“There’s nothing like the sound of several thousand elementary students on recorder,” says Joanna Massey, Director of Learning and Engagement at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute. A horde of recorder-wielding elementary school students might sound like a terrifying prospect on paper, but the interactive performances she refers to, in which students in Grades 3 to 5 play along with a professional symphony orchestra from their seats – are actually an integral part of her organisation’s hugely popular Link Up programme, an initiative which has helped introduce young people to orchestral music for over three decades and is expected to reach more than 400,000 children worldwide this year.
The idea behind Link Up
Massey recalls the words of a young student at a Link Up event who, when asked if he enjoyed the concert, gave the baffled reply, “Well, I was the concert.” This is in essence what WMI is trying to achieve with the programme – participants learn about orchestral music by becoming part of the orchestra. Over the course of a year, orchestras work with schools in their local communities to teach one of four curricula, each focusing on a different aspect of music – The Orchestra Sings, for example, focuses on how composers create melodies, while The Orchestra Rocks explores rhythm. This results in a final concert in which the students sing or play – either on recorder or strings – along with the orchestra from their seats in the hall. Sometimes, students perform on stage, too. In “linking up” classrooms and the concert hall, WMI hopes to introduce children to their first experience of playing an instrument and reading notation while fostering an appreciation of music in general and orchestral music in particular. On the other side of the coin, participating orchestras themselves are thought to benefit from reaching out, as Massey says: “It’s a vehicle for them to connect more deeply with their communities, and certainly with young people and schools.”
How Link Up works
Massey explains that the successes of the programme so far have hinged on the closeness of the collaboration between WMI and participating orchestras and arts organisations, adding, “It’s a pretty robust partnership.” Orchestras who are interested in running the programme are invited to a conference at Carnegie Hall held every Spring, and once on-board they must take the initiative in recruiting schools in their areas to participate. WMI then provides the orchestra with all the resources they need to run the programme: a score for the repertoire used, cues for the end of year concert and materials for the professional development sessions they are required to run for schoolteachers taking part. In some cases, musicians from the orchestras will even go into the classrooms to help prepare the students for the performance, though this is an optional extra. A designer from Broadway also creates projections which can be used by orchestras who have the facilities. All resources used in the schools, meanwhile, are provided by WMI for free.
According to Massey, WMI works closely with the partner orchestras throughout the course of the programme, with a team of staff dedicated to troubleshooting problems and creating connections between participating organisations. They run webinars, for example, allowing the different orchestras who’ve run the programme to share their experience and expertise. By necessity, there is also collaboration with local school systems or other official bodies. According to Massey, far from restricting the programme, this approach fosters an atmosphere where “partners are really customising the programme for their needs, the repertoire that works for their orchestra”. There are the inevitable challenges, namely the initial process of drumming up interest from schools, navigating transitions between administrations and teaching staff, not to mention the logistical issues of running concerts featuring casts of schoolchildren that can run into the thousands. Yet such challenges would appear to be more than surmountable given the popularity of the programme: initially running solely in New York, Link Up now works with around 15,000 students and teachers in the city, while schools across the US and in countries such as Canada, Spain, Brazil, Japan and more recently, Kenya have taken up the scheme.
Link Up around the world
“Link Up really looks different in different places, and that’s great because that’s what we want communities to be able to do,” affirms Massey. So how does WMI navigate the presumably difficult process of adapting and implementing a scheme in countries like Japan where not only the education system, but also the musical culture will be markedly different from the US? “Japan is a vastly different music education system than in the United States,” agrees Massey. “So there were many changes to the structure of the curriculum that we worked collaboratively on.” In the case of their existing Japanese partner, Sapporo’s Pacific Music Festival (an additional Japanese partnership is apparently in the works) this involved working closely with the local board of education to align the programme to the Japanese system. One major adaptation, for example, was how the PMF used Link Up to teach English language skills, with the children singing along in English to the Link Up theme song “Come to Play” by composer Thomas Cabaniss. According to Massey, this collaboration with the local authorities certainly paid off in the performance: “I went to the second year of the students’ concerts and I was frankly blown away by the level of playing… the students were incredibly well prepared.”