irvine
Did you know that:
Mozart's Piano Sonata K448 was found to significantly increase spatial scores of college students on IQ tests when the Sonata was listened to for 10 minutes, dubbed the "Mozart Effect." - From Nature. Copyright 1993, Drs. Rauscher and Shaw, University of California, Irvine
Did you know that:
Disadvantaged preschoolers display dramatic improvements in spatial reasoning ability after music training. - Drs. Rauscher and Shaw, University of California, Irvine
Did you know that:
A Gallup Survey on American's attitudes towards music revealed the following:
Did you know that:
Seventy-one percent of respondents in the Gallup Survey think music education should be mandated by states. - 1994 Gallup Survey
Did you know that:
When it comes to arts education, US public schools are not making the honor roll. According to the "Christian Science Monitor", a national report card gives arts education mixed marks.
Did you know that:
The U.S. Department of Labor issued a report in 1991 urging schools to teach for the future workplace. The skills they recommend (working in teams, communication, self-esteem, creative thinking, imagination, and invention) are exactly those learned in school music and arts education programs.
Did you know that:
March 1996 marked the second anniversary of the release of the National Standards for Arts Education, as well as the recognition of the arts, among other academic disciplines, as a core subject.
Did you know that:
Today's music students are more self-motivated, interested in technology, and are better musicians than students two decades ago. - 1995 survey conducted by the Music Teachers National Association
QUOTABLE QUOTES
"Music, to me, was -is-representative of everything I like most in life. It's beautiful and fun, but very rigorous. If you wanted to be good you had to work like crazy. It was a real relationship between effort and reward. My musical life experiences were just as important to me, in terms of forming my development, as my political experiences or my academic life." - President Bill Clinton. From The Gifts of Music. Copyright (c) 1994 by Music Educators National Conference.
"I believe arts education in music, theater, dance and the visual arts is one of the most creative ways we have to find the gold that is buried just beneath the surface. They [children] have an enthusiasm for life, a spark of creativity and vivid imaginations that need training...training that prepares them to become confident young men and women." - U.S. Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley
"...a vibrant arts community is critical to how corporations decide where to locate, when people decide where to work." - Megatrends & Megatrends 2000, John Naisbitt
A Curriculum For Our Future : One approach to meeting social change in the next decade.
Scott Thomson, Agawam Junior High School (The opinions that follow are my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of the AJHS Music Dept, Agawam Junior High School, or the Agawam Public Schools.)
It is possible with today's technology for us to know what is happening around the world at just about any given moment. It is impossible, however, to accurately predict what events might occur 10 minutes from now, let alone what social changes might come about in the next decade. Perhaps the greatest social change facing our children will be brought about by a further development of a "world culture". By the year 2000, more than half of the world's population will be Asian. The majority of the world population will be non-Christian. The world's 20 largest cities will not be found in the United States or Europe. It is this awareness that we must become "world citizens" that should direct us in how to prepare our children for the future.
Looking back in time, it is easy to understand how it has become increasingly difficult to abide by a relevant curriculum. The Middle Ages lasted approximately 1000 years. Most of the educated people were either those in power, or involved with the Church. However, with the ushering in of the Renaissance, the probability of an education of some sort began to occur. With this new enlightenment of humankind, the socio-economic makeup of the Western world began to change. Change would come about rather rapidly, and the era known as the Renaissance would end after only about 250 years. Following this time, change would become faster and faster. Man's world would grow around him in ways never before imagined. As time progressed into the 20th century, changes would no longer encompass entire eras, but instead be measured by decades, or even less.
How do we now, in an era in which new technology seems to become obsolete as soon as it is produced, create a curriculum will continue to meet our to our needs as we enter the next millennium? I have a personal view of what should be included in the "curriculum for the future", and am well aware that my views do not always find themselves in agreement with current reform movements.
A primary concern should be the study of our culture. In 1941, Walter Lippmann decried the lack of importance given to the knowledge of western culture. Now, nearly 60 years later, his concerns still remain relevant. We may be in even greater danger than before. With modern technology, the world is becoming "smaller", yet our lack of cultural awareness may well prevent us from becoming a part of that world. No longer is just a knowledge of western culture a necessity. In the future, we must have a knowledge of global culture in order to survive.
