Growing up, I didn’t want to be a lawyer, like my dad,
or a mother, like my mom; I wanted to be a teacher. It didn’t occur to me that I’d
need way more patience than I had, and to be able to live on a relative
pittance. For all the music lessons I took, I never had delusions of pursuing
music as a profession – my talents are as a hobby and as educated audience, at
best. But recently, I had the opportunity to participate in an educational
experience involving music, at the Horizons Program at the Warner School of
Education (at the University of Rochester). The program’s theme this summer is
Performance, and I volunteered my a cappella group (Rocappella) to perform and
teach the kids a song.
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| Our biggest and most animated audience yet! |
Rocappella’s mission is to sing for fun and charity, and
for what we hope is the joy we bring to our audience. We mostly perform at
nursing homes, but this season we branched out to the downtown YWCA, and we hope
to carol at the Ronald McDonald House in December. Singing for the Horizons
kids was a little outside our scope, but it was an opportunity to show them
that, just as you don’t need to be a professional to learn, play, or enjoy
sports, neither do you need to be a professional to learn, perform or enjoy
music.
We sang some of our more ‘upbeat’ and kid-friendly
songs: Royals, Blackbird, All You Need is
Love, as well as Summertime, from
Porgy & Bess. On a couple of the
songs, the kids started snapping and clapping along, not even needing to be
told that “friends don’t let friends clap on 1 and 3.” And even though Royals turned out not to be the most
appropriate choice for K-8th grade, lyric-wise, we could see some
kids were singing right along with us!
I wanted to teach them a fun round, not something
mindless like Row Row Row Your Boat
that they already knew. I immediately thought of P.D.Q. Bach’s Art of the Ground Round (click here to
listen to a recording on Youtube). None of my ‘fella pellas’ or Horizon’s
Executive Director, Lynn Gatto, had heard of P.D.Q. Bach or Peter Schickele –
how can that be? I decided that Nelly is
a nice girl would be too racy, and Please,
kind sir too difficult, but Loving is
easy would be simple to teach and just silly enough. OK, this lack of
judgment is perhaps another reason I’m not an educator – it was difficult just
for my group to master! We did, though, and the kids all got the joke. During the applause, Lynn quietly confirmed
that it was too demanding for the kids, and we left on a high note. I hope I’ll
be able to make it back to campus for the students’ end-of-term performances!
For more information on Horizons at Warner:
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