Celebrating Latin-American Classical Music

"It was clear that the wind players, each with a full, warm tone, have spent a great deal of time playing together and have cultivated a collective sensibility... an exciting and witty piece that showed off the group's tight interplay and excellent ensemble sense." - Benjamin Frandzel

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Some memories from AIM 2010…

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We’ve come to the end of the AIM season… well over 150 concerts! Looking back on all those performances, we want to share one of our favorite parts of our AIM show with you… the question-and-answer portion. The students’ questions were always interesting and often amusing. Kyle did a great job of emceeing for us. Here are some of the most common, a couple of unexpected and the number one question of all…

We were asked these a lot…
How old are the instruments?
How old are you?
How long have you been a group?
How did you meet?
How long have you been playing?
How much do your instruments cost?
Is the bassoon heavy?

These two were unique and made us think for a minute…
If you could each play a different instrument, what would it be? (Interestingly, we all answered cello.)

Where did the word “music” come from originally? During our show the students learn the word for music in five languages. One student came up with this compelling question. (The word music comes from the Greek mousa and is derived from the word muse.)

And the #1 question asked…
Why does Armando keep his hand in the bell of the horn?

Like we said at the end of every show, “We’d like to thank the San Francisco Symphony AIM program and we’d like to thank the students for being such a great audience!” Thank you, 3rd, 4th and 5th graders of San Francisco! We had a great time performing for you all!

Quinteto Latino

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Ready, Set, AIM (Adventures in Music) with Quinteto Latino

by admin

Date January 12, 2010
Day 1
Schools ER Taylor and Dr. William Cobb Elementary
Number of Concerts 4

This week we kicked off our 3rd season with the prestigious San Francisco Symphony’s Adventures in Music (AIM) Program! As you might know, AIM is a music outreach and education program where they send 8 ensembles into
all the public schools of the San Francisco Unified School District – that’s about 75 elementary schools and 14,000 children in 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades!

It was wonderful to once again see all the smiling faces! We open our show with a movement of Gyorgy Ligeti’s Six Bagatelles (1953). We explain to the children that a bagatelle is a short, fun piece of music. Wow, we had no idea how much these kids would love Ligeti, a Romanian 20th century composer. The kids were all laughs when they heard the high piccolo and the low bassoon.

Our Third Season

We are very fortunate to be part of the AIM program. Although we have 2 seasons under our belt, our first day on stage was still a bit nerve wracking. Would we remember our speeches, would we remember our music, would the kids like our show, would they think we were funny? Each and every concert is always full of surprises, we never know what to expect.

When we got to Cobb Elementary school in the afternoon, we closed our program with the song Jarabé Tapatio, aka “The Mexican Hat Dance” – We’ve played that song hundreds of times for children all over the Bay Area…and never once before today did the entire audience simultaneously break out into “olé!” after each phrase. It was wonderful and the kids just loved it.

That’s it for today, please check back regularly as we get into a routine in updating our Adventures with Adventures in Music.

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