Music Education Today: Learning More

What role can music play in

A conversation with Joan Katz Napoli, The Cleveland Orchestra’s senior director of education and community programs, about learning through music and music-making.

Q: Please talk a little about yourself. What brought you into music education? Joan: Cleveland is my hometown. Singing in chorus was my fi rst love. Then I heard The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall on a school fi eldtrip I’ll never forget — the beauty of the building, the intensity of the music, the whole experience left a huge impression on me. After college, I spent 16 years in children’s television in Washington D.C., fi rst at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, then at PBS, where my work received a Peabody Award and two Emmy nominations. That work ignited a lifelong commitment to kids and learning, which I brought with me when I returned to my hometown — and to my beloved Cleveland Orchestra! — to raise a family. Here I am 26 wonderful years later with an Orchestra more committed to learning and serving the community than ever before. Q: Why is a symphony orchestra involved in music education? Isn’t that something that usually happens in private lessons or school classes?

Joan: In many schools, both public and private, when budgets are squeezed, arts programs — including music — are too often among the fi rst cuts. This is a situation that may worsen as schools prioritize other needs coming out of the pandemic. We want to help ensure that music is part of every child’s life, regardless of a school’s fi nancial situation. Decades of research has documented the positive impacts of music on learning. Kids engaged in music have better grades, higher school attendance and graduation rates, better workforce opportunities, and more positive outcomes overall. The rigor, self-discipline, teamwork, and perseverance that music study requires are skills that transfer directly into other areas of learning and living, and which last a lifetime.

Since its founding in 1918, The Cleveland Orchestra has been involved in teaching and inspiring young people through musical concerts, lessons, and presentations. Q: How long has The Cleveland Orchestra been involved in music education?

Joan: Education and community service have been part of The Cleveland Orchestra’s mission from day one in 1918. Frankly, even before day one. The Orchestra’s founder, Adella Prentiss Hughes, recognized from the start the inherent value of music education for children, as well as the need to grow an audience for her new orchestra. Our fi rst music director, Nikolai Sokoloff , was hired to create a music education program in the Cleveland Public Schools at the same time he was working to hire the fi rst musicians to form the Orchestra itself. Teaching about music and learning to play a musical instrument was considered an essential part of a wellrounded education back then. Many of us still think it should be!

Q: What kinds of programs did the Orchestra off er to students a hundred years ago? Joan: In the earliest years, The Cleveland Orchestra’s involvement was to off er a grounding in classical symphonic music. In cooperation with the Cleveland Board of Education, beginning in 1920, Orchestra members gave instrumental music lessons on Saturday morn-

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ings to children in Cleveland schools. The Music Memory Contests that followed, in which students competed to identify popular classical pieces, became legendary. Early on, too, the community’s school children were brought in buses each year to experience the music in person, played by The Cleveland Orchestra. In fact, across the past century, The Cleveland Orch estra has introduced over 4 million young people to live orchestral musical performances. By the 1950s and ’60s, annual fi eld trips to Severance Hall ensured that almost every student growing up in Northeast Ohio experienced The Cleveland Orchestra in person — and so many adults today remember coming to Severance Hall on these school fi eldtrips to hear the Orchestra for the very fi rst time. Times and priorities have changed in schools and in society, of course, but more than a century later, the Orchestra’s commitment to education and community service is still core to our mission, and has never been more important.

Q: What role can The Cleveland Orchestra play in advocating for and promoting the study of music? Joan: Many of the kids who could benefi t the most are the ones with the least access to music. So one of The Cleveland Orchestra’s goals is to serve as an advocate for the importance of music education as part of educating the whole child, and to partner with school districts across Northeast Ohio to demonstrate music’s positive outcomes. Given the many challenges that Cleveland faces as a city and as part of the larger Northeast Ohio community, The Cleveland Orchestra has a responsibility to be part of the solution — to use the Orchestra’s voice, visibility, and expertise to make music part of a wellrounded education for all students. For us, this is an equity issue — because all children deserve the joy and lifelong benefi ts of music. We are determined to help bridge the gap between today’s school budgets and the documented lifelong benefi ts music brings. Our programs — and our generous supporters — are helping us pursue these goals.

