Ted Wiprud, NY Philharmonic Arts Education Advanceman: Blog #4, from Tokyo

To read Ted the previous installments of Ted's arts education travelogue click here for the first entry; here for the second; and here for the third.

I love this entry. Can an ordinary 10-year-old compose music? Read on! RK
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10.11.09

Yesterday, the New York Philharmonic premiered eight new pieces in one concert at Suntory Hall. As though that's not news enough, the pieces were composed by ten- and eleven-year-old Tokyo schoolchildren: not prodigies, just ordinary kids with some imagination and a willingness to work hard. Musicians, audience, conductor - everyone was astonished and delighted.

These pieces go way beyond cute - in fact, the "c" word is a slur to Jon Deak, the composer and Philharmonic bassist who created Very Young Composers. VYC is a radical approach to working with kids that enables just about anyone to compose music for orchestra. These eight pieces have depth; they are authentic to eight different kids' imaginations and lives; and as Magnus Lindberg, the Philharmonic's composer-in-residence said, they are all exactly the right length: their two-minute forms are exactly right to their contents - something professional composers often struggle to attain.

The suite of new works by Very Young Composers of Tokyo was intended as something of a provocation, demonstrating in this most rule-bound, sensei-respecting society that adults have much to learn from the imaginations of children. Very Young Composers is the most extreme student-centered learning imaginable. The music all comes from the children, who as composers become senseis to this great orchestra and its music director. The process does not so much teach them to compose, as to discover their own potential. The thrill of hearing their ideas come to life, through diligent work, creates in each child a need, a hunger for musical technique so that the can take the next steps themselves. It is still early in this venture, which Jon Deak began in the US ten years ago by asking the innocent question, what is children's music? We don't know how many of the 500+ kids who have composed for the Philharmonic will become composers or musicians or brain surgeons. But it will be interesting to find out.

One of the most interesting things about VYC in Japan has been the difficult position it creates for the child composers themselves.

First, their parents signed them up a year ago in a time-honored drive to provide the best opportunities for their children. We started with eight, expecting some to drop out. None did. Credit the mothers, because it turns out that being singled out is not a good thing in a Japanese school or social set. Children here are teased and bullied not for being nerds but for being different in any way. So when the Teaching Artists Ensemble played six of these pieces at Nanzan Elementary School with those six composers in the audience, their names could not be mentioned, and the composers made themselves very small as their pieces were played. In some settings, the kids and the school prefer us to talk about the pieces as a group project - whereas in reality, the eight children all composed their pieces individually in their entirety, including harmony and form, most of them playing them on piano or another instrument for transcription by our Teaching Artists.

The kids' ambivalence about taking credit has fed suspicions among Japanese musicians that the children could not have composed these pieces themselves. We have heard for a year about Japanese kids not being creative because of the culture they grow up in. It's been suggested that Japanese kids just say "yes" to every option presented to them - but if that were our method, we would finish these pieces in an afternoon, not in a ten-month process. The fact is, these eight kids were as creative, as free, as confident in using the big sound of the orchestra, as any of the kids in New York have been. It's been a fascinating experiment and the results are as clear as day.

I have no way of predicting what impact the VYC Provocation will have on Japanese musicians, schools, or society. Ten years of VYC premieres in New York are just beginning to infiltrate people's thinking about children and creativity, and changing Japanese ways of thinking is not the mission of the New York Philharmonic. But those who hear these pieces glimpse as if through a window that opens for two minutes at a time the depth of a child's mind and the limitless possibility of enlightened, Socratic mentoring. As well, one gets a thrilling sense of the future of music, if even a few kids go on to explore these sounds and forms as professionals.



Very Young Composers of Tokyo at work with New York Philharmonic Teaching Artists David Wallace and Richard Carrick

N.B., Photos of the Young People's Concert with the Very Young Composers of Tokyo will soon be up at nyphil.org - click on the Virtual Tour link

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Theodore Wiprud
Director of Education, New York Philharmonic

Theodore Wiprud has directed the Education Department of the New York Philharmonic since October 2004. The Philharmonic's education programs include the historic Young People's Concerts, the new Very Young People's Concerts, one of the largest in-school program of any US orchestra, adult education programs, and many special projects.

Mr. Wiprud has also created innovative programs as director of education and community engagement at the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the American Composers Orchestra; served as associate director of The Commission Project, and assisted the Orchestra of St. Luke's on its education programs. He has worked as a teaching artist and resident composer in a number of New York City schools. From 1990 to 1997, Mr. Wiprud directed national grantmaking programs at Meet The Composer. During the 1980's, he taught and directed the music department at Walnut Hill School, a pre-professional arts boarding school near Boston.

Mr. Wiprud is also known as a composer and an innovative concert producer, until recently programming a variety of chamber series for the Brooklyn Philharmonic. His own music for orchestra, chamber ensembles, and voice is published by Allemar Music.

Mr. Wiprud earned his A.B. in Biochemistry at Harvard, and his M.Mus. in Theory and Composition at Boston University, and studied at Cambridge University as a Visiting Scholar.

September 2008