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Music in Schools Initiative adapts, rediscovers mission
When the pandemic sent the world online in March, the Music in Schools Initiative’s administrative team scrambled to figure out how to adapt—how to serve young musicians from the New Haven Public Schools at a distance. The initiative’s director, Rubén Rodríguez ’11MM, pointed out in May that young music-makers from the New Haven Public Schools were receiving just a “fraction of the experience” they normally would through the program, in which graduate-student teaching artists from YSM bolster the work of music educators.
Soprano Gabriella Xavier, who’s now an 11th-grader at Wilbur Cross High School, is a member of the initiative’s Morse Chorale. In the spring, Xavier and her fellow choristers, unable to make music as an ensemble in real time, worked on fundamentals— sight-singing, pitch recognition, and the like. “We’ve all learned how to listen a little better,” Xavier said.
Tubist and teaching artist Aidan Zimmermann ’20MM found himself asking bigger questions than those having to do with whatever specific musical lessons he was trying to impart over Zoom. If there’s no concert for which to prepare, “What is this going to do for the student?” he asked, rhetorically. “What does this mean? What can I give them?” His answers? Adapting to the moment “puts the musicmaking we do into context,” Zimmermann said. “This is what music means in the community, this is what education means in the community.” The students, Zimmermann said, “are there, they’re present, and they’re captivated.”
So, too, were students who participated in the initiative’s Morse Summer Music Academy, which, this past July, became MorseOnline, and, despite the limitations of making music online, offered a new course, Creative Music-Making, that was in large part designed by composer and teaching artist Alexis C. Lamb ’20MM and her colleagues in the school’s composition program.
Seventh-grader Kayla Pressey was just one student who was introduced, through the new course, to the world of conceiving and writing music. Pressey, Lamb wrote in a blog post, “unlocked a beautiful world of sonic possibilities” through “collages of spoken voice, humming, whistling, singing, virtual instruments, song samples, and even her own recordings of flute.”
“My biggest accomplishment with writing music,” Pressey said in Lamb’s blog post, “has been being able to put together music without having to ask for help, and also being able to make music out of things that you would never think could make music.”
Kayla Pressey
MorseOnline is a program of YSM’s Music in Schools Initiative, which is made possible by an endowment from the Yale College Class of 1957. Learn more about MorseOnline here and the Music in Schools Initiative here, and read Lamb’s blog post here. q
