March 14, 1980

NEW SOLIDARITY Page 7

MUSIC: Vivian Freyre Zoakos

Musical Dialogue at NYC School

Photo NSIPS/Ray

Pianist Bodil Frolund, who has appeared as a soloist with the Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra and Stockholm's Royal Opera Orchestra and frequently on the New York concert stage.

Last week the Humanist Academy held the first of a two-part program at Public School 187 in New York City after winning a bid from the school for a series that would introduce the very youngest students to both great music and great art. The program consisted of a 45-minute selection of piano works ranging from Bach through Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin performed by the noted Danish-American concert pianist Bodil Frolund. The P.S. 187 Humanist Academy program was the first of what will be succeeding efforts by the Academy to bring the humanist tradition of learning, including the arts, to the reach of children in various settings, including schools and after-school child recreation programs. This is a period in which New York and indeed most schools nationally are being forced to slash their cultural budgets for lack of funds, a period in which even well-meaning teachers have bowed to the prevailing mores and allowed disco to enter the schools.

If the damaging impact of this trend is to be reversed, children must certainly be exposed to their true cultural roots. But even before this can be done, it is a necessity to empirically as well as theoretically overcome what is fast becoming a fostered misconception even among some of our better educators. Faced with deteriorating classroom performance and a social context permeated with degrading disco and epidemic drug use, many teachers have come to the discouraged conclusion that their job is to catch the child's interest in any way they caneven if that means using rock and disco music to do it. The successful concert held at P.S. 187 proved the dangerous fallacy of this misconception. The school's exceptional administrative and teaching staff, like the Humanist Academy, was concerned to expose the children directly to the highest levels of cultural ideas in the hope of making an impact on the children that could be nurtured with follow-up work. The "Dialogue" Principle Particularly because the children involved in the program were so youngin the 6 and 7 year rangethe academy decided to accompany the music with dialogue before each selection, presented by this writer. This proved to be immensely important, and subsequent discussion with the school teachers led to ideas for expanding this approach, including exposing the children to taped performances of the concert pieces before any subsequent concert so that they could familiarize themselves with what for many of them is a completely new language. The commentary was simple, and geared to conveying two straightforward ideas which I had found in working with children to be easily accessible to this age group. The first idea presented was that the theme of a composition any compositionwas itself an idea; different from a verbal idea but understandable as a unit that could be easily remembered and repeated. The second notion put forward was that the fundamental difference between real music and other forms of noise like rock is that music, like people themselves, develops through dialogue. It is a simple matter to reference for a child his own memories of talking with friends where he puts forward a thought, which the friend picked up and took further, leading to a process from which something new emerged. This is the notion of dialogue.

Before each performance by Ms. Frolund, the children were given hints of how the dialogue process worked in the particular piece. Even with the quality of instrument typical to grammar school auditoriums, the combination of Ms. Frolund's particular talent in bringing out hidden ironies and jokes in a performance and the children's receptivity to the quality of the music itself, led to a remarkable situation. Those who know the normal behavior of six- and seven-year olds grouped together for a solid hour, would be struck by the attentive response of these children exposed to great music for what was, in the case of many, the first time in their lives. The Humanist Academy is now planning a series of once-a-month classes on music, art and the sciences, which will aim at educating the educators to what can be done with children if the appropriate pedagogy is used.