Flutist Eleanor Powers Jones, early years
Breaking: Kids are people.
Stating the obvious has limited use, but when big people try to talk to little people, returning to basics seems necessary. Especially if big people in orchestras are trying to coax little people in audiences into remaining the audience of the future. There are some guidelines.
Keep it short.
Keep it great.
Focus on the music.
No talking—for the adults. (The kids can talk a little.)
Young people’s concerts have grown in popularity—get them hooked early, and they’ll be hooked for life. (Admittedly, it worked for cigarette companies.) But just like the famed Young People’s Concerts that Leonard Bernstein used to influence a generation of young Americans (hand raised here), the problems are still the same.
Adults love music for its complexity, and emotional variety. Kids live in the moment. The two are bound to clash.
Eleanor Powers Jones is a ten-year old flutist from Rockport, Mass. She has already had multiple concert experiences, thanks to a better-than-usual music program in her school, and the presence of an education-minded presenter, Rockport Music, right in her own town. Her memories seem to epitomize little people’s reactions.
“You got a fancy grilled-cheese made with waffles,” she remembers, from a visit with grandparents to Boston’s Symphony Hall. She’s had only positive experiences—in-school artist visits, pop-up concerts, outreach programs—and thinks that’s a common reaction. “I remember all the kids being mellow,” she says of most presentations. Those memories mix in with the recall of certain instruments, a vague recollection of “a string quartet,” not many details about the repertory, and lots of fun listening.
Kids do everything—with equal intensity. In bursts. So if an expensive visit to a Broadway show has the same value as the quarter and two rocks found on the sidewalk—near the pigeon—where should the focus be?
The music.
“There’s nothing I can to do explain it, to make them enjoy it, other than to hear it,” says Francesco Lecce-Chong, music director at both the Eugene and Santa Rosa symphonies. Those orchestras have extensive programs for young people, and Lecce-Chong’s own enthusiasm has enhanced those presentations. He also leads a New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concert next March—just one of several prominent conductors that orchestra uses for its YPCs, including music director Jaap van Zweden.
“When I talk, I want to make them feel comfortable,” Lecce-Chong says. “I don’t necessarily want to teach them about the music. Give them a taste of a real concert. Don’t tailor to them.”
“If the music is great, that’s the most important part,” agrees José-Luis Novo, music director at the Annapolis Symphony. “If you talk, concentrate on a few aspects of the music. They’ll figure out everything else. Do short pieces, explain it to them briefly, and children will react.”
Conductor Roderick Cox agrees. Cox, who guests extensively from his base in Berlin, has conducted YPCs during multiple seasons in Milwaukee and Pittsburgh. He’s also on the NY Phil’s YPC roster this season.
“Young people are attracted to excellent music, just like adults,” he says. “Students gravitate toward storytelling. At one YPC in Seattle, we played the “Firebird.’ They loved it. They could hear the story present in the music.”
Welcome littles, and bigs will follow
The North Carolina Symphony—with state funding that fuels a broad education mission—piles all its musicians into buses forty times a year to criss-cross North Carolina. “We think it’s the most extensive outreach of any orchestra,” says Jason Spencer, director of education, referring not only to the road trips, but dozens of main-stage performances in Raleigh’s Meymandi Hall, online resources, residencies and teacher workshops. The New York Phil has made its historic Young People’s Concerts—we think of them as beginning with Leonard Bernstein’s, but they started in 1924—into an industry standard. The presence of van Zweden and its impressive roster of YPC guest conductors gives evidence of the NYPhil’s continuing commitment.
The Cleveland Orchestra’s remarkable list of educational activities makes one wonder how they have time for subscribers: high-profile concerts at Severance Hall get complemented by hundreds of in-school programs, and vast online resources. Novo himself conducts the popular Annapolis family concerts. The Eugene Symphony gets inventive: last year an afternoon of Beethoven included a Musical Time Machine devised by a robotics team.
But no organization creates a family-friendly vibe like Houston’s ROCO Ensemble. The group, founded by artistic director Alecia Lawyer in 2005, has offered child care during concerts since its inception. Child care and music lessons: licensed providers are joined by music teachers. Audiences benefit: “We save marriages, one concert at a time,” Lawyer says.
“When my church was renovating, I wanted to form an orchestra,” she says of ROCO Ensemble’s beginnings. “I thought, ‘The church has a kids night out, why not have a concert for adults too.’ We do them at five o’clock. We use licensed day-care workers, and a really fine music teacher. We’ve been doing it from the very beginning, and our musicians use it too. We can fit up to 45 kids.”
The littles in the ROCORooters programs get their own repertory lesson, a brief trip to the adult concert (“Hi Mommy”), and then, of course, pizza. No age discrimination either; parents and kids, grandparents and caregivers—everyone gets welcomed.
