On Tuesday (3/24) at Agence France-Presse, Shaun Tandon writes, “In an exchange that has fascinated participants, children unschooled in musical theory are producing pieces that are transcribed and performed by [New York] Philharmonic musicians. The project is part of the Philharmonic’s ‘Very Young Composers’ project, which since its launch in 1995 has spread around the world with a mission to take children’s music seriously rather than passing it off as cute. ‘I’ve seen so many hundreds of pieces written by very young composers and I’m just astonished, again and again, by how interesting and innovative the pieces are, because of course the children have none of the constraints that those of us who have studied composition have,’ said composer Theodore Wiprud, the vice president for education at the Philharmonic. Nine children from Fukushima between ages 10 and 14 are visiting New York as part of the project. Musicians from the Philharmonic will premiere the children’s chamber works at Lincoln Center on Tuesday evening…. Takehito Shimazu, a professor at Fukushima University who led the project locally, said that the children chose to express themselves in various ways, with not all of them directly referencing the March 2011 quake-tsunami that killed almost 19,000 people in Japan’s worst post-World War II disaster.”
Posted March 25, 2015
