Delight, surprise and shock: Interview with music educator Paul Rissmann

Whether he’s working as an Animateur with the London Symphony Orchestra, composing children’s works for the chamber music organisation Music in the Round, or presenting Orchestra Unwrapped school concerts with the Philharmonia Orchestra, composer Paul Rissmann specialises in introducing orchestral music to young audiences. We caught up with him to talk technology, attention spans and getting primary school children into Berio.

PRESENTING ORCHESTRAL MUSIC TO CHILDREN

DR: Children will have heard orchestral music through TV adverts, films, the radio and video games. Why is it so important to present it in a live form?

PR: I think - especially nowadays because kids are completely saturated with digital media - that the idea of sound being created live in concert is still a very magical thing for a young audience to experience. Nothing replaces the feeling of having your body totally engulfed in sound. It’s really important that kids get to see how music is made, not only just to hear it and appreciate it, but to see the craft and skills of the musicians, too.

You use projections in your concerts. How does this enhance the children’s experience of the music?

The big challenge that we have with young audiences is their attention spans: is it really possible to engage a five-year-old for 30 minutes in an orchestral score? So I use a lot of technology, particularly when we’re doing story pieces, where we project all of the visuals from the book that we’ve turned into music above the orchestra. The kids get a real sense of what the music is about, of where we are in the adventure. It’s all about encouraging kids to listen deeper and longer.

Narrative seems like a big feature of your work. Is it important for music to have a story to get children interested?

Not entirely, and certainly not if it’s a shorter piece. But if it’s for a larger work where you’re expecting young people to be engaged for 25, 30 minutes, then it’s essential. I think young people will listen to anything as long as you present it to them in the correct way. It can be incredibly contemporary and they will be engaged, as long as you show them what’s cool and interesting about the music beforehand.

How do you decide what kind of music fits certain age groups of children?

I believe it’s all about the presentation. It’s not about fitting the music to the kids, it’s fitting the presentation to the kids and tailoring it. If they are young they will want to participate, so you’ve got to plan and measure that, and work out exactly where that should come in the programme.

Nothing’s off-limits at all. Sometimes you can get the most brilliant results with the most contemporary piece.

What’s the strangest contemporary piece that you’ve got children into?

Years ago we did a project on Berio with primary school kids in Scotland. We were doing serialism, which is perfect because you can just rearrange all the bars of a xylophone and you’ve got your tone row.

We once took Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges and played that to kids. Although Prokofiev is not a wild contemporary composer he has his moments, and Love for Three Oranges is a really in-your-face, challenging work for the orchestra to play. But it’s also the most perfect piece for a primary school audience because the story is ridiculous, it’s crazy. It’s in no way the obvious choice for a school concert but if everybody is up for giving it a go then it works brilliantly.

MUSIC EDUCATION: WORKING WITH TEACHERS AND ORGANISATIONS

With Orchestra Unwrapped, there are also workshops with the teachers so they can plan their own lessons around the concerts. How do you do this with teachers who might not have knowledge or training in music themselves?

They’re my target. I love working with music teachers, but actually the teacher who comes and says, “I’m terrified, I’m not musical, I really don’t know why I’m here” - they’re my target audience. It’s about saying, “Yes you are, you can definitely deliver music to your class, and here are some really simple, straightforward ideas that you can try with your young people.” When we started out with Orchestra Unwrapped the teachers were terrified, they had no idea what they were doing. But they love it now.

Is the Ensemble 360 piece you’re currently working on for Music in the Round?

Yes. I’ve written works for Music in the Round for the last 7 or 8 years. This new one is a sequel to a children’s book that I set to music a few years ago.

The really interesting thing with 360 is that they’re totally committed to presenting the best performance they can to a young audience. That’s a really interesting issue because there’s this perception that young audiences can’t tell the difference in quality, or they don’t deserve to have the best performers on stage. I think that’s absolute nonsense. Young people instantly know when something is fantastic, even if it’s in a musical language that they’re not used to, or it’s a piece that they’re not used to. If they feel and sense that energy from the stage they instantly connect.

What’s the most important aspect of your work with children: creating an audience for orchestral music in the future, or enriching the minds of the children?

For me it’s not really about the audience of the future at all. If they become the audience of the future that’s a brilliant bonus, but they’re the audience of now. It’s about ensuring that they have the richest, most rewarding experience right there and then in the concert hall, and that the music delights or surprises or shocks, and they feel the power of the orchestra.

Do you think it’s vital to be able to engage with this kind of music for one’s basic development?

Yes, completely. Music is in the school curriculum, but I feel like orchestral music shouldn’t be something that people shy away from. It shouldn’t be seen as something that’s old and from the past and an amazing museum piece that we have to revere and worship. I think it’s about finding out how Beethoven can be useful to a primary school class now, how it can be interesting and engaging for them today.

MUSIC EDUCATION IN THE UK

What do you make of the state of music education in general in the UK at the moment?

I think schools are under such unbelievable pressure, and it seems to be that the only things that are valued is how kids do in Maths and Language. The arts become marginalised in the curriculum, so you need a really strong headteacher and amazing teachers to be able to fight against that, and to really deliver an enriching musical education. It’s tragic that we’ve gotten to this point where the arts are an optional extra and considered not to be important. But when you build these long-term partnerships with schools that trust what you’re offering, you see how enriched the curriculum can become for those teachers and those kids, because they come and experience live music on a regular basis.

It seems like the orchestras and music organisations themselves have stepped up in recent years, where the government has fallen down. Do you agree?

Completely. I think there was a lot of naive talk of orchestras developing these programmes to plug the gap as funding was pulled away from music education in schools. Of course that’s ridiculous, because we’d need 100 times more orchestras to be able to actually fill the gap. But I think for a lot of orchestras their work on and off the concert platform has completely equal status, which is just brilliant. The musicians view time in school as being as important as time in the Royal Festival Hall.

Finally, I read that you taught 2000 primary school kids to read music in 10 seconds using your projections. Could you tell me the story about that?

We were doing the “Toreador’s March” from Carmen in a school concert, and basically you just throw the cymbal’s part from the orchestra up on screen. The kids look at it and think, “I have no idea what that means.” Then you throw in some numbers to help them count, and literally within 10 seconds they’re counting and accurately clapping the cymbal part from Carmen. A very simple, straightforward technique, but instant engagement from the audience, plus they learn to read a bit of music too.

We have a responsibility as people who create concerts to find those ways in, to find those avenues, however simple they are. Actually, I think the simpler they are the more difficult those ways can be to find! I think we have an obligation to present this music that we feel so passionately about and to share that love with a whole new audience.

All the artworks on this page were created by schoolchildren in year groups 3-5 who attended one of the Philharmonia's Orchestra Unwrapped concerts in Leicester, UK. As well as giving additional teacher training to schools that attend the concerts, Orchestra Unwrapped gives workshops to the students before they attend the events. Learn more about Orchestra Unwrapped here, and find more information on Paul Rissmann here.