THE JEWISH JOURNAL

3-11-2005
Music for a New ‘Generation’
by Beverly Gray, Contributing Writer

With all the bouncing and clapping at the concert for 700 Valley Beth Shalom second and third graders, it’s hard to believe the event was not simply entertainment.

“Linking Our Heritage: Songs of the Generations,” featuring musicians from the Los Angeles Jewish Symphony (LAJS) and guest-star Sam Glaser performing a range of Jewish pieces, marked the culmination of a four-week program in which trained teaching artists from the LAJS visited day school classrooms. They educated the youngsters both about music and about Jewish tradition. This outreach effort, now underwritten by Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation as well as the Jewish Community Foundation, has been part of the orchestra’s mission since its founding 11 years ago.

“What we try to do is enable students to develop a relationship with the teaching artists and with the orchestra,” said LAJS educational director Ilizabeth Gilbert.

Currently, some Jewish day schools teach arts appreciation and many provide music lessons as an after-school option. The LAJS outreach program adds a new dimension to schools’ music offerings by helping the children connect emotionally and intellectually with the music and connecting the music to Jewish tradition.

One of this year’s teaching artists, Bassoonist Leslie Lashinsky, taught concepts such as melody, rhythm, texture and color by having students draw to music. She had them choose instruments for scores to go with events in Jewish history. A third grader, for instance, imagined bassoons, violas and trumpets accompanying the giving of the Torah.

All four of the current LAJS teaching artists were trained by Gilbert, whose methods reflect the multidisciplinary approach pioneered by Leonard Bernstein.

“Bernstein felt that the arts could be used as a vehicle to teach other subject areas,” Gilbert said.

The LAJS program augments the day schools’ Hebraic studies curricula. The underlying goal, said executive director Wayne Hinton, is not so much to teach children music as to prompt them “to be aware of music and how it relates to their culture.”

The teachers also encouraged the students to delve into their own family heritage. For instance, kids learned a Sephardic song that celebrates a baby’s birth, and then were asked to research how their own names were chosen.

Because the program encouraged intergenerational sharing, parents and grandparents were part of the mix. The Feb. 14 concert at VBS, attended by many senior citizens as well as children, was a chance for program participants to show what they’d learned.

Music director Noreen Green is pleased with the program, but she is already making plans to add a Judaeo-Persian tune to the repertoire that already includes songs in Hebrew, English and Ladino.

For Danielle Simpson and Naomi Jaeger, students at Pressman Academy, the big discovery was how well the musicians played. The two girls, both of whom take piano lessons, agreed “we wish we could be that good in music.”

Hadassah Aber, a teacher from Maimonides Torah Academy in Lomita, has students who play instruments, but, for the bulk of them, the LAJS performance was a first opportunity to experience music in a professional concert setting.

“I think it was nice learning about it in a Jewish context,” Aber said.

“This was one of our most successful programs, due to the number of students who participated, the number of schools that participated,” Gilbert said.

Next year’s program, “A Patchwork of Cultures,” will again be supported by the Righteous Persons Foundation. Schools interested in being included should contact Julie Blumberg in the LAJS office by fall of 2005 at (213) 805-4270. For more information go to www.lajewishsymphony.com. — Beverly Gray, Contributing Writer