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.