It should be the responsibility of the schools to facilitate this cultural awareness. Not by training for specific careers, but by providing a well-balanced education to all by the time of high school graduation. It should be the responsibility of specific vocational training institutes, colleges, and industry itself to take on the responsibility of training for specific careers, not that of the elementary, middle and high schools. Those schools should involve themselves with providing the basic cultural education needed for the proper nurturing of the human being.
This basic education should revolve around the arts. The arts should by no means be considered as more important, but instead be recognized as the area with provides a commonality, a thread, connecting virtually all subject areas of cultural importance. The arts, whether visual or performing, have reflected the lives of human-kind since the beginning of time. Is it not best to understand the enlightenment of humankind in the Renaissance than through the study of the great art of this period? Or, perhaps gain the understanding of the culture of Southeast Asia through a study of folk music indigenous to the area.
I am not suggesting that we learn only of the past. It through the arts that we can learn of our creativity and inventiveness for our future. In America today we risk the possibility of losing this creativity. By not recognizing the importance of our cultural awareness we may well lose the possibility of nurturing interaction between a person's thoughts and his social/cultural awareness, which is the essence of that creativity. The arts serve as a prime vehicle to make an individual aware of his own creativity, and creativity is what drives us to help better our own lives.
As I stated before, basic education should revolve around that arts, but they should not be the sole area in our quest to become globally aware. As Americans, we must have a strong command of language. It is essential that we be articulate and eloquent in the use of our own language. It is also important that we be aware of both English and American literature. This command of English should logically lead to a command of world languages, a necessity in our ever expanding global awareness.
American public schools have often been at the center of controversy when it comes to the subject of religion. However, much of this controversy has arisen when only one particular type of religious thought has been taught. Today however, it is not possible to escape the reality that much of the conflict in the world can be traced to religious and philosophic controversy and misunderstanding. It is time to reconsider the role of religion in the schools, but this time with an emphasis on the study of world religion and philosophy.
Any plan for survival in the future must carry with it a knowledge of the past, for it is through many of these past experiences that we learn of the reasons behind mankind's successes and failures.. As citizens of the United States, it is essential that we be aware of our own American history, but also of world history as well. The United States is no longer made up exclusively of peoples of European ancestry, but is much more representative of the world as a whole. It is becoming more and more important for us to be aware of these cultures as well. Very closely tied in with the study of history should be the study of world geography. An awareness of both American and world politics and economics is also of importance.
There has always been some sort of stress on the study of mathematics and science, and they certainly must have a place in our curriculum. However, there exists a need, particularly in the study of math, to make this study relevant to our needs. Science should include the study of life, environmental and physical sciences. Perhaps tied in very closely to the sciences, should be a study of the human body and our health.
One aspect of most existing curricula is one that I have not stressed. That is the study of technology. There is no denying the importance of technology. Technology not only includes the obvious, including the use of the modern computer, but also provides a means for our very existence, starting with the food we eat. Technology has always existed in some form or another, whether it be high-tech or low-tech. In fact, in no matter what subject area we deal with, we are dealing with some form of technology.
Modern technology, perhaps best exemplified by the use of the computer, is simply a tool. This tool does not necessarily warrant its own course of study. Where it was at one time important to study computer science, it is no longer an imperative. A simple analogy can be drawn when comparing the use of a computer to the use of an automobile. One no more needs to take a course in auto mechanics to drive a car than one needs to take a computer science course to operate a computer. Yes, it would be helpful at time know how our automobiles operate, but this is not a necessary part of our basic curriculum. For those in need of a more detailed technology education, one should look to the colleges, vocational institutions, or industry for training. (One exception to the teaching of computer skills in school might be through the existence of keyboarding or word processing courses, which might be part of a basic life skills portion of the curriculum).
Upon reflection of this proposed "curriculum for our future", it is evident that it is simply an extension of traditional perennialist philosophy. In order to meet the social needs of our future however, this view needs to extend beyond a knowledge of our own culture, to that of a broader world culture, and the development of "world citizens".
