For the past eleven years I have been designing and implementing my own programs and curriculums for the pre-kindergarten right up through sixth grade age groups.
The preceding 11 years ('85-'96) included creating both a guitar program for 260 students a year, (yes, you read that right) and a keyboard program following. (Yep, 260 again.)
Well, in short, it worked. I developed an approach which enabled over 90% of my students to perform a large spectrum of guitar chords, several guitar patterns (riffs), and melodic playing as well. The 10% who did not succeed, failed, I believe, only because they WOULD NOT make the effort.
I developed a similar model for the Keyboard program, but something else began to develop, almost within the first week.
One by one, students from each group of 48 would come up to me before or during class, asking if they could perform a “solo” piece on my teacher’s acoustic piano in the front of the room, which I would instruct from.
From the outset, the students were taking the chords and patterns I had taught them, and they were now COMPOSING piano music that was their own. These "solos" became part of our music period, needing serious blocks of time, especially when there were 9 or 10 hands going up at the same time, all volunteers with something new, ready to go.
Can you imagine my thrill with all of this, and witnessing the same thing in all six groups? A variety of musical styles from all regions of the world, jazz, baroque, classical, impressionistic, Chopin-like romantic styles, ragtime, blues, ethnic folk music suggestive of Asian, Russian, Arabic, Hispanic, and, well, American! It was a potpourri of any and everything.
People didn't know what to compare it to. I would invite school administrators to come in and witness what was happening. Even Rudolph Giuliani. the then Mayor of New York City, possibly heard about it from his wife, Donna Hanover. She was with me, witnessing this phenom in action. It clearly wasn’t your conventional school band or chorus.
My seven years that followed on the elementary level found me desiring to shift towards Drama and Musical Theatre. For one thing, I had no music room, and the children had no access to instruments. So I encouraged the playwriting and skit development which opened up a new genre for me to cultivate more of that “creative fruit” I was applying the "green thumb" towards.
Producing and Directing Summer Theater camps were another part of my professional work right until Karen and I heeded an unanticipated call to relocate up to Vermont. Spurred on by a long range vision for a Creative oriented Theater Arts center one day in the future, we moved in August of 2004, commencing this new chapter in our lives with the commitment to build new programs, with all we had to give, within the Castleton Hubbardton area of central Vermont.
A great surprise to me was a flood of inspiration, since moving to Vermont, that is “driving” me to pursue my OWN creative projects, in addition to my development of student work that I have described in my “Out of the closet” blog of June 29, 2007. (Is there something "special" in the air or the water, here in Vermont?
What I haven’t discussed until now is the fact that 4 and 5 year olds, volunteer to come up to the piano, standing, not sitting, and proceed to “make” music. Yeah, pretty much like what I've been talking about up until now. There are children that only need encouragement and a little bit of guidance. Then they improvise a story, on the spot. They sing the story while accompanying themselves. They might be matching their melodic creativity to the accompaniment, finding the same key. Or they are expressing in the accompaniment the theatrical mood of the story they are singing. Others who are not quite ready to sing are telling stories through their fingers.
You’ve got to see it to believe it.
And if my guess is right, based on what I witnessed in New York City, the children will absorb what their more adventurous classmates are doing, and they will follow, doing the same. I can pretty safely predict that most of them will be singing and playing their own improvised musical stories.
At ALT we will rely on that same “green thumb” that has brought success in the schools we have given ourselves to over the years. And what time constraints I've always had to work under. But not here at ALT. We'll have plenty of time. Finally! Time! Wow! Now, as long as the thumb stays "green". So hopeth Karen and yours truly.
Until next time. Leslie
Monday, July 2, 2007
Sunday, July 1, 2007
"OH, I COULD NEVER DO THAT"
When I was ten years old I woke up in the middle of the night, wide awake. I felt a curious compulsion to retrieve from my school bag a notebook and pencil, set myself up at the dining room table, and begin to write. Deep thoughts, poetic, a flow of words that were the embodiment of my mood at that 3:00 a.m. moment. I wrote a page or page and a half, looked it over, feeling pretty emotional about it. I thought to myself, "This is really different. Then I went back to bed and fell asleep.
A similar thing happened two years later. This time it was a two hundred word piece about fear of nuclear war . Because I had two much older brothers who talked about current events, I was probably the only 11 year old in America who was worried about war in this tiny country around the world that most people hadn't even heard of, Vietnam. My boy's heart blurted out a mix of of anger, worry, and sadness.
From age 13 on into adulthood, whenever that same“urge” came, I would respond in either of two ways:
1. Ignore it (This is going to be junk, so why bother?
Or 2. Write something. Then cut it to pieces. "This is junk. This is stupid. Why did I bother?"
Now where did this notion of JUNK AND WORTHLESSNESS come from? At ten and twelve I still had enough sense of wonder and, can we say, FAITH in the worth of these feelings, that I had enough courage to "get it out".
What changed? What was it about the years that ended in "-teen" that made "getting it out" like the worst thing in the world? What was there at ten, and gone at fourteen?
Faith in what I was doing. The Belief that my creative impulses were true, exciting, and would resonate with some of the folks in my world.
FAITH - ie: Belief. a Strength of Conviction. The Vision is True.
NO FAITH- ie: Unbelief, the Inability to grasp the hope. "It's too Good to be true."
I propose to you, gentle reader, that when I entered into adolescence and adulthood, I withdrew from my talents, knowingly and with some sense of guilt. I let them become “quenched”, “cauterized” by a malignant mood or atmosphere that "cast" itself over my creative "oomph". "Cast" like in an evil spell. In other words: I LET IT ALL SLIP AWAY.
