Student Elizabeth Padilla susses out tonal differences.
Standing at the front of a small music classroom, David Perry rested his clarinet in his palms, glanced to colleagues Yevgeny Yontov and Bora Kim, and then uttered a word that seemingly had nothing to with the scales behind him or instrumental terms scrawled on a nearby wall.
“Hi,” he said.
Students, their eyes still closed, pointed in his direction. They opened their eyes to see if they’d guessed his voice correctly. Smiles around the room. Then they squeezed their eyes shut again and waited.
“Hi!” Kim chirped. They paused for a moment, and then pointed in her direction, smiling as they reopened their eyes. Correct again.
Perry and Yontov.
That was the scene Tuesday at Truman School, where Perry and his colleagues from the Second Movement Series were teaching 19 fourth- through eighth-grade music students about timbre, the quality of a musical sound. Carefully pronouncing it tam-ber for students who gleefully yelled out “timber!,” Perry guided the group through a quick lesson on tonal variation, starting with the sound of the human voice, and then opening the discussion up to Kim, who demonstrated the same principal on her violin.
The lesson was part of a new outreach component of the Second Movement, a music nonprofit still experimenting three years in. Working with Truman music teacher Jeff Jones, Perry has designed three sessions and mini-concerts between January and May to pique interest in music education and teach close listening. He also attends Truman once a week to teach in one-on-one or smaller sessions, channeling work he used to do with Yale’s Music In Schools initiative. The idea came about, he said, as he was balancing his love for music education with a realization that “it’s really easy to underestimate what younger kids are able to hear.”
Instead, Perry and Jones wanted to expose students to music that would help them, in Jones’ words, “turn their ears on and find out what’s interesting.”
Both graduates of the Yale School of Music, Perry and Jones see early music learners as fertile ground. Younger listeners don’t yet have a tonal frame of reference, and rarely classify something as sounding not right. They have a sense of tempo, but may not know why its presence or absence is important. And they’re genuinely interested in the basics of composition — even if that’s sometimes overshadowed by an interest in themselves as performers.
Tuesday, Perry sought to put his ideas to work. He and his colleagues arrived with Olivier Messiaen’s frantic “Dance of Fury, For the Seven Trumpets” (from the Quartet for the End of Time) and Igor Stravinsky’s dizzying, macabre “The Devil’s Dance,” from A Soldier’s Tale. Describing the conditions under which Messiaen wrote the piece — in a prisoner of war camp in 1940s Poland, where the quartet was based on the musicians he could find — Yontov urged students to listen closely for emotional clues, and guess why the group was playing the piece as a trio, and not a quartet.
They launched into the bom bom ba da / bom bom ba da of the piece. Students bobbed their heads, a few closing their eyes to listen as others leaned forward and watched the instruments closely. A few zeroed in on Perry’s face as it turned four different shades of red and purple. Long, uninterrupted notes emerged from his clarinet. Then the group stopped, and scanned the students.
“Thoughts?” Perry asked. “There are no wrong answers.”
Silence for a moment. “Really, there are no wrong answers,” Perry repeated. Jones floated around the classroom, scanning for raised hands.
Fourth-grader Louis Sanchez raised his hand at the front of the room. “It felt like somebody was about to die,” he said.
“And you guys all played the same rhythm!” fifth grader Gian Llorente added from the back of the class.
“Yes!” Yontov said.
Another hand shot up in the middle of the classroom. Jones gestured to her to go ahead.
“It was weird,” said eighth-grader Aaliyah Centeno. “I’ve never heard anything like it before.”
Student Gian Llorente.
Yontov nodded near ecstatically. The piece’s fast, off-meter nature made it feel frantic, he said — and it was rare to hear anything quite like that in classical music. Working with Jones, he hammered out a classic four-four time signature on the piano. Then a three-four one. No parallel existed for this piece, he said — and the result was a sense that something wild, unpredictable, and somber was about to happen. That was also true for the work’s deep timbre, tiptoeing always on the edge of something ominous.
That was a new term for the class, Jones said. As Perry, Kim, and Yontov illustrated it with their voices — Perry’s sonorous and smooth hello to Kim’s airy and quick one — and then their instruments, students listened anew. They played the piece again. This time, a new hand shot up.
“It kind of sounds like the background of a Disney movie, when someone is running away,” said a student from the middle of the room. Perry nodded. That was probably very close to what Messiaen was going for, he said.
“They have really good ears,” said Jones after the session, as students left to head to other classes. “They’re learning how to trust them.”