Boston Globe Feature Story

Song Brings Budding Musicians Together

Author: Gail Kelley
Page: 7 Section: New Hampshire Weekly

New Hampshire Weekly / Closer Look / Gail Kelley

It's the dead of winter. Parents are shuttling their kids to music lessons, play rehearsals, Odyssey of the Mind work sessions, and ski slopes. Nobody is thinking about summer camp.

But now is the time to be doing that if you would like your child to attend one of the most unusual and highly regarded music camps in the nation - The Walden School. This five-week program of intensive training accepts 45 students, ages 9-18, from throughout the United States and overseas (six from New Hampshire last year). Housed at The Dublin School, a private school occupying 365 acres of hillside meadows and woods above the center of Dublin, it is the only program in the country that creates a kind of artist colony around improvisation and music composition for this age group.

Each summer, Walden brings in musicians of national and international repute to perform weekly public concerts. In the last week of the program, a visiting composer works informally with the students, attends rehearsals of their works, and moderates three days of composers' forums. During the forums (also public), faculty, guest musicians and students perform student works written over the preceding four weeks. Following each performance, the visiting composer guides everyone, including audience members, in a discussion of the works they have just heard.

All the faculty hold advanced degrees in music theory, composition or performance. With a student-to-teacher ratio of 3 to 1, the school custom-fits the offerings in its curriculum to each student, based on an assessment of each application.

Kids and faculty use the squash court to perfect their vocal tuning. Because the acoustics are so good in that space, they once staged a 45-minute improvisational singing program there.

These campers sing all day, in four-part harmony - in their various classes, before lunch and dinner, and on mountaintops when they go on weekend hikes. Five days a week, the campers, faculty and staff meet for an hour-long chorus rehearsal.

Every night at bedtime, they stand in a circle with their arms interlocked and sing "Good Night, Music," a song that modulates