The Power of Music,
by Laura Elliott, The Washingtonian, December 1995
On weekends, my six-year-old daughter and I play duets on a Knabe piano that was once my grandmother's. Simple tunes, mind you--"Mary Had a Little Lamb" and "Blow the Man Down." Neither of us is Mozart, who at my child's age composed his first publishable work. And yet I think these 15-minute sessions are some of the loveliest times of my life.
My little one plays the melody and I the accompaniment, usually a simple um-pah-pah. We stumble, we start over, we laugh at ourselves. But after a few tries comes magic-- we are in sync. Suddenly, the 1-2-3 rhythm waltzes out of our individual fingers atop the keyboard and pushes our souls into one another's arms. I feel completely connected to her again, as I did when I was pregnant and believed that if I sat very, very still, the heartbeat I felt would be hers and not mine.
"Good job, Mama," she says, enjoying her role as lead player.
Once a week, she and I take a piano class together with other children and their parents. During the drive there we chitchat about little nothings that tell me a great deal about her day: the snack her deskmate likes best, the silly-looking bug her science teacher drew. Occasionally, she asks me about the long-ago days when I studied flute.
Once I told her about my sophomore college recital, which I began with "Syrinx," a delicate solo Debussy wrote to represent the Greek myth of how Pan came to play the reed flute. It was the 1970s, and to be arty, I played the piece from the back of the hall to make it sound distant and mysterious. I stood in a practice room with the door cracked open.
"You mean you were in a closet?" my daughter asked.
"Well, yes," I answered. "That way, if I messed up I could just pretend I was warming up and start over."
She laughed.
Thirty minutes later, I saw in her the same desire to hide as she readied herself to perform "The French-Fry Bandit" for her class. She blushed and her hands trembled when her teacher called her name, but then my quiet little girl pounded out the walking bass line of "The Bandit" with bravura. As she finished, she threw me a dimpled, look-what-I-can-do smile that absolutely took my breath away.
That's the power of music: Through the instrument, even the shiest, most reticent person can sing out and be seen in all her radiance.
Watching my daughter also reminded me of all I had learned about myself through my own music-making. That the moments in which I have felt the most capable, the prettiest have not been at the computer or at any dress-up event, but the moments I have polished a difficult passage and made it shine musically.
To this day, I turn to music in times of stress, when I feel my own self lost in a hurricane of story interviews and carpool lines, when I need uplifting. Music remains both my rock and my lark's wings to heaven.
MUSIC ON THE MIND
It is said that Albert Einstein was a mediocre student until he began playing the violin. "Before that, he had a hard time expressing what he knew," says Hazel Cheilek, orchestra director at Fairfax County's Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a magnet school where more than a third of the students also play or sing in musical ensembles. "Einstein said he got some of his greatest inspirations while playing violin. It liberated his brain so that he could imagine."
In the early 1700s, England's King George I also felt he would make better decisions if he listened to good music. Reportedly, Handel responded by composing his Water Music suites to be played while the king floated the Thames on his royal barge. Even Plato in ancient Greece believed studying music created a sense of order and harmony necessary for intelligent thought.
Can music really make us think better? Recent scientific studies say yes.
In 1993, researchers at the University of California at Irvine discovered the so-called Mozart Effect--that college students who listened to ten minutes of Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D major K448 before taking an IQ test scored nine points higher than when they had sat in silence or listened to relaxation tapes. Other studies have indicated that people retain information better if they hear classical or baroque music while studying.
The most profound effects take place in young children, while their brains literally are growing. This year, the same researchers at Irvine's Center for Neurobiology of Learning and Memory found that preschoolers who had received eight months of music lessons scored 80 percen higher on object-assembly tasks than did other youngsters who received no musical training. That means the music students had elevated spatial temporal reasoning--the ability to think abstractly and to visualize physical forms and their possible variations, the higher-level cognition critical to mathematics and engineering.
Also this spring, German scientists discovered that in musicians who have perfect pitch--the ability to recognize notes by ear--and who typically began studying music before the age of seven, the planum temporale--the region on the brain's left side that processes sound signals, particularly language--is three times the average size.
