Yesterday my colleague, Karen, and I went to the annual NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) trade show down in Anaheim. We had gotten invited as part of an effort to bring educators "to the table" to learn about new music product and programs. I have been to NAMM a few times before, in my former capacity as an employee of various retail music outlets. It never fails to amaze me how many companies there are that make musical instruments. Going to NAMM offers a good opportunity to look at, among other things, new method books, music publications in general, and see crazy instruments-such as the contra-bass flute we saw yesterday that was taller than Karen. It's also a good place to buy a new instrument, sometimes. Not every vendor will sell you things out of their booth, but if you find one who will, you can usually get something you thought you might like to have for a wholesale price. Karen got herself a nifty little pocket trumpet, and I splurged and got an electric cello.
Sunday's keynote address for educators was about "El Sistema", the Venezuelan music education philosophy gaining foothold in the U.S. and around the world. Ten young teachers who were recruited straight out of music school to train in the program and then start programs in cities across the U.S. spoke about their experiences of learning about and working with El Sistema, or "The System". I listened eagerly to these young people, as we have in Pasadena one elementary school which has been working with El Sistema for a year and a half, as an after school program. I wanted to know what makes what they do different from what we do, and how they account for their incredible success.
Each person's story was inspiring and some were almost unbelievable. One talked about being in Venezuela for the training, and watching a high school group rehearse. The energy of orchestra rehearsals on this program is legendary, and this fellow was very impressed that a high school group could play Richard Strauss' Don Juan, and play it well. Suddenly in the middle of the rehearsal, the electricity went off, plunging the stage into complete darkness. The young man decided to leave the room and see if he could find out what was happening. He returned to the rehearsal a few minutes later, still in darkness, to hear the kids still rehearsing! They were playing Don Juan from memory in the dark! It is remarkable that anyone, let alone high school-aged kids, can play this challenging piece from memory, but what is even more remarkable is that the kids did not use the power outage as an excuse to quit their practice session.
Another story from L.A.'s inner city came from the teacher who has started a program at Heart of L.A. aka HOLA. The kids in her program come from at least 5 different ethnic neighborhoods, which traditionally do not interact much. Separate schools, churches, shopping centers and languages have left little in common for the diverse groups. At HOLA, elementary-school-aged kids came together from their different cultures and focused on making music together. Soon they began to identify as clarinetists or cellists rather than as Phillipinos or Koreans. Parents who had actually had harsh words for each other put their differences and difficulties aside as they saw their children become friends. Summing it all up was a comment from one of the 4th grade children in the orchestra. He raised his hand one day and said something like this: "I get it, Miss Christine. If we all played trumpet, this orchestra would be really boring. But we have lots of different instruments and we each have our own part, but it all goes together. That's what makes it interesting. It's just like us. We're all different, but we all have a part, and it all goes together." I'm sure I'm not saying it as well, but you get the idea- the symphony orchestra as metaphor for the creative power of cultural diversity.
El Sistema has several pieces that make up the whole of its philosophy. The two that are unique and especially interesting to me are 1) the idea of music as an agent for social change, and 2) if you are going to change a person's life you have to have lots of contact with him/her.
The first of these sounds like some feel-good platitude, but it has real application as you can see from the HOLA child's comments. In Venezuela this idea means that children living in abject poverty have a dignified core to their lives, something to be proud of and possibly a way out of the hard life into which they are born.
The second of these translates into contact between students and teachers in the range of 12 to 15 hours a week. I think this is the real dividing line between what we do in our schools and what The System does. Most of the programs in this country are after school, and meet pretty much every day. I have to say, I am a little jealous of this and think that if we public school music teachers had that much access to our students, we would accomplish amazing things too. We are expected to imbue our students with musical expertise on 1 to 1-1/2 hours of contact a week, or less. And even then we have to fight for that time.
I was inspired by the presentation at NAMM. I want to affect social change with the music that my students can play. I want to give them a dignified core to their lives. To do less is to abdicate.
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