The Kingston Symphony, led by Music Director Glen Fast, will perform for over 2500 students next week, in the continuation of a remarkable partnership between the orchestra, the Queen’s University School of Music, and both local school boards. Here’s how it works:
Each year, teachers representing the school boards, music education professors at Queen’s University, and Kingston Symphony staff plan the repertoire and write a curriculum for the program. Music education students from the School of Music at Queen’s University visit the elementary schools to teach the various lesson plans. Representatives from the three co-operative organizations also conduct professional development sessions with area teachers on ways to prepare the students for the symphony concert experience. The culmination of all this work? Five Kingston Symphony concerts take place over two mornings and one afternoon –giving the students a first-hand classical music experience.
This year, the program focuses on texture in music. Through various lessons and activities, students have been looking at the major concepts of texture used in western music and how combinations of instruments, timing, and dynamics make up the form of a piece. Is it rough and bumpy like sandpaper, or is it smooth like the surface of limestone?
Tonight, February 11, the Winnipeg Symphony (led by music director Alexander Mickelthwate) shares the spotlight with over 400 high school students from across Manitoba, in its annual Rising Stars Concert. The program, created to bring together and showcase Manitoba’s aspiring musicians with their professional counterparts, will offer the students the chance to meet and perform alongside their musical idols!
It’s a massive undertaking, bringing together a mass choir of 350 student voices, the Winnipeg Youth Orchestra, flutist Jaena Kim, soprano Katrina Townsend, boy soprano, Drew Brémault and and soloists from the University of Manitoba Marcel A. Desautels Faculty of Music. The major work on the program is Karl Jenkins’s The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace, in its first-ever performance in Manitoba.
