Close Harmony: Teens and Music
But as much as Evan loves listening to CDs, making music matters even more to him. “Nothing compares, nothing,” he says. “Jazz band—that’s what I live for. Instead of people writing about teens stealing music from the Internet, they should tell about the great music kids can make together.” On a recent Friday night in Providence, Rhode Island, for instance, middle school kids fill up on pizza, then take out their stringed instruments to practice for an upcoming performance at the church down the street. At the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, a group of high school thespians from across the country brings the crowd to its feet with a musical composed especially for them. At a PBS recording studio in Boston, young virtuosos perform for a radio show that showcases the nation’s most talented musical prodigies. At Santa Monica High School in southern California, the award-winning Viking Marching Band takes the field with 88 proud years behind its buoyant strides. Programs like these speak to the transformative power of music-making for youth, whatever their level of proficiency—even as budget cuts and standardized testing push music education out the school door. And while research links music education to benefits like reduced dropout rates or higher math scores, the teens and adults at the center of these stories remind us why music-making exerts such an extraordinary pull.
Storefront Strings
“Next week after we play this piece, wouldn’t it be great if the audience went, ‘Wow, listen how completely together they sounded!’” — Sebastian Ruth, Community MusicWorks
When violinist Sebastian Ruth graduated from Brown University in 1997, he left with an unusual mission: taking Bach and Mozart to young people in Providence neighborhoods where classical music rarely travels. Six years later, Ruth’s Community MusicWorks (CMW) enrolls 60 seven- to 17-year olds in its education program—a combination of lessons, monthly performance parties, and concert trips—with another 80 on a waiting list. It boasts a one-of-a-kind resident string quartet made up of 20-somethings who pair promising careers with a local ministry of music and performance.
As CMW’s first students move from grade school to middle and high school, Ruth and his colleagues work hard to keep their teenaged musicians wielding their bows despite the competing allure of hip-hop. Remembering their own experiences in the nation’s best summer music camps, where capture-the-flag mixed with chamber ensembles and classical music was cool, they create their own version of music camp on weekend nights in a Providence storefront that once sold spandex clothing.
On this night, fourteen self-conscious yet boisterous seventh and eighth graders bolt down their last bite of pizza. “Everyone done?” asks 29-year-old violinist Jesse Holstein, “It’s time for charades with a twist!” The kids form a circle and get their instructions.
“Here’s where the composer throws us a curve ball,” Holstein cautions his violinists. “We have to do two up-bows in a row.” “This means two up-bows on G?” asks Ashley. “You got it,” Holstein says.
Stalnaker stops her cellists. “Up to now, we’ve been accompanying. What does accompaniment mean?” Jovanne is ready with an answer. “It means you’re not the melody,” she says, “you’re the harmony, the backup.”
Eventually, Ruth moves to the front and everyone hushes. “So far tonight, we haven’t heard many moments of quiet. But one of the most important things about music is the silence that precedes and follows it. It’s like a picture frame. It defines the space. So when I bring the baton up, that means sacred silence. When I let it drop, start to play.”
“Cellos and viola, here you need to come in like stampeding horses, then go out with a whisper,” says Ruth as they reach the last section. “Note the fortissimo at the beginning and the decrescendo at the end.” The group plays. “Well, you stampeded in like horses—that was great—but you also stampeded out! Let’s try it again.”
On the final run-through, all fourteen bows end in unison, quiet as a cloud. “The Boston Symphony couldn’t do it better,” Ruth exclaims.
The kids strike their stands and move to one last game. When it’s time to go, two girls, who barely knew each other when they arrived, leave arm in arm. “My friends won’t believe I spent Friday night this way,” says one. “This rocks.”
Marconi: There was a point where I wasn’t sure I wanted my friends to know I played the viola. But going to Apple Hill [music camp] changed that. Once I was back, I told them stuff I did over there, how I got the scholarship to get there. Now all my friends know that I play the violin and viola—and they know it’s a talent not everyone can do, that it’s hard. And they’ve seen from me how playing an instrument shows discipline, concentration, patience—a lot of patience. They see how it grows your personality, too.
So now when I tell my friends “I play the viola,” they say, “That’s cool!”
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“These kids want more. They want what lies beyond normal teenage life, past the schoolyard and in the spotlight. They want to share themselves with the world as performers, actors, and actresses of the finest quality.” — Caitlin Howarth, student theater critic for Cappies
Nerves were fraying and tempers flashing at Washington, DC’s Kennedy Center last August as a group of teen actors prepared to take the stage with their new musical, Go-Go Beach, set in 1960s California. “By dinner, everyone was kind of grumpy,” recalls Kristin Garaffo, a cast member and area high school student. “I was having trouble breathing after my hair was half done, techies were yelling at me to get on stage for a mike change, my eyelashes weren’t on, and I wasn’t in costume. I was really nervous.”
The director gathered cast and crew for a pep talk. “We all realized that this was it—this was our last performance together,” Kristin remembers. “It was so emotional, and we hadn’t even started the show!”
Kristin is one of a group of high school students nationwide who belong to the Critics and Awards Program, known as Cappies, which celebrates the outstanding work of teenagers in the performing arts. Begun in the Washington, DC area but now in ten other cities, Cappies teaches high school theater and journalism students how to be critics as well as actors. During the school year, they attend one another’s shows and, under the guidance of volunteer teacher-mentors, write reviews for local newspapers.
Come July, 40 Cappie award nominees and winners from across the U.S. have a chance at a coveted prize: performing original plays and musicals at the Kennedy Center with the Cappies National Theater. For three weeks they sing, dance, rap, and tap like mad as they rehearse scenes, brainstorm sketches, and coordinate steps—and then perform live for three successive weekends. This past summer, they opened with Starz, a 34-part revue that featured aching love songs and fast-paced dance numbers, and closed with Go-Go Beach. Cappies student critics, watching from the audience, gave the productions high marks.
Kristin sums up the experience in her journal. “What more could I have asked for this summer,” she writes. “I met people from Cincinnati, Kansas City, Dallas, El Paso, Florida, and lots of kids from around here. Each and every one of them had something to offer, and the talent was incredible. We were all there for the same reason, because we all loved to perform and we all loved theater.”
“Go-Go Beach has all the makings for teeny-bopper pop appeal, circa 1966. A beach full of California kids compete in dance and surfing contests for coveted spots in the latest movie by pop sensation Mindy Chinchilla. Yet it stops short of being saccharine, its message shifting from shallow aspirations to a more tribal love that many will recognize as vintage San Francisco...”
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“From July 12- August 4, I performed in a revue that showcased some of the most talented high school students from around the United States, I was in a play where I got to wear feathery masks and scream, cackle, and take out someone's heart and throw it around, and I was in the first full production of a brand new musical making it's way to the Great White Way. All at the Kennedy Center...”
Click here for complete journal entry.
“You don’t have to be a classical music fan to love this show... It’s great music and great kids, but better than that, it’s normal kids playing great music.” — Jamie Gangel, NBC News
On a Sunday afternoon in June, the familiar sounds of Rossini’s William Tell Overture, performed at a galloping pace by the New England Conservatory’s Youth Philharmonic Orchestra (YPO), fill Boston’s Jordan Hall. As the applause dies, Christopher O’Riley, the program’s piano-playing host, invites several young players to the microphone.
Welcome to From the Top, a weekly showcase of the best young classical musicians in the country—“public radio’s answer to MTV,” as The Boston Herald put it. Taped before live audiences in performance halls from New England to Texas, the show combines stunning performances with interviews, sketches, and musical games. Hundreds of thousands of kids nationwide tune in.
O’Riley moves to Winton, a 17-year-old trumpet player who devotes nine hours a week to playing in two Boston area youth orchestras. At one time, Winton was also a first-class runner; now he tells O’Riley how he settled his focus on music. “I had a lesson with my namesake, Wynton Marsalis, and he told me to get more involved with my music—and to stop doing everything else that’s not your passion.”
“Which is more exciting, being in a track meet or being in an orchestra concert?” O’Riley asks. “They’re different,” Winton replies. “For me, I get more of a rush playing classical music, because I can put more emotion into it. But for track, it’s more aggression and—” Winton pauses, chuckling a little as he continues, “it’s more like cutting people’s hearts out.”
“Trust me, there’s plenty of that in classical music, as well!” adds O’Riley.
The sounds of Ravel and Bartok soon fill the concert hall. This time, when the applause fades, 15-year-old “Roving Reporter” Hayley Goldbach bursts on stage and announces that she has devised a way to make the next number, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, “a little more relevant. We’re always trying to make the point around here that classical music is for lots of kids,” she explains. “And here we are doing Romeo and Juliet, which as everyone knows is about teenage love... So, I’ve asked several of the musicians to write dedications to go with sections of the music.”
“I want to dedicate this next passage of Romeo and Juliet to a certain guy in the cello section. Okay, okay, so he doesn’t exactly know my name yet. In fact it’s been a whole year, and he still keeps calling me Anne. But hey, at least he knows my name begins with A! So I hope you’re listening to this, over there in the cello section, shifting up on your fingerboard the way you do with your muscles rippling...”
Then the baton rises once more, and these normal kids are again playing great music—with, as YPO’s conductor Benjamin Zander notes, “the passion and the love and the engagement and the willingness to give everything they have without holding back.”
“Never have I played for a more grateful audience. Somehow it didn’t matter that, by the end, my intonation was shot and I had no bow control. I would have lost any competition I was playing in, but it didn’t matter. The men would come up the stairs in full gear, remove their helmets, look at me, and smile.”
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“The invention in five-four came to mind. I tried to run through the latest edits in my head, found myself too nervous to remember them, and instead just began to play. In the stark quiet of Lea’s living room, the notes were so much more bare, dull, and repetitive than they were even on the static of my tape recorder.”
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“Yes, the Santa Monica High School band is alive and kicking. We are in our 88th consecutive year!”—Terry Sakow, Santa Monica High School band director
Once relatively prosperous, Santa Monica High School (dubbed Samohi) has changed in recent decades; it now mirrors the diverse ethnic and socioeconomic mix of California’s student population. But this high school clings to a tradition rich with music: a beginning strings class, a string orchestra, two full symphonic orchestras, a chamber orchestra, five concert bands, a jazz band, and five choirs. One-fifth of the school’s 3,500 pupils put music-making in their schedule. Their awards come like a drum-roll one after another, year after year. Most recently, the marching band represented California at the 2003 Independence Day parade in Washington, DC; the symphony orchestra played in Carnegie Hall, Vienna, and Spain.
The talent-building continues in high school. “These students are, relatively speaking, just starting out,” cautions band director Terry Sakow as 35 mostly ninth graders take their seats in the school’s spacious rehearsal room at the start of third period. “They’ve had maybe a year or two of beginning instruction.”
The bell rings and the most advanced band students—64 juniors and seniors—enter and warm up, filling the room with their musical jumble. This time silence falls within seconds, when Sakow climbs the podium and lifts his baton. For the next 50 minutes, students move like clockwork from scales to exercises to their concert folder, playing with a polish that seems worthy of L.A.’s new Disney Hall.
When these young musicians—regardless of their proficiency—take tubas and timpani to the football field and the parade route, however, they move to a new level. This year, the 150-plus students in Samohi’s Viking Band are working hard on performing while they march. “These kids sound as good as anyone when standing still,” Sakow notes.
Few students quit music at Samohi. What keeps them going, besides an extraordinary ladder of music-making opportunities? “Well, there’s the sheer sound of the music,” answers Sam, a ninth grader. “And the fact that it’s both you and the whole band, working together, doing the best you can. It’s fun. It’s active. Plus in other classes, the only thing that matters to you is yourself and how you are doing. Here, everyone counts.”
Lauren puts down her flute to explain. “It’s about harmony,” she says.
My story is not the flowery tale of the little girl who wandered through the music store until she found the one instrument that fit perfectly in her little hands. Nor did overbearing parents shove sheet music through the bars of my crib, shouting, “When Mozart was your age, he’d written four symphonies already!” I simply found my clarinet in the hall closet... I rushed in to get my sticky eight-year-old fingers on the secrets I believed it held. The pads on the clarinet were falling off, dust had collected in every crevice, and the once shiny keys were dull and rusted. I thought it was beautiful.
Click here for Alice’s complete essay
Click here for a digest of recent research and surveys related to music education and listening.
This story is made possible by the generous support of the AT&T Foundation.
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Forty-five minutes later, the games give way to chairs and music stands. Ruth works with the first violinists while 27-year-old Sara Stalnaker rehearses the cellists. Holstein coaches the second violinists as 29-year-old Minna Choi practices with the ensemble’s one violist. 
This is the second time the kids have played together and their initial run-through of Suzuki’s Andantino is rough. Ruth and his colleagues coax them through each section, working out the kinks. 
In May, the student critics mete out awards (from “best song” to “best choreography”) at a Tonys-style gala complete with evening gowns and tuxedos. The Washington Post publishes a two-page color spread featuring DC’s nominated lead actors. “Just like an all-league sports team, except theater students!” writes a former Cappies critic currently attending college in Virginia. 
“Pay no attention to the fact that your conductor is sitting right there listening to you,” teases O’Riley as he asks Ethan, a 17-year-old cellist, to compare playing in a youth versus a professional orchestra. “We’re all young, we’re all doing it because we want to, not because we’re getting paid,” Ethan responds quickly. “It’s fresh. We’re loving it, and that’s why we’re doing it.” 
This almost century-long story owes less to sheer talent, points out high school principal Ilene Straus, than to a community’s steadfast investment in music education—even in the face of budget cuts. And it’s about building talent, from the bottom up. In the elementary and middle grades in this coastal Southern California city, almost half of the students “take instruments.”
“Quiet, shhhh, quiet please,” Sakow exhorts. “I need your full attention, I need everyone participating. Sit up—put yourself into it.” He seizes a fragile hush and launches the group into counting exercises. The chatter returns as students shift to practicing a larger piece. “In this classroom, I’m not the one who makes things happen—you are,” Sakow reminds them. 