How does music affect the brain? Music is an ordered and predictable sequence of sounds. In decoding those symbols and patterns, the brain sets up neural highways, or synapses, to receive and analyze data. These electrical and chemical pathways then can be used for processing other symbol-oriented information, such as language and mathematics. Like a muscle, the brain becomes more nimble the more it is stretched. The mental workouts required by music seem to make the brain run stronger and quicker.
The final proof may be in SAT scores. According to the Music Educators National Conference, students who take music-appreciation courses score an average of 51 points higher on the verbal section and 39 points higher on the math than students who take no such courses. Adds Abraham Groveman, a 12-year-old-violinist: "Music gives you a lot of discipline and concentration. You have to learn how to memorize long pieces. And you know what the benefits are to hard work, so it helps you try harder in everything."
Even adults feel the intellectual benefit of studying music. Secretary of the Army Togo West Jr. played clarinet and saxophone as a teenager. Two years ago, at the prompting of his daughters, he began studying piano at DC's Levine School of Music.
"Let's say I am now older than 50, and that's too early in life to stop growing," he says. "Music is the way by which I continue learning. It's like what they taught us when we were young adults: Get your paycheck but put away a little bit to accumulate for yourself. The time I put away for myself is my music. It is the one thing that brings beauty and harmony to my life. Also, I have so far to go in my technical ability that I feel a real sense of progress, and that's very gratifying."
CHILD'S PLAY
Several times a week, different groupings of parents and children gather at Vienna's Gordon Keller Music store for a Yamaha keyboard class. Like the famous Suzuki method designed in the 1940s by a Japanese violinist and educator, the Yamaha approach largely depends on parental involvement and teaching music as if it were a language.
"Children listen to adults speak and then imitate them. They learn even the most difficult languages perfectly without any accent. If children study music early enough and in the same fashion, they will absorb it just as easily," says Hava Rogot, director of The Music School--Suzuki in Bethesda.
Some music schools offer courses for babies as young as six months, but studying an instrument generally begins no earlier than age three, except at Suzuki schools. "Young children are so spontaneous," says Yamaha teacher Elise Gabriel. "They don't realize that they're learning during the fun. At this age, they're willing to try anything without feeling self-conscious. They leave the class feeling really good about themselves."
Today, a small group of five-, six- and seven-year-olds collects in Gabriel's studio with a parent apiece. Together for two years, they are familiar with and supportive of one another. Gabriel brings them to order by singing and playing a waltz, "Class, ta-dum: Class, ta-dum: Are you here?" One by one each child plays and sings: "Yes, Miss Elsie, we are here." Next, they copy chords she strikes, pushing their little fingers to stretch wider and wider. Then parents accompany them in duets assigned the previous week.
"Come to my piano," Gabriel sings, and the children arrange themselves into a semicircle around the back of the upright so they cannot see her hands. Gabriel hits a key and asks, "What's this note?"
"Do!" shouts a typically silent girl.
"Sol" is next, as Gabriel moves up a fifth on the keyboard to G. Up and down the octaves she lands like a pouncing cat, striking notes for the children to identify by ear. "This is easy," says one.
"Yeah, easy-peasy," echo a few more with big grins. Most of the parents look completely lost.
The children correctly pinpoint most notes, but more important for their self-esteem, they risk mistakes without a flicker of fear. "No," says Gabriel reassuringly when they miss. "Try again." As the guesses get wilder, she makes a funny face, sending the children into a wave of giggles.
She urges them to parrot snatches of melodies she sings in solfeggio--a system dating to the Middle Ages that uses do-re-mi syllables to represent the tones of a melody. Among them is "La ci darem la mano," a love song from Mozart's Don Giovanni, a tune so pretty and familiar to 19th-century audiences that Liszt and Chopin composed their own variations to it. Gabriel doesn't name the piece, but one first-grader recognizes it from her parents' recordings. The class is riddled with such cultural gifts tucked unobtrusively into the curriculum--Haydn's Surprise Symphony, part of Saint-Saens Carnival of the Animals, as well as children's nursery classics such as "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," which, by the way, Mozart wrote.
