It’s just after second-grade recess at Carter Lake Elementary, and Anna Peterson is in the hallway, drawing. Headphones on, she’s impervious to passers-by and noise from nearby classrooms, including her own.
• MULTIMEDIA: Hear an audio slide show On the paper, she’s drawn a tumult of swirly red loops, framed by red and green picture corners and punctuated by jagged red solids. On the headphones, playing on repeat, is Variation 28 of the Goldberg Variations by J.S. Bach.
Eight-year-old Anna, like her classmates at this McChord Air Force Base school, is in the middle of the Goldberg Performance Project. A pilot program developed by Pacific Lutheran University piano faculty member Amy Grinsteiner in partnership with Carter Lake, the Goldberg Project teaches elementary students about classical music by making their art part of the performance and expressing their emotions along the way.
While listening to their own Variation, students draw what the music suggests to them. The resulting artwork will be screened behind Grinsteiner as she plays the Variations in a public concert Sunday at PLU’s Lagerquist Hall, with students recognized on stage and the original artwork displayed gallery-style at a reception afterward.
Grinsteiner developed the idea last year for her doctorate degree as a way of getting more classical music and art into schools, with minimum training required of teachers. “Teachers get science and social science kits,” said Grinsteiner, “but they don’t seem to get art kits. While I’m fine with playing ‘Bumblebee Boogie,’ we have to find a way to expose kids to great music. They love it when they hear it.” The pianist’s “kit” for the Goldberg Project includes lessons on line, color and shading, a lesson on pitch, tempo and dynamics and a class visit by a professional musician.
With the public performance aspect, the project also gives students a chance to attend a classical concert and see their work displayed in public, something they wouldn’t often get otherwise, says Grinsteiner, who’s contributing her performance for free.
She’s hoping to market the project to conservatories where, she says, it will also benefit students by building their audience and connecting them to the community.
While last year’s project was held at the University of Washington in Seattle, this year Grinsteiner has the support of PLU for a performance venue, which will enable more students and families to attend.
But for the kids, there’s another benefit – self-expression through art, as the class talks about emotions and how they’re portrayed. Teacher Corey Harmon, who led his Carter Lake second-graders through Grinsteiner’s project last year, is enthusiastic about it: “I’m always amazed by the result. Students who are not normally artistic do remarkable work.”
Yet Bach’s Goldberg Variations don’t immediately strike you as visual music. Written for solo harpsichord (Grinsteiner will play them on piano), they take a set theme through 30 variations which can sometimes seem abstract and were, in fact, composed to ease the insomnia of Bach’s patron.
Harmon, however, thinks their abstraction helps inspire creativity. “A lot of students, asked to draw a person or thing, say they can’t draw. With abstract music, they’re not psyching themselves out. It simplifies it.” Most of the drawings are abstract. They employ large color fields in blocks, stripes or domes, some incorporating line work. Anna Peterson conveys the “happy” staccato passages of her Variation with swirls and the violent trill interruptions with jagged solids.
Students also worked on evaluating their work, writing down what they had drawn and why. “When I listen to this, it reminds me of my mom,” wrote Gavin Temple, whose Variation 17 was a whirl of red, yellow and black stripes and squiggles. “I feel like I want to dance,” wrote Christopher Ramirez, expressing Variation 23 through large squares of color.
For kids in a former Title One school where few of the class has ever attended a concert or been to an art gallery, this project is a big deal. Some, like Andrew Lewis, whose Variation 26 expressed Bach’s running triplets with strong, straight lines in red (for happiness) and black (for sadness) think the concert’s “pretty cool.” Others, like Lauren Stephens, find not knowing how the audience will react to their art “pretty scary.”
Even just the fact of connecting music and art with emotions, says school Principal Paul Douglas, is important: “That’s huge for kids, particularly the kids we have here. They struggle with the deployments and everything, and for them to have another way of expressing their feelings is great.”
For Harmon and Grinsteiner, the Goldberg Project is about making music matter to young people and getting people of all ages to interact with music and art.
It’s Anna Peterson, though, who sums it up for her classmates: “I feel really happy that (the art) is gonna be up there, that people will see it.”
Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568
blogs.thenewstribune.com/arts