Q: Can you talk about some specifi c examples of programs that are making a diff erence? Joan: We’ve had a particularly strong partnership with the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD) from the start, where we’ve introduced a number of pioneering programs over the years. For example, Musical Neighborhoods, in eighteen CMSD preschool classrooms, uses music to develop and reinforce school readiness skills. In addition, the Crescendo Strings Program in Slavic Village’s Mound School, the Brass Program in Hough’s Wade Park School, and Music Mentors at Cleveland School of the Arts all focus on music-making and music mastery. Beyond CMSD, we serve hundreds of schools and school districts throughout the region. Just prior to the pandemic, we received a transformational endowment gift from Mrs. Jane Nord, which guarantees free tickets to Cleveland Orchestra Education Concerts for all students, forever. This is visionary thinking and planning, to ensure that music and The Cleveland Orchestra are part of future generations.

Q: How did the Covid-19 pandemic aff ect the Orchestra’s education off erings? Joan: The past year has been a challenge for everyone. Covid aff ected everything — school, work, families, and more — everything except our determination to make a diff erence in our community. Of course, in-person performances were cancelled. But we took the opportunity to rethink how The Cleveland Orchestra can best make a diff erence in education. The pandemic accelerated our development

The Orchestra’s Crescendo program in the Slavic Village neighborhood continued even through the pandemic, when lessons and teaching moved outdoors.

of new digital resources. These greatly expanded the reach of education programs this past year, not only for children, but for adults as well. Our Mindful Music Moments series, begun four years ago, is one example. This web-based program combines Cleveland Orchestra music recordings with mindfulness prompts in bite-size daily off erings — and was a ready resource when the pandemic started, bringing calm and comfort to tens of thousands via our social media platforms. Music combined with mindfulness is a powerful tool for social and emotional learning for people of every age!

Q: Do you have other examples from the past year? Joan: My staff and I, together with the Orchestra’s musicians, have been very busy developing new off erings and retooling existing programs. Our brand-new What is an Orchestra? and Choose Your Instrument digital series provide music educators — and families — with videos, interactive quizzes, and more to keep kids engaged and excited about music virtually. Digital off erings won’t replace live concerts or live instruction, but they are 21st-century learning tools that convey the fundmentals of orchestral music to young generations. And although Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra musicians had to remain virtual all year, online sessions provided them a unique opportunity to directly interact with composers, guest artists, and guest conductors from around the world. This past year also made us even more aware of disparities among school districts. Most noticeable in Cleveland was the “digital divide.” But also a lack of stable housing and food insecurity. These are all prerequisites for learning. Of course, an orchestra can’t solve all problems, but our staff and musicians worked tirelessly throughout the past year to address the challenges we could, and to keep music present in students’ and residents’ lives across these very uncertain months.

Q: What are your hopes and challenges going forward? Joan: Diff erent communities across Northeast Ohio have diff erent needs, and we want to help bridge gaps in music education in all districts, including those with least access. My greatest hope is that every child across this region, city, or suburb, has the opportunity to play an instrument or sing in a choir, to experience the sheer joy of music, and to hear The Cleveland Orchestra — at Severance Hall, at Blossom Music Center, or right in their own neighborhood. I’ve been with the Orchestra for more than 25 years and it is exciting to see how well we’ve been able to adapt, to keep moving forward and to harness the power of music to change lives, one student at a time. In a normal year, without the pandemic, we serve over 100,000 with our education and community programs and through our young audience initiatives. We want The Cleveland Orchestra to be defi ned not only by the excellence of our music onstage, but by the value we bring to our hometown communities across Northeast Ohio. With the variety and reach of our education programs, we invest in the future of this region, in generations of students who will become tomorrow’s leaders. We want to be Cleveland’s Orchestra in the truest sense of the words.

Mindful Music Moments help students prepare for the schoolday through focus on four-minute classical music pieces each morning.

Joan Katz Napoli has directed Th e Cleveland Orchestra’s education and community engagement programs since 1995.

To learn more about Cleveland Orchestra education initiatives, please visit www.clevelandorchestra.com/education.

To read more about the connections between music and learning, and the value of music for life and living:

Your Musical Child: Inspiring Kids to Play and Sing

for Keeps by Jessica Baron Turner. 239 pages. 2004, String Letter Media. $14.95 list. (Hal Leonard Corporation, 7777 West Bluemound Road, P.O. Box 13819 Milwaukee, WI 53213). A hands-on book for parents and teachers on how to engage young people in music-making .

The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth

by Michael Spitzer. 480 pages. 2021, Bloomsbury Publishing. $34.95 list. An insightful and in-depth look at how music has shaped humans as individuals and as societies and communities, across history and today.