Gabriel concludes the class with "The Piglet's Gavotte," a stately little minuet in spite of its title. She arranges parents and children in two long lines, facing one another. "We must move very elegantly in this one," she says, demonstrating a poised and slow turn. "Do you know why?" Rapt, even after a day of school and now piano instruction, the children shake their heads. "In those days, during Mozart's and George Washington's time, the ladies wore very wide, stiff skirts and the men big, funny wigs, so they couldn't move quickly or get too close to one another."
"See the piglets pirouette, how they love to dance the minuet," Gabriel sings and plays. Despite the silly lyrics, the children grasp the sophistication of the classical tune and hold themselves as royally as Marie Antoinette might have to the same melody. At the concluding bow, one little girl hugs her mother and says, "Let's show Daddy after dinner. OK?"
"That'll be fun," replies the mom.
SOOTHING THE SAVAGE
The most important task of middle childhood, wrote development expert Erik Erikson, is to find a skill in which a child can excel, thereby establishing healthy self-esteem. For many, music is that gift, an especially important one as they move into turbulent adolescence. It provides them a way to express themselves and a ready-made social group.
"In normal life you can't let is all hang out, but in music, being emotive is considered a good thing," says Jennifer Montone of Burke, a competition-winning French hornist studying at Juilliard who will perform this month in one of the National Symphony Orchestra's concerts for young people. "When I play something beautiful, I absorb the character of that piece. It helps me forget whatever might be bothering me."
Music also assured that Montone had friends as soon as she entered Robinson Secondary School. "It's huge, with 5,000 students. It would have been very overwhelming had I not immediately joined the marching band and met people there.
"There's a lot to be said for being focused and busy as a teenager," Montone adds. "I had an emotional outlet and goals involving good music. I just didn't have time or the desire to get into any kind of trouble."
At five o'clock Thursday evenings, the halls of the Levine School of Music echo with the sounds of flutes, violins, voices, and pianos. The school teaches 3,500 students of all ages, and the quality of the botched scales to gorgeous Brahms sonatas. Outside the first-floor performance hall, two dozen children, ranging in age from ten to fourteen and in size from four to six feet, are awaiting casting assignments.
The production? Mozart's "The Magic Flute." Ten-year- olds learning opera? "Kids will surprise you," says dean Jean Kellogg; "they can learn anything," including the pyrotechnical Queen of the Night solo, which requires the singer to hit high F repeatedly. "The best part, though, is their support and mentoring of one another. Kids this age can be terrible to each other, very competitive. Here they must collaborate. The better singers take a lot of pride in the progress of the less gifted."
During this first rehearsal, the children will sing through the score for the first time. Most have already listened to a recording and know the story line well, but the group's director, Candace Reeder, goes over the plot, the characters, the historical context of the opera--the American and French revolutions both occurred during Mozart's lifetime--and the personality of the composer. She reads part of a letter Mozart sent his wife: "Hold your hands up in the air--2,999 1/2 little kisses are flying from me to you."
"Does this sound romantic?" she asks, fanning herself and sighing. The children titter and roll their eyes. She silences them by singing a high C.
Her control of the children waffles from just barely to not at all until they themselves sing. As soon as Kellogg plays the introduction on the piano, they are serious and attentive, their posture long and correct. Even in the mishmash of mistakes and overshot high notes that comes with sightreading such complex melodies, the promise of glory can be heard. "The Magic Flute" was Mozart's final opera, premiered as he lay dying at the age of 35. The passages are riddled with whirlwind 32nd-note flourishes, overlapping entrances of different voices, and canyon-wide interval jumps during exposed melody lines.
As the children wade further into the score, many become lost. Yet, they do not give up. Those still on track lean over and point out the place to others. Little jaws set in determined persistence. They cock their heads toward the better among them, following their voices, and even hold up their thumbs in admiring high signs.
Then, miraculously, as they read "O Hear the Lark's Sweet Voice," the benediction of making music arrives. Together, these children capture the timing, the notes, the phrasing, the beauty of it all. Together, their confidence grows and urges their voices louder and fuller.
They sing about the opera's lovers: "So wondrously, so perfectly, their voices blend in harmony . . . upward, too, their spirits fly." And so it is with them. All the tumult of the age--hair that won't behave, figures in the process of trying to find a shape, braces--is forgotten. For a few moments, they are transformed, singing with the voices of angels, enraptured with what they themselves are creating.