I want to know who can identify with this phenomena. Did you experience a transition in your life where you found yourself believing that anything you tried to create would end up being “stupid, cornball, wimpy, trite, already been done, dumb, sissyish, second or third rate, not making any sense, boring?” You have no idea how easy it was for me to create the list of these 11 items just now. Obviously, I had been thoroughly contaminated.
Why does this judgment and self-condemnation of our creative flow strike so quickly? Who has done this "number" on our head?
Most of us feel confident enough in our skills at finding bargains, waiting for the best price, improving our financial situation, strategizing through how to handle the money, even complicated issues.
Why do we have such confidence when it come to money matters, yet leave "personal creativity" to those "special", slightly "oddball" people?
I do believe that there is an ENEMY of our soul that wants you and me to submit to a “law of talent" that proclaims with authority that “only a few special people can create anything truly worth while. They are the geniuses, the super talented. You are not the one in a million, or one in ten million, one in 300 million, or 600 million, or only one in the whole world who can do that".
What have we resigned ourselves to believe? Have we been duped? What kind of things do we say, from this perspective? Things like:
“Oh, I could never do that. I could never be like ………………......... ( Fill in the name of your artistic hero from your favored genre .
In American Logres Theatre we are going to fight and conquer this Intimidator of our faith in what we can do. Arnold may be the Terminator, but the Intimidator is far more dangerous because He is quite real and has done great damage to everyone I have ever known, and worse yet, he is even more powerful because very few of us ever attempt to overrule his defeatest attitude.
Now is the time to fight. I've begun. I want to help you fight. Both Karen and I, and the rest of the ALT community are united in this.
When you enter into the atmosphere of American Logres Theatre, you will hopefully find your mind and soul feeling invigorated, encouraged, ready to breathe in the air of “inspiration”. Then the creative "stuff" can begin to come out. Do you know that’s what the word inspiration means? Well...
EXPIRE is the opposite. It means to exhale, breathe out, to die. Finis. All done. All gone. Kaput.
INSPIRE is to breathe in. Receive the breath of the gods, or God. The fruit of inspiration is the Experience of vision, the dreaming of possibilities. Get ready to give birth, to dreams and visions. And together, we'll turn them into something.
A similar thing happened two years later. This time it was a two hundred word piece about fear of nuclear war . Because I had two much older brothers who talked about current events, I was probably the only 11 year old in America who was worried about war in this tiny country around the world that most people hadn't even heard of, Vietnam. My boy's heart blurted out a mix of of anger, worry, and sadness.
From age 13 on into adulthood, whenever that same“urge” came, I would respond in either of two ways:
1. Ignore it (This is going to be junk, so why bother?
Or 2. Write something. Then cut it to pieces. "This is junk. This is stupid. Why did I bother?"
Now where did this notion of JUNK AND WORTHLESSNESS come from? At ten and twelve I still had enough sense of wonder and, can we say, FAITH in the worth of these feelings, that I had enough courage to "get it out".
What changed? What was it about the years that ended in "-teen" that made "getting it out" like the worst thing in the world? What was there at ten, and gone at fourteen?
Faith in what I was doing. The Belief that my creative impulses were true, exciting, and would resonate with some of the folks in my world.
FAITH - ie: Belief. a Strength of Conviction. The Vision is True.
NO FAITH- ie: Unbelief, the Inability to grasp the hope. "It's too Good to be true."
I propose to you, gentle reader, that when I entered into adolescence and adulthood, I withdrew from my talents, knowingly and with some sense of guilt. I let them become “quenched”, “cauterized” by a malignant mood or atmosphere that "cast" itself over my creative "oomph". "Cast" like in an evil spell. In other words: I LET IT ALL SLIP AWAY.
I want to know who can identify with this phenomena. Did you experience a transition in your life where you found yourself believing that anything you tried to create would end up being “stupid, cornball, wimpy, trite, already been done, dumb, sissyish, second or third rate, not making any sense, boring?” You have no idea how easy it was for me to create the list of these 11 items just now. Obviously, I had been thoroughly contaminated.
Why does this judgment and self-condemnation of our creative flow strike so quickly? Who has done this "number" on our head?
Most of us feel confident enough in our skills at finding bargains, waiting for the best price, improving our financial situation, strategizing through how to handle the money, even complicated issues.
Why do we have such confidence when it come to money matters, yet leave "personal creativity" to those "special", slightly "oddball" people?
I do believe that there is an ENEMY of our soul that wants you and me to submit to a “law of talent" that proclaims with authority that “only a few special people can create anything truly worth while. They are the geniuses, the super talented. You are not the one in a million, or one in ten million, one in 300 million, or 600 million, or only one in the whole world who can do that".
What have we resigned ourselves to believe? Have we been duped? What kind of things do we say, from this perspective? Things like:
“Oh, I could never do that. I could never be like ………………......... ( Fill in the name of your artistic hero from your favored genre .
In American Logres Theatre we are going to fight and conquer this Intimidator of our faith in what we can do. Arnold may be the Terminator, but the Intimidator is far more dangerous because He is quite real and has done great damage to everyone I have ever known, and worse yet, he is even more powerful because very few of us ever attempt to overrule his defeatest attitude.
Now is the time to fight. I've begun. I want to help you fight. Both Karen and I, and the rest of the ALT community are united in this.
When you enter into the atmosphere of American Logres Theatre, you will hopefully find your mind and soul feeling invigorated, encouraged, ready to breathe in the air of “inspiration”. Then the creative "stuff" can begin to come out. Do you know that’s what the word inspiration means? Well...
EXPIRE is the opposite. It means to exhale, breathe out, to die. Finis. All done. All gone. Kaput.
INSPIRE is to breathe in. Receive the breath of the gods, or God. The fruit of inspiration is the Experience of vision, the dreaming of possibilities. Get ready to give birth, to dreams and visions. And together, we'll turn them into something.
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