The PS22 Chorus of 2010 made the cover of CHORAL DIRECTOR MAGAZINE! The magazine includes a very in-depth article/interview with writer Eliahu Sussman, and features some excellent photos from Claudio Papapietro. Unfortunately the on-line version doesn't include all the great photos of the kids that were used in the hard copy version, but the complete article is available on Choral Director Magazine's website. (The magazine was apparently published back in November, but it just came to my attention the other day!)
7 comments:
Congratulations, Mr. B!
Hi, Gregg-
Somehow the Choral Ditector interview doesn't fully capture what you convey in the simple phrase, "feel the music" As you know, this inclues the feeling inhernet in melody, harmony and rhythmn. But it is also the feeling conveyed by the lyrics.
The musical package, it seems to me, bathes the kids (and listeners) in the spectrum of emotions from joy, love and exuberance to loss, sadness, grief. It begins to give the kids the ability to feel freely. To have emotions rather than emotions having them.
To be vulnerable to emotion in the way "feeling the music" provides is so different from contemporary culture of "being cool" "having it together" and being emotionally invulnerable. THERE'S A POWERFUL EDUCATION GOING ON HERE.
I have heard chorus members say more than once something to the effect that wherever I am at, when I get to chorus everything's OK.
In feeling the music, they are learning, not in their heads, but in their hearts, in their experience that anger, resentment, sadness, and hassle can be transformed easily and pretty quickly. They are subtely learning they can get unstuck. They are learning or beginning to learn that they are not victims of their circumstances, but that by allowing emotion to flow through them (rather than resisting emotion), they can find the part in them that is really free, wide open, really loved and fully loving.
Love of music is important; your curriculum, of course, includes that, but is much more than that: You are facilitating becoming real human beings. And I am pretty sure you know, if only instinctually, exactly what you are doing.
As the kids say...you're the best Mr. B.
Bruce Gardiner
Wow. I've touched on things you've said in other interviews moreso perhaps, but I've NEVER put it as eloquently as all that. Thanks, Bruce.
I had no idea there was a magazine out!.. I am glad u made the cover.. You and your group are getting the notice that is justly deserved...I thought your last semester's group was the best but this one is special as well...I have a feeling no matter what group you have, u have that touch to bring out the best in them.
Mr. B, Your work with the students has inspired me so much! I want to thank you for recording the songs and putting them out into the world so random anybodies like me can get such pleasure from them!!
Where can I send a "thank you for the inspiration" donation to you/to the school?
Thanks!! - Laura Baran, NYC
Mr. B: So much kudos to you for this astonishing body of work, and so wise to place it in the context of modern popular music. Your work, though far more ongoing, reminds so much of that of Christian Vander, leader of the progressive rock band Magma in France (now in its 40th year!), who took one of his epic and intense compositions, "Mekanik Destruktiw Kommandoh," and had it reworked for a children's choir, with child musicians. This was relelased on CD as "Baba Yaga Le Sorcier" and might be of interest to you: http://www.seventhrecords.com/CVANDER/AKT7/cdbabayagauk.html
My son works at the Urban Assembly School of Art and Music, where jazz musicians happen by regularly, but your work with younger kids is to be emulated by others.
Congratulations!
Dana Lawrence- IA
congrats such a nice thing for them to put the chorus in this kind of magizene congrats!
-sandy
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