Empowerment through artistic excellence - professional performances for school children - Education & Outreach, Part II

Dance Magazine, Jan, 1996 by Camille Hardy

What made 2,800 fourth- through sixth-graders sit spellbound at a performance last May, interact joyously when given the opportunity, and leap to a standing ovation at the end? Flashy costumes? Walt Disney characters? Wrong. It was an all-Stravinsky concert at Carnegie Hall with the American Composers Orchestra, under the direction of Rachael Worby, that left them cheering in the aisles and humming themes from Firebird on the way back to school. And that's only one example of how leading New York City arts organizations are reaching out to young spectators throughout the city. With the shared viewpoint that the arts are truly part of America's public domain - accessible to everyone, now and forever - the people who run Carnegie Hall, American Ballet Theatre, and the Joyce Theater are offering a range of fully professional performances to thousands of schoolchildren from the metropolitan area.

"Our numbers are the biggest, because we've been at this a long time," says Phyllis Susen, a former harpist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, who is now Carnegie Hall's director of education, the head of the operation that reached some 24,000 students in the 1994-95 season. In fact, Walter Damrosch conducted the first children's concerts in December 1891, seven months after the venerable hall opened. From 1958 to 1981, the CBS telecasts of the New York Philharmonic's Young People's Concerts under Leonard Bernstein reached millions of viewers. And it was part of that television series that inspired Worby, a grammar school student at the time, to become a conductor - quite a heady aspiration for a little girl in the Father Knows Best era. Worby is something of a wonder, not just because, as a woman conductor, she belongs to one of the tiniest professional associations in the world. Dressed in concert black (her version includes slacks and flat-heeled shoes), she darts from the stage into the audience with a cordless microphone. "Where have you heard those notes before? Who knows?" she inquires, as a sea of hands beckons recognition and a bid for the limelight. Never mind that it's quite a way from the podium to the back of the house, she traverses all aisles man times during the course of a fifty-minute session with full orchestra. Worby challenges the youngsters to "dare to be different" and "break down barriers," much as Stravinsky had done in music. The kids are transported - exuberant, yet polite. And they know all the answers because of months of cooperation between New York City schools and Link Up!, Carnegie Hall's classical music education program.

Link Up! was begun in 1985, one year after Worby took over the Carnegie Hall's children's concerts, to provide students with direct exposure to live orchestral music and to teach them basic music concepts. Each year the program emphasizes a different theme while establishing a connection with at least one other art form. During the first five months of 1995, musicians visited fifteen participating schools in four New York City boroughs. Classroom teachers were trained in a special workshop where they were given audio cassettes as well as resource manuals with sequentially linked activities to examine the theme "melody" and to explore why melody is memorable. Worby and members of the orchestra appeared at each school to perform a suite from Stravinsky's Pulcinella and to demonstrate how specific musical instruments sound and are played. Dance was integrated into the grand spring concert at Carnegie Hall, with members of the Nikolais/Louis Dance Lab in especially devised choreography by Murray Louis to make the shape and construction of Stravinsky's tunes visible. Sections of Petrouchka and Firebird were viewed" in dance sequences that were related strictly to the music's development, not the ballets' plots.

"Integration is critical to everything we do," explains Susen, "to reinforce the fact that music lives in a mortal context, not in isolation. As a creative expression, art is driven, perceived and enjoyed by human beings, who don't change very much over centuries." Easy familiarity with artists, composers, and the concert hall is another important objective. "We want to welcome young audiences into our world of music and find ways of sharing our passion with them, while maintaining the integrity of what we do." On this point, Carnegie Hall thinks big; the all-Stravinsky concert is but one of several examples. For 1995-96, the link is with literature and the theme is "Music Speaks." Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," the final movement of his Ninth Symphony, will be performed at Carnegie Hall for the youngsters by Worby and the orchestra, with the All City High School Chorus of New York. The scale is awesome. The goal is excellence.

Susen recognizes the power of the Link Up! activities to hone student skills in time management, analysis, critical assessment, problem solving and an array of empowerment tools that expand the individual's capacity for expression. "We stretch imaginations, yes," she affirms, "and expose them to the holistic nature of an artist's thought processes. We build on common bonds of musical knowledge and see concepts reflected as other disciplines are approached." She believes the nine- to twelve-year-old age selection is also significant. "The children are bright and know enough to make decisions. They are eager to learn and haven't yet become jaded."