When the music stops, they disintegrate again into a wise-cracking, gawky rabble. But for a moment, they were grand, even the smallest and most timid among them. As they disappear into the night, shades of heroes, princesses, and Mozart cling to them still like a magical perfume.
A POWER TO HEAL
In "Henry VIII," Shakespeare wrote: "In sweet music is such art/Killing care and grief of heart." Although some medical professionals still question the long-term potency of music therapy for the emotionally ill, no one questions its power to uplift and rejuvenate.
In his 1990 memoir, "Darkness Visible," William Styron writes that he was planning his suicide for the following day until he heard a recording of the Brahms "Alto Rhapsody." The music "pierced my heart like a dagger," he writes, "and in a flood of swift recollection I thought of all the joys the house had known: the children who had rushed through its rooms . . . ." The next morning Styron admitted himself to a psychiatric hospital.
Music can be particularly helpful for the elderly in nursing homes, autistic children, and people fighting life- threatening diseases. It breaks a hospital's monotony by providing an enjoyable activity. Nowhere is this more evident than at Children's National Medical Center, where each Tuesday and Thursday musician-in-residence Pat Little pushes a 500-pound cabinet stuffed with instruments and tape recordings from ward to ward.
On a typical afternoon, Little brings together several grade-school children with a Mickey Mouse rap tape and songs from the movie "Aladdin." As she opens the cabinet, a small boy who had been lying listlessly in bed sits up and peers with interest. His mother's eyes well up, and she murmurs: "He's happier already."
Little gives the boy a set of bongos, a hallmate a ukulele, and a toddler drawn to the room by the sound of laughter a pair of maracas. "All right, get fired up," Little says as Michael Jackson's voice jumps out of her boom box. She dances from child to child, shaking her tambourine, and they laugh and laugh. After she leaves, the children can be heard chattering to parents in what before had been eerily quiet rooms.
When Little finds a teenager who's too cool to jam, she teaches him or her sign language. The combination of signing and singing is not as much of a contradiction as one might think. At Lucy Barnsley Elementary in Rockville, music teacher Teri Burdette directs 115 fifth- graders in a group called The Fabulous Flying Fingers. They sign in balletic accompaniment to songs such as Michael Jackson's "You Are Not Alone." The ensemble includes the school's hearing-impaired, who add their own special harmonies with a wonderful confidence.
The children's comments show an instinctive feel for the power of music: "You can express your feelings and no opinion is wrong," says one small boy. An Asian- American girl adds: "Music makes everybody feel good about themselves and that they're not different, that they don't have to feel bad about being a different color, a different age or size, or hearing differently."
TIME TO REFLECT
Each morning, former senator Charles Percy plays piano out in his garden house. He began studying a year ago, just after his mother died at the age of 102.
"She was a professional violinist," says the 76-year-old Percy. "My father fell in love with her when he saw one of her concerts. During the Depression we could no longer afford my piano lessons. When she died, I asked myself what would Mother want me to do now. She had always regretted my giving up music. So now I play each morning to Mother, really, up in heaven."
During a "Mix and Match" session at the Levine School of Music, a few dozen adults gather to find chamber-music partners. These are quintessential Washington workers: doctors, consultants, CPAs, and lawyers, lawyers, lawyers. Like Percy, they play at home to relax, to reflect, to remember, to touch the aesthetic. But today, they want partners and the marvelous give-and-take that ensemble playing provides.
A lawyer/pianist and a radiologist/violinist decide to sight-read a few things together. "So, what have you got?" asks the pianist of the violinist's stack of music, sounding a bit like one small boy sizing up another on the playground.
"Let's try this Beethoven sonata," suggests the violinist. They have never met before this evening, and it is clear from their earlier conversation that both are quite used to running things. Such tendencies will not wash here. An instinctive cooperation settles on the lawyer/doctor duo as soon as the pianist strikes the A by which the violinist tunes.
They begin with a wild scherzo, a rather daunting first reading, but if they can get through that, they can probably play just about anything. They talk in musician's shorthand, "See those triplets there?"
"Yeah, yeah," interrupts the other, and without further ado, they begin at the agreed-upon measure. As with any scherzo there are ripping runs and intricate counterpoint. It would be easy to stomp all over each other's entrances, but they listen to one another's timing and phrasing and heed the other's moments of melody dominance. The two even manage to plunge through the frenzied cascade of runs in the movement's finale and finish together, sort of. "I gotcha at the end there," says the violinist with a laugh.
They actually are rather good and move on to Beethoven's "Spring Sonata," capturing both the work's shimmering flurry and soaring lyricism. "That wasn't so bad," says the pianist when they finish, and the violinist agrees. In those few moments, the men probably learned more about one another than either might usually reveal.
Does that allow them to open up more in other aspects of their lives? Dick Barnet, co-founder of the Institute for Policy Studies and a violinist, once said about ensemble playing: "You learn a sensitivity and an immediate response and the ability to moderate what you're doing to conform to someone else. At the same time, you encourage the other person to move with you. It's not cerebral as are political and economic discussions. It allows me to explore and develop another part of me that I hope I carry to other endeavors."
SHARED EXPERIENCE
Last year, during a Washington Chamber Symphony family concert, conductor Stephen Simon turned to the audience of parents and children and asked, "Did you know that you can listen to a symphony the same way you read a story? Let's take this plot line: Once upon a time, a boy lost his shoe and a dog found it. The end."
Everyone laughed.
"Now let's expand it. Here's the theme for the boy"--the orchestra played the first theme of the symphonic movement next on the program. "Here's a theme for the dog. And another for the shoe." The orchestra demonstrated both. "Now let's have the boy and the dog play together"--the development part of the symphonic movement--"and then the shoe lies here. Now, what can we do to end it?"
A little girl shouted out, "You can repeat the end, the end, the end."
"Which is exactly what every composer does," says Simon with a laugh, "especially Beethoven, who always ends Ta da, Ta da, Taaaaa Daaaaah. Really, children plug right into this stuff."
The family concerts are designed for children; programs are limited to 20 minute halves, and the program notes include puzzles and stories about the featured composers. But adults can learn from them.
"I really view these family concerts as a chance to get the parents hooked back into good music," says Bonnie Ward Simon, executive director and author of the program notes. "Learning about music was missing in most of our generation's education. Like learning about Africa or the Mideast, which now our children study. The booklets tell the basics about any composer we perform so you can hold your own in cocktail conversation. And Stephen will teach you how to listen so you can follow and really enjoy the music."
No child is allowed into these concerts without a parent. "If you don't attend as well," continues Simon, "you are saying, 'I don't really like this, but it's good for you, dear.' Of the 100 dolls and stuffed animals given to me during my childhood, I remember only a handful. What Iremember are the times my parents and I went out together. Children will hear some of the music we play later on in their lives, and they will be transported back to that original concert with their parents."
Music can bond communities, too. In the pretty Silver Spring neighborhood of Woodside Park, children break into songs from "Oh, Jonah!" as they ride the school bus home. Ten-year-olds make their superhero figures sing snatches of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat."
They learned the songs from their neighbor, Joan Phalen, a professionally trained singer who decided a few summers ago to start an informal singing group for her daughters and their friends. "Just as a confidence-building thing," she says. "But music really became a different system for them to use to cope with things--feelings, fears, having had a bad day."
The news of the group's success quickly spread through the neighborhood, and this past summer almost 100 children, from five-year-olds to young teens, congregated to Phalen's house two evenings a week. At summer's end, they performed a 30-minute musical for their family, friends, and neighbors. While the children practiced inside, parents gathered on the front lawn, exchanged news, and embraced newcomers. A deep bond of community grew.
Phalen hadn't intended for the Woodside Kids Chorale to become the focal point of the neighborhood. But she's not surprised by it either. "Music is the great connector," she says. "Like so many Washington neighborhoods, ours is splintered by children going to many different schools: public, magnets, private, and parochial. It's been a wonderful way for children to get back in touch with kids down their street.
"Last year we knocked on the door of an Orthodox family, and the grandmother opened the door. The children sang in Hebrew to her. Tears streamed down the face of this beautiful 70-year-old woman. It was wonderful for the children to realize they could give such a gift to someone through their singing."
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