News Stories/Symphony Welcomes Full House To TWT As Annual Music Education Ends Till Fall

 

By C.S Gillbert

 

On the eve of Thursday’s master concert, the Conch-born South Florida Symphony Orchestra completed its 2013-14 Do It for ME (Music Education) program at Tennessee Williams Theater with a standing-room only audience of more than 500 students in grades one through five and their teachers from Poinciana Elementary, Montessori Charter, Big Pine Elementary and  Treasure Village Montessori Charter in Islamorada. There was in addition a homeschooling group from the Mid to Upper Keys.

 

 

The Keys Council of the Arts arranged transportation for the young audience —  a gargantuan job using relays of school buses and at least one Conch Trolley.  Efforts are ongoing between Monroe County School District Assistant Superintendent Terri Axford and council Executive Director Liz Young to expand the program into Coral Shores.

 

 

All of the children had been visited in their classrooms prior to the performance to acquaint them with the orchestra and its instruments as well as the specially commissioned ME concert, based on 501 years of Florida’s written history, with themes of care for the environment and each other. They were also taught, added Jacqueline Lorber, symphony executive director and president, “how to behave in an audience.”

 

 

Flautist and music educator Donna Wissinger, who with pianist/educator Joy Myers taught the concert’s lessons in classrooms and on stage, piped the audience through the lobby dressed as a colorful conquistador. She would also be costumed as a 19th century environmentalist, Everglades explorer and artist Bartram, wearing costumes circa 1912 to honor the arrival of Henry Flagler’s railroad in Key West. Both music and interactive instruction were illustrated by an accurately historical slide show.

 

 

“They’re so excited,” reported Wissinger in the lobby before the concert, noting how “fantastically well they did in the schools yesterday. They’re learning to look at art and feel art and take away a great history.” They wrote stories, she said; the class succeeded in “touching their hearts about taking care of nature and other people.”

 

 

This educational concert first debuted last fall, prior to the symphony’s first master concert. The third and final concert is scheduled during spring break, so the ME program will not be held again until next year, Young said. Eventually all district students will experience the concert.

 

 

A highlight of each concert -– as has been the case since the Symphony in the Schools program was first introduced during the symphony’s second season 1999-2000 — is a description and demonstration of each of the orchestra’s sections of instruments: strings, woodwinds, brass and percussion presented by a good-humored principal instrumentalist.

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Also contributing to the instruction, of course, was SFSO maestra Sebrina Maria Alfonso.

 

 

Visiting adults attending were, in addition to Lorber and Young, the orchestra’s founding president Elena Spottswood, music education program patron Marilynn Weber, Poinciana School Principal Christina McPherson, Take Stock in Children executive director Lesley Holmes with her five-year-old son, Cruz, members of the arts council board and symphony patrons.

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