The Weekend of Chamber Music Brings Music, and More, to Area Students

Monticello, NY– The most recent cycle of enrichment programs that The Weekend of Chamber Music brings to Sullivan County schools will culminate on Saturday, May 12 at 7:30 in the auditorium of Monticello Middle School. For the second successive year, the distinguished professional players of WCM will share a concert of chamber music with students of Monticello High School whom they have coached over the preceding months. The program features DvoÍak

Bartók and Stravinsky, among others. (Tickets: (845) 932-8414; information: (845) 932-8527.)

Last year’s program was notable not only for the excellence and enthusiasm of the performers, at their respective levels, but for the unselfconscious way in which the pros from Lincoln Center served as stage hands for their junior colleagues. This seems to capture the spirit of the relationship. On a recent Monday afternoon, cellist Kaethe Jarka is coaching a movement from a Beethoven string quartet. A passage that lasts half a minute is worked at with equal devotion by coach and students for a good half hour. The structure of the phrase is discussed, and summarized by Jarka as "That’s right, you three rev up the engine, and then Dana [Phillips, first violin] drives." She also explains the nature of playing in tune in terms of the parallel between color and sound, in that each tone emits a spectrum of waves that contains other notes as well, which each of the other players’ notes must match. The passage is then worked on in slow motion on the basis of this fresh insight (which doesn’t preclude the exchange of digs and barbs among the teen players). The result is unanimously declared "cool."

Meanwhile in a nearby room, flutist and WCM Artistic Director Judith Pearce is coaching a Haydn wind trio, asking for "more bounce on those eighth notes, but the scales legato, legato, legato." Subsequently, the two groups merge and are reinforced to constitute a force of some fifteen players, the largest ensemble attempted yet in the six years of this program, for a vigorous go at Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concert, coached by Jarka and Pearce. Without a conductor–this is chamber music!–there is a tendency to lose tempo to inertia, identified by Jarka as "the herd of turtles problem," but it is soon overcome.

These coachings of Monticello High School students by WCM are sponsored by a major grant from the NYSEG Foundation, Inc., with additional financial support from Amateur Chamber Music Players. At other times throughout the year, with support from the Sullivan County Music Educators Association, from the Board of Cooperative Educational Services, and from corporations and private donors, WCM presents "Music and Imagination" concerts to elementary and middle schoolers throughout the county. But its involvement in arts education is more varied still, and involves collaboration with yet other regional organizations and creative individuals.

Days before the Monticello coachings, Pearce and folk singer Annie Hat had spent an hour with a ninth grade English class at Narrowsburg Central School, in an intricate but organic presentation of poems and songs as part of the ongoing "Memory Project." Funded by the New York State Council on the Arts, this joint enterprise between WCM and the Liberty Museum and Arts Center requires the students to interview area residents regarding their personal recollections of the history of this region. With the guidance of their teacher, Debra Rovitz, and poet Kaye Cloonan, they then transmute the interviews into poems. These will, in turn, be set to music by members of the WCM and performed throughout the fall as enhancements to a new section of the ongoing LMCA "Main Street" exhibit, which will also be accompanied by photographs the students have taken under the tutelage of art teacher Steve Layman and professional photographer Andrew Dantzler. The Narrowsburg class is serving as a pilot for the project, which will be expanded to other school districts next year.