[Dixielandjazz] "Everybody's Doin' It"

Steve barbone barbonestreet at earthlink.net
Sat May 13 07:33:58 PDT 2006


Not OKOM but a great example of doing what needs to be done in order to keep
what ever kind of music turns YOU on viable for following generations. Right
now the classical music scene in Berlin is thriving, yet they are
intelligent enough to realize that still, the young need to be courted.

If the energies of the IAJE, OKOM Festivals, the trade press and individual
bands could all be harnessed in a similar manner, OKOM would surely thrive.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


Berlin Philharmonic Forges New Links to the Young

NY TIMES - By DANIEL J. WAKIN - May 13, 2006

BERLIN, May 7 ‹ Even in the land of Beethoven and Brahms, the fight is on to
keep classical music alive among the young.

Fearing the loss of future audiences, the once-staid Berlin Philharmonic has
constructed an elaborate education program, something still relatively rare
on the Continent. Many orchestras in Britain and the United States have been
making similar efforts to draw in youngsters and educate the public, but in
catching up, the Berliners have created one of Europe's most ambitious
programs.

"You can't take it for granted," said the orchestra's principal conductor,
Simon Rattle. "It's a very different society now."

The urgency comes as some surprise when you consider the landscape. Berlin
has three opera houses and four major orchestras. Musical institutions
abound across the land. Berlin Philharmonic concerts are usually close to
sellouts.

"Music belongs to the people in this country, maybe more than any place in
the world," said George Benjamin, an English composer who was in Berlin last
week to conduct his music with the orchestra. "What they're doing in Berlin
is miraculous," he said.

The Philharmonic's musicians have visited two dozen Berlin schools in the
last four years. Nearly 2,000 students have taken part. The staff is soon to
grow to five, from four. Next season, the education department plans to
carry out 13 major projects. They have been increasing every year.

New York received a taste of the program in January, during a Berlin
Philharmonic tour, when orchestra musicians and students from Park West High
School, on West 50th Street, collaborated on a student-created piece. The
orchestra also plans to work with New York schoolchildren during its
three-week residency at Carnegie Hall in November 2007.

Catherine Milliken, a soft-spoken but intense Australian, runs the education
program. She is an oboist and a founding member of the Ensemble Modern, a
new-music group based in Frankfurt.

"Now, in Germany, orchestras are having to prove there's something they're
giving back to the community on a very grass-roots level," she said. "They
can't stay in these beautiful glass houses serving a small audience and
taking all this money." The government heavily subsidizes German orchestras.

The Berliners' efforts received widespread publicity from a recent
documentary, "Rhythm Is It!," about the creation of a dance performance of
Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" with 250 schoolchildren. The film was shown in
Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria and Japan and has won several
small festival prizes, but has yet to attract an American distributor.

"The film has just whipped up interest, internationally and politically,"
Ms. Milliken said. 

The education program benefits the Berlin Philharmonic in other ways.

In the United States, orchestras have education departments not just to
generate future audiences and fill the gap left by abdicating school
systems. They also subscribe to the principle that ‹ as Willie Sutton said
when asked why he robbed banks ‹ that's where the money is. In the case of
classical music, the sources are foundations and government.

The Berlin Philharmonic is learning.

The orchestra derives 57 percent of its revenues from ticket sales and
touring, but its roughly $43 million budget depends on government subsidies
of nearly $19 million. Strongly independent, the ensemble has long been
loath to accept corporate money, for fear it would be subject to pressures
from donors, said Marc Chahin, the orchestra's spokesman.

But now, Deutsche Bank has provided a $4.1 million grant, most of it used
for the education program. (Some also goes to a glossy magazine and
touring.) The money is welcome, given the tight finances of Berlin's
government.

"Politicians don't feel responsible for art and refrain from sponsoring
art," said Jan Diesselhorst, a cellist and one of the orchestra's
co-chairmen, "so we have to look for other sources, to look for social
legitimization. We have to look for sponsors as well."

Sir Simon brought in the program when he arrived as the Berliners' music
director in 2002 after an 18-year commitment to the City of Birmingham
Symphony in England, and it was taken to heart by a significant number of
young, energetic members of the orchestra.

The Berlin method calls for involving students ‹ many from poor or
ethnically mixed areas of the city ‹ directly in performances, usually in
contemporary works and often incorporating art and dance. The performances
are videotaped and photographed, and written up in the orchestra's glossy
new magazine. 

"It's a very old-fashioned formal process where you go out in the fields,"
Sir Simon said, waving his arm in a strewing motion, "and see what grows.
You simply have to plant the seed."

The latest project was on view this month in three large airy classrooms at
the Sophie-Charlotte-Oberschule in the prosperous Charlottenburg
neighborhood. Ms. Milliken, two assistants and three orchestra members took
charge.

In Room 121, a television screen showed video of children painting on a
clear surface. The painting was videotaped from the other side of the
surface, showing swirling lines and blotchy vortexes being created. The idea
was to match the sounds of "Ringed by the Flat Horizon," a 1980 work by Mr.
Benjamin that was on the week's Berlin Philharmonic program.

Watching inside the classroom, a group of middle schoolers made their own
music to the videotape of the painting: fast violin figures for quick
brushstrokes, the bass drum thumping at a fat line, chuckling bongos, a
shimmering thunder sheet. Other instruments included a xylophone, cymbals
and gong.

"There was a time when yellow was more spooky," Franz Schindlbeck, a
percussionist in the orchestra, told the group. "At the moment, I have the
feeling that you are so happy to be in sync, you have forgotten spooky. So
don't play it too loud."

Ms. Milliken told two 12-year-old violinists to watch for their cues. One,
Cihan Mishiev, whacked the other, Anna Budniewski, with his bow.

The motifs were disassembled, then put back together to create a new
"piece," which the youngsters performed in public.

"It's about helping people to discover that, yes, they can create," Ms.
Milliken said.




More information about the Dixielandjazz mailing list