Dec. 1, 2011
MUSIC MATTERS: BSO contributes to music education for children
(COOKEVILLE, Tenn., Dec. 1, 2011) -- It had to be one of the most memorable musical moments in Cookeville ever: The morning when 500 fourth-graders conducted the Bryan Symphony Orchestra at Tennessee Tech University.
It didn’t happen just once, either. On Monday, Nov. 14, three different sets of schoolchildren got a lesson in conducting from BSO Music Director Dan Allcott. Down, left, right, up – the enthusiastic students in the audience led 50 professional musicians onstage in a rousing performance of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
An experience similar to this has taken place once a year for the past five years in the Bryan Fine Arts Building on the TTU campus, because the members of the Bryan Symphony Orchestra Association believe in musical education experiences for all ages – and particularly for the youngest members of the community. Altogether, nearly 1,400 fourth-graders took part in this year’s education concerts.
“Fourth grade is such a great age,” says Allcott. “It’s the time when children are learning so fast, and when their skills of observation and their self-confidence are really coming into play. It’s also about the time when they can choose a musical instrument to learn, so it’s not too late to reinforce what they know about music. But you have to get to them now. Unless we constantly create opportunities for young children to find out what they’re good at, we may be robbing them of their life’s avocation or vocation.”
Music education projects taken on by the orchestra have evolved over time, depending on the community’s needs and organization resources – from helping produce a series on orchestral instruments with WCTE-TV, to sending chamber ensembles into the schools, to the education concerts on TTU’s campus. For Tennessee Tech students and music students in the community, the organization also supports master classes taught by guest soloists appearing with the BSO. Over the years, the organization’s work in education has won two national awards from the American Symphony Orchestra League.
“We take our mission to provide educational experiences for all ages very seriously,” says BSOA Executive Director Gail Luna. “As a professional musical organization, we believe it’s our responsibility to supplement music education in the schools as much as our resources permit. All of us here in Cookeville – in the Upper Cumberland, for that matter – benefit from having a professional orchestra in residence. Not every community is this fortunate.”
Two-thirds of the children who attended this year’s education concerts go to school in Putnam County. About 500 more are students in Warren County, home of the orchestra’s namesake, Charles Faulkner Bryan, whose centennial the university celebrated earlier this fall.
The fact that one of Tennessee’s most distinguished composers was born and raised in McMinnville – and taught at Tennessee Tech -- was as important a message for the students as were the musical concepts they learned.
“When we played one of Bryan’s compositions,” says Allcott, “I told the children that I hoped one of them would compose something we could play. The message was that composers can come from anywhere.”
Just as musicians come from anywhere.
“What we want them to come away with is that this kind of music is exciting and interesting, that there are people in their town who enjoy it and play it, and that it’s available to them as audience members, as musicians, as composers – as someone within the music community, at no matter what level,” he says.
The BSO’s newest education initiative, the Community Youth String Orchestra, began as part of a comprehensive effort to teach children to play the instruments that are the backbone of the symphony orchestra: violin and cello. The string section is what distinguishes an orchestra from a band – and from the earliest days of music-making in this region, violin and cello have been the rarest of commodities. To this day, the Bryan Symphony supplements its string section with musicians from Tennessee’s metro-area professional orchestras.
Idalynn Besser, a Bryan Symphony violist who plays frequently with the Nashville Symphony, directs the BSO’s Community Youth String Orchestra. The aim of the after-school program is to build the foundation necessary for a full-fledged youth orchestra – a sizeable goal, given that string instruction in the public schools is limited. CYSO musicians are learning to play violin and cello, they’re learning to read music and they’re learning how to work with each other – to understand the role each musician plays in the team-like orchestral setting.
The CYSO is divided into sections for fourth-graders and older students. Sycamore Elementary School music teacher Mary Bastin has five CYSO students in her classes, and she attended the BSO education concert with all of her fourth-graders.
“I was so proud of them; they were all so attentive and polite and knew exactly what to do. The ones who take violin after school got to see Ms. Besser onstage, and they were so excited about that. What a great experience this was. I hope most of them will be able to see a concert like this again, although the reality is that some won’t, because it’s beyond their means.”
Bastin, a first-year teacher and recent TTU graduate, works with about 65 fourth-graders at Sycamore, and of those children, about 10 are actively learning to play an instrument outside her 30-minute classes. In the week leading up to the BSO concerts, her class studied new music vocabulary and the different orchestral instrument families – woodwind, brass, strings and percussion.
To help Bastin and other music specialists in both Putnam County and Warren County, Allcott developed lesson plans and, with the help of his fellow musicians at TTU and education partner WCTE-TV, an instrument primer DVD.
“We spent a week on the identification and classification of instruments,” says Bastin, “and when the DVD came in, I was so grateful. The kids needed that visual – and to hear each instrument and see it played really helped. To follow that up with the concert itself – that was so great, to actually see all those musicians playing live. My students will never forget this.”
Allcott has never forgotten his earliest experiences with classical music. He began playing cello in fifth grade, but it wasn’t until high school that he got serious about it – and fortunately, it wasn’t too late.
“In fifth grade, I was the only student who didn’t choose a band instrument,” he says. “I knew I enjoyed music and that I was getting good at it more quickly than my peers. But I had to choose between music and my other passion, tennis.”
When he did, he never looked back; that musical background led him to competitions in Europe, to conducting youth and professional orchestras and choruses, to serving as principal conductor of the Atlanta Ballet, and to directing the Bryan Symphony Orchestra and TTU’s orchestral programs, as well as the Oak Ridge Symphony Orchestra and Oak Ridge Chorus.
“Music is about opportunity,” Allcott says. “People ask how I got to be where I am now, and I tell them I’m a musician because I had an opportunity to discover music when I was little. That’s why our education concerts are so important, and why the connection between the students and teachers is so important. These are not just concerts; we think very carefully about how the music is presented.
“All of us are born understanding music,” he says. “We’re innately wired for music; we learn it before language. Babies from different cultures cry differently; at the most fundamental level, they understand intonation. Later in life, if music isn’t a part of our everyday lives, we get un-wired; that’s why it’s so important to offer music opportunities early and often.”
Listening is our first and last sense. Hearing helps us understand the world around us from the “prenatal concert hall” to our final day on earth, say researchers. Listening is the cornerstone of learning – and the earlier we learn, the more we learn throughout our lives.
“There’s simply no question about the importance of music education,” says Luna, who studied voice and piano as a child. “It’s not just an adjunct to the rest of a child’s subjects, like language and math and science; study after study shows that meaningful experiences with music improve the way we learn every subject. Our association with Tennessee Tech allows us to supplement the music education our children receive in the schools or in private lessons with the kind of music experiences they’ll never forget and that will impact them for the rest of their lives. Music has that kind of power.”
This year’s education concerts by the Bryan Symphony were funded in part through a grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission under an agreement with the State of Tennessee, while the Community Youth String Orchestra is supported in part by funding from The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee. A number of individuals and civic organizations, including the Rotary clubs of both Cookeville and McMinnville, also provide financial assistance for the Bryan Symphony’s education initiatives.
LEARN MORE about the research being done in human musicality -- how we're born with an innate sense for music -- as presented by Henkjan Honing of the University of Amsterdam's Music Cognition Group.
