Image
In 1999, actress/singer Marnie Mosiman was a woman in need of an epiphany. She got it on the set of What Women Want, the Mel Gibson/Helen Hunt romantic comedy, in which she had a small part.
“I had spent hours in my trailer for a week, waiting to be called to go back and forth to shoot this scene,” Mosiman recalled. “It was a two-minute scene in which I said three things and then spit my mouthful of bread into a bucket to be ready for the next take.
“I called my husband and said, ‘That’s it. This isn’t what I wanted to do. I can’t do this anymore.’”
What at least this one woman wanted was more meaningful work. Mosiman has devoted a good part of her career to programs to inspire in young people a love of the arts—including stints with LA Opera in the Schools and creating the long-running Voyage of the Global Harmony at the Hollywood Bowl for the LA Philharmonic’s Summersounds program.
So, when the Los Angeles Master Chorale, where Mosiman sings soprano, asked her for some ideas about the education outreach programs for the Chorale, she was more than willing to lay aside acting work for a while.
The program that Mosiman and her co-creators launched in the 1999-2000 school year was far more ambitious than the typical chorus education outreach. Voices Within, as they called it, aimed to engage public school students in a creative process in which they would find their own voices, tell their own stories, and compose their own songs.
“Most Arts in the Schools offerings concentrate on exposing students to performances, bussing kids in to see a performance by a professional company, or offering lessons to talented and interested students,” says Mosiman.
“That’s a wonderful way to begin arts exposure, but I was interested in those kids who didn’t even know they liked music, much less liked to sing. And it was important to me that we teach in regular classrooms and include every student.”
Starting Small
The first year, Mosiman and LA-area composer Penka Kouneva and lyricist Bernardo Solano, tested the idea with a classroom of predominantly Latino fifth-graders at San Fernando Elementary in the Sun Valley area north of downtown Los Angeles.
They started by engaging students in a series of free writing exercises—about such things as family, pets, friends, and their community. “The topics for the songs came out of their own lives,” said Mosiman. “And we discovered that the program worked. The kids could write songs.”
By the mid-2000s, Voices Within was working in some eight schools. Mosiman’s new artistic team and co-creators, composer David O and lyricist Doug Cooney, helped to refine and expand the curriculum.
“From the beginning, we were reviewing and revising our classroom approach to make sure we were reaching our goals for the students,” says Cooney, “and also continuing to challenge ourselves as artists. Our resourcefulness was valuable as, more and more, teaching artists are asked to prove their value in the classroom.”
And so, the song topics became more complex. “The teachers were getting hammered about testing and felt they didn’t have time to do anything extraneous to the curriculum,” Mosiman said. “So we worked with teachers and principals to choose our song subjects from the fifth-grade curriculum.”
Students at one school wrote songs about colonists coming to America. Another class focused on the Civil War and imagined following the Underground Railroad, or what it was like to be a drummer boy on the battlefield. Some theme areas led to collaborations with local museums. In 2005, students at Pio Pico Elementary toured “BODY WORLDS: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies” at the California Science Center and wrote songs about six different body systems.
Over several years, collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles led to field trips to study contemporary works of art, resulting in songs based on those works, collaborative sculptures based on the songs developed with teaching artists from MOCA, and integrative performances at the museum.
“When we began, we weren’t sure which parts of our curriculum would truly get us where we wanted to go,” Mosiman readily admits. But the process of application, analysis, and experimentation enabled the teaching artists to fine-tune a curriculum for an effective song-writing residency in elementary and middle schools.
According to composer David O, a frequent teaching artist in the classroom, “After a few years, our curriculum was set and formalized in writing; however, we continue to revise and adapt the process as needed, depending on what new and unique challenges each different group of students brings to the table."
During the 2011-12 school year, the process was in full flower at Mount Washington Elementary School, high in the LA hills, where two classrooms of fifth-graders were creating a series of songs based on mathematical concepts. And not just any math concepts, but challenging ones—chaos theory, tessellations, algebra, geometry, topology, and the Fibonacci Sequence.
Working with performing artist Amy Fogerson, composer David O, and lyricist Mark Savage, here’s how their process unfolded.
Tapping the Creative Spirit
To learn about the collaborative process, students engaged in theater games such as “mirroring”—two students face each other and track each other’s movements. “It’s an exercise to help them be present with each other and with what is happening in the moment,” says Mosiman. “We want to create a safe place, foster communication, get them listening and focused, help them turn off their negative judgments of themselves and each other, and engage their creative brains.”
Developing a Bigger, Better "Word Bank"
“We’re not looking for songs that are book reports about a subject area,” Mosiman said.
“Though we begin by sharing what we call ‘one-sheets’—a page of interesting facts and images about the subjects—early in the process we lead students in a meditative journey and ask them to use their imaginations to explore how they might be personally connected to the subject. What do they see, smell, hear, taste? Then we ask them to write it down using very specific images, describing the scene as if to someone from outer space who knows nothing of this world.”
In working with her group on a song about the Möbius strip, nine-year-old Isabella Saborio said she took the advice of lyricist Mark Savage and just “spewed all of the words out. What we had at first was random. A tree, a cat scratched me, running through the forest, my shoes fell off. Then it changed. You just let everything out and pick the good ideas and put those in lyrics of the songs.”
“The idea is to use all their senses to come up with descriptive language,” says Mosiman. “We joke that we have some four-letter words that we encourage them not to use—but these no-nos are just ordinary words such as nice, or good. We encourage them to develop a bigger and better ‘word bank,’ to create the juiciest phrases for their songs.”
Putting Words to Music
From juicy words, the students develop the lyrics in a verse/chorus structure, then move into creating melodies. “We teach melody as a combination of long notes, short notes, high notes, and low notes,” says Mosiman.
“The way you begin to choose those notes is partly based on which words are important. Then we ask them to think how those important words can be emphasized with high notes or low notes, with syncopation, dynamics, or melisma,” she continued.
Collaboration: Just Say Yes!
Working in small groups, the students begin by sharing their ideas about the subject, and when those words are refined into an identifiable structure, they set them to a melody. Two groups are working at the same time on the same concept, a group of four or five students from each classroom developing and sharing their ideas. The teaching artists emphasize clear “rules of engagement” to encourage collaboration:
- Behave as if your team is made up of your best friends.
- Listen actively—look at your partners and acknowledge what they are saying to you.
- Share your ideas and feelings strongly and clearly.
- Be brave!
- Just say yes!
Making It Better
In the classroom, the teaching artists audio record the students’ work or transcribe it to musical staves as well as collecting all of the written work from the students. “We analyze, discuss, and edit between sessions every week, so the students can move forward at the next meeting,” says Mosiman. “Some groups will come up after the first few sessions and say, ‘We did it. Our song is done.’ And they have come up with some great ideas, but we say, ‘That is a great start. Now let’s make it better.’”
The children know intrinsically what “better” is, but they don’t always know how to achieve it, said Mosiman. “They may say, ‘We don’t like that’ or ‘That’s stupid.’ In response, we say, ‘Don’t just cross it out—make it better. What doesn’t work? Is the melody too monotonous? Is the rhythm—the scansion—wrong? If it is the rhythm, is there a syllable you can take out? Is there a synonym you could use?’
“We are asking kids to use higher level thinking—to listen to something, and instead of labeling it ‘stupid' or 'bad,’ to say ‘I’m not sure I understand, could you explain it to me in a different way?’ We ask them, ‘What do you think your collaborators were trying to say, and how could you make their intention clearer?'”
At this stage, the teaching artists often remind each other not to step in and “fix” the problem. “My fix will frequently be conventional,” says Mosiman. “The kids may come up with odd rhythmic patterns, but when we’re trying to regularize it, it may be that we’re just not hearing what they are hearing. It is important that we ask questions, but let the kids come up with the answer.”
The Smoosh
After each session, the teaching artists gather all of the students' work and meet to work on what they call the “smoosh”—integrating the various groups’ ideas onto a one-page, including as many different ideas as possible, but providing a little more structure. The artists work to honor all the ideas, but sometimes, at this stage, there is disappointment.
“Sometimes my ideas were used and then later were taken out and lost forever,” one fifth-grader at Mt. Washington reflected. The students learn something about loss and about the nature of the collaborative process. “We’re making a soup together,” says Mosiman. “Your work made the soup better, even though your contribution may not be obvious in the final serving.”
The process is often a revelation for the teaching artists as well. “Composers love doing this and keep doing it because they learn so much about the many different ways a song can go,” said Mosiman.
“You learn how much you don’t know and how wrong you can be.” Composer David O says, “During our work with the kids, we often were pleasantly surprised at how many of the issues the students were grappling with also provided insight to our own experiences as collaborative artists.”
The song about Fibonacci numbers is an example. By definition, the first two numbers in a Fibonacci sequence are zero and one, and each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two. The sequences show up in nature in the most beautiful of ways—such as the arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruitlets of a pineapple, the flowering of an artichoke, an uncurling fern, and the arrangement of a pine cone—which the children captured in their lyrics:
Patterns of Beauty
1, 1, 2, 3, 5,
8 and 13, 21 —
Numbers in nature
All around us,
Patterns of beauty
Everywhere in life.
Expanding the Concept with High School Students
In 2010, with a lead grant from the California Arts Council, Voices Within had the opportunity to try out the concept in the new Ramon C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts in downtown Los Angeles, a short walk from Walt Disney Hall and the Master Chorale offices.
The ninth- through twelfth-grade students needed a bigger project to sink their teeth into, so Voices Within came up with the audacious goal of creating an oratorio—a complex work with choruses, arias, duets, and recitatives. Though the scale was much grander, the basic premise was the same as in the elementary and middle school program: What is the story you are trying to tell and how can you create music to help you tell it?
The first year, the students created an oratorio based on an Aztec creation myth about a warrior god in the shape of a hummingbird. The resulting performance was “beyond everyone’s expectations,” said Chris Rodriquez, one of the choral music teachers at Cortinez. “It was one of those days where you hit the ball at just the right spot on the bat. We have done Peter Pan, Hello Dolly, duets from Wicked—but to have an oratorio marry with the creative content of the teenager was awesome.”
For the 2011-12 school year, the students took on another ancient myth—a 10th-century Japanese folk tale, The Bamboo Cutter, about the life of a mysterious girl from another world discovered inside a glowing bamboo plant.
There were a number of themes in the tale that teenagers could relate to. “When the kids started, they loved this idea of alienation, of leaving home,” said Mosiman, “because they are right at that point in their lives. It resonates with them.”
There was pressure to top the previous year’s oratorio, but the students had also gained confidence from that first experience. “Fear, I think, permeates the American teenager experience,” said Rodriguez. “It is very heightened. What makes this so good is that all of that comes into the room and things happen despite that.”
In the creation of the Bamboo Cutter oratorio, Rodriguez noted that a lot of the fear and reluctance from the previous year was gone and the spirit of collaboration stronger. Older students were taking the lead in guiding young students who had not been through the process before.
“Some students were shy about composing,” said Taylor Washington, a senior, who played the role of the Warrior God the previous year. “They would say, ‘I can’t do this. I’m not a composer. I’m just a singer.’ But then they were exposed to something new that they had never done before and they began to have all of these different ideas. And all of these people were helping—the composer, the lyricist, the singers, and your peers, too. It’s not like you are alone when you are facing this big project. You start to feel a lot more comfortable.”
From Fear to Creativity
It is the teaching artists who instill that feeling of comfort and safety, Rodriguez believes. “I have found only two groups that work at such a high level and are as committed to the kids and to the teachers—the LA Opera and the LA Master Chorale. They understand the kids’ experience in the classroom, and they really understand what it takes to be a teacher.
“They are kid-centered, positive with children without sacrificing their ideals,” he said. “They get it and the kids have totally gone for it."
For some students, the experience of creating something of this magnitude is nothing short of breathtaking. “This is not a Fame school,” said writer/lyricist Corey Madden, referring to the film and musical about the elite school of the performing arts in New York City.
“There are no auditions. These are not the hyper-focused kids who already know they want to be musicians. You get kids who walk in here in September and have no interest or low interest. Some of these kids are gnarly and hard to work with because they are still really shy and unconfident. You get to take them and develop them. You see the lights go on in their eyes.”
One of those kids, a ninth-grader who had resisted the whole experience practically up till the end, rushed off the stage after the performance and declared, “That was the best thing that has ever happened in my life.” And he meant it.
“It was so exciting to be working at an 'inner-city' school with these kids, who love making music,” said Leslie Inman, LAMC alto. “During the performance I was thinking about my own experience in high school, and how fortunate these kids are to have an opportunity such as this. And the wonderful thing is that they realize how lucky they are, and they are grateful.”
In the end, Voices Within is about so much more than composing and performing music. “From the beginning we were going for something deeper than asking kids merely to write and sing songs,” said Terry Knowles, president and CEO of LAMC. “This program is really about helping young people find their creativity—their ‘voice’—and showing them through this experience what is possible when people work together toward a shared goal. They see that if they work with their friends collaboratively, they will create something better than they ever imagined.
“These are really life lessons. And for us, some of the best moments happen when we hear about a shy or even reticent student who becomes engaged in the process and is literally transformed as a result.”
"These students are finding their own voice and they are finding a way to use it. If there is a future for choral music with young people, this should be part of it,” says Mosiman. “The pop bands don’t have all the narratives. Choral music can tell the same kind of stories. I want kids to understand that if you have a story to tell, you have all these tools to do it.”
This article is adapted from The Voice, Summer 2012.
