For several years now, University Settlement Music and Arts School has, with the musicians of Contact Contemporary Music, organised Music from Sctratch, a week-long day composittion worskshop for teens. It begins today at 2 p.m. — and I’m sure there’s still an extra place or two for the stray young people in your life.
Because these people know what they’re doing, the participating kids get to experience composition not as the culmination of a complex series of lessons about building blocks, but as an act of foraging for the weird as well as the familiar in the everyday world.
Rather than being intimidating — and even more demanding than a regular school class — the exercise becomes an adventure of discovery.
I dropped in on Music from Scratch a few summers ago, and enjoyed the experience as much as the kids.
Although workshops like these will never replace learning the rudiments of music, they provide a valuable alternate perspective on what organised sound is, and what it can mean.
Toronto composer Michael Colgrass regularly presents school workshops on graphic notation for music, which allows children to better associate what they hear (or would like to hear) with what’s on paper.
Groups like New Adventures in Sound Art, which I’ve seen working with children at the Canadian Opera Company’s summer opera camp, help their young charges translate the sounds of the city into art.
Children should be encouraged to experience making music, not just listening to it, in the same way they are encouraged to experience the visual arts. We have Play-doh and fingerpainting, so why not encourage this same messy-and-fun, let’s play-in-the-sandbox ethos in music?!
Music from Scratch starts today at the Music Gallery (197 John St), at 2 p.m. All the details are on the poster:
John Terauds