“I’m not listening anymore”
Little people love all kinds of music—for a while. A two-hour concert is just too long for growing bodies that need to wiggle, squirm, and poke somebody. But giving them the flavor of the concert experience—a bit of the energy that adults experience—that’s the trick.
“Get them involved immediately,” Lecce-Chong suggests. “I made them sing the ‘Ode to Joy’ till they got it right, before we played Beethoven. Get them invested right off the bat.”
“I do a thing that’s partly education, but mostly to deal with distractions,” says Mike Miller, Cleveland Orchestra trumpeter and active YPC presenter. “I have hose, six or eight feet long, with a funnel to blow in. The kids hold it along the length, to feel the vibrations. I’ll always pick the kids who are creating distractions, and all of a sudden they start paying attention.”
Sticking to consistent repertory remains important. “I’m turned off by music that is pieced together,” Lecce-Chong says, “just to make a show. I love jazz, I love non-classical genres. We do that, but I want them to be quality things on their own. Play great music, in short excerpts, but try to include as many full pieces as possible.”
“We use the simplest concepts,” says New York Philharmonic’s associate principal violist Rebecca Young. “Dualities, like adagio/allegro. We focus on an instrument family. My overarching goal is to make them have fun. So much fun they want to come back.”
Young began hosting the NY Phil’s Very Young People’s Concerts—aimed for audiences aged 3 though 6—more than a decade ago, and embraces her role creatively.
She fabricates narrators—“when I first thought of Modern Major General, I wondered if I could pull it off,” she says—to drive interest. The VYPC programs once used a variety of musician/hosts, she says, “and sometimes I could feel the energy drain away because of the changes. So now I don’t leave the stage.”
She describes a more linear approach for the littles—keeping distractions down, the story moving along with a tight focus. “We have the kids come in through different stations, playing games with dance and music,” Young says. “We warm them up, get them ready to hear certain words. I feel like I have them along with me, as long as it’s focused.”
She also noticed that video accompaniment—which seems like a no-brain winner for young audiences—actually distracts attention. Novo has experienced the same thing in Annapolis: “then we are taking the power and importance of the music away.”
Start and don’t stop
Breaking news update: Musicians used to be kids.
Getting the littles in the door (when they have no choice) is easy. Getting them to embrace music on their own—and maybe even to start playing instrument, and stick with it—there’s the rub
For a vanishing generation, Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts did the trick. Last year’s birthday centennial, with hundreds of performances of Bernstein’s own music, re-ignited that feeling in some.
“I did eight Bernstein concerts last year,” Lecce-Chong says. “Lenny could talk to a room of five-year-olds—that’s his important legacy for me. He asked people to elevate their thinking, and to understand his thinking. He did not play down to people.”
Bernstein’s passion onstage connected with kids. “Positive performance experiences are a must, Cox says. “Any instrument studies have to be complemented with positive performance experiences, where you can imagine yourself onstage.”
“Secretly, I want to let them know that playing an instrument is something they can do,” says Mike Miller. “If I could do that, they can do that. I learned because my grandfather had a trumpet he let me monkey around with. So maybe I can could do for them what that trumpet did for me. The notion that you can gain some skill, and express yourself, that you can feel good with something that’s not electric, and not exorbitantly expensive. If I can plant that feeling just once.”
Bernstein’s legacy aside, conductors from and earlier era would rarely address young audiences. No longer: Spreading enthusiasm about music starts on the podium with this generation.
“I have to remind myself what type of music inspired me, and the players in the orchestra,” Cox says. “When I dumb down the presentation, it doesn’t have much musical appeal. Young people’s concerts with the some of the ‘Ride of the Valkyrie’ or ‘Firebird’—that’s riveting music, exciting to latch on to.”
Novo grew up in Spain, “listening to concerts on the TV, with my father singing ahead of the music. I thought that was amazing. That high level of passion, like my father had, that was enough to impress me.”
Performing for littles isn’t easy, given that most of the performers have a day job already.
“It’s is a lot of work, a lot of pressure,” Rebecca Young says. “But the minute I’m out there I feel like I’m home. For me, this makes a great balance with performing. I’m using a different part of my brain. I feel like a big clown; I’m expected to do something.”
Gratitude for having things that others don’t also plays a big part, especially for the Cleveland Orchestra’s Miller—a local boy.
“Who knows what path I would have gone down,” he says. “I grew up in Cleveland Heights, and maybe I feel more gratitude to the city. When I go into neighborhoods where the kids have nothing, where there’s lead paint everywhere—well, I remember that I’m here partly because of those neighborhoods.”