The Cleveland Orchestra, the Princeton Symphony Orchestra, and the Charleston Symphony Orchestra have each announced separate education initiatives taking place during the month of March. From March 4 to 10, the Cleveland Orchestra is highlighting music education with numerous events, including a concert for middle-school students, “Discovering Romeo and Juliet,” at Severance Hall, led by Music Director Franz Welser-Möst, featuring works by Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, and Bernstein. Also planned is a free Cleveland Orchestra concert on March 7 at Severance Hall that will also feature musicians from the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra Youth Chorus, Cleveland Orchestra Children’s Chorus, and El Sistema@Rainey, the intensive afterschool music education program founded in 2011 by Cleveland’s Rainey Institute and Isabel Trautwein, a violinist in the Cleveland Orchestra. In New Jersey, the Princeton Symphony Orchestra has launched a pilot arts journalism project for Princeton High School students. The eleven students participating in the PSO program will study Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, works on the PSO’s March 10 concert, and then write concert previews and reviews, in conjunction with faculty from the high school. One of the reviews will be printed in the high school’s student newspaper, and all projects will be posted at the PSO’s website. Further plans for the arts journalism program include expanding to more high schools and including theater, dance, and visual art. South Carolina’s Charleston Symphony Orchestra has been partnering for the past two months with the Charleston County School District for an education initiative entitled Composition and Critique, teaching elementary school students about parallels between composition in writing and music. Three composers in the program—Craig Budde, Jonathan Milford, and Kari Kistler—have visited three schools during the students’ regularly scheduled general music class, working with them to compose musical motifs that represent characters in a selected book. On March 7, students will present their musical interpretations of the book Probuditi!, with a discussion and reception to follow with James Braunreuther, fine arts coordinator for the Charleston County School District.
Posted March 6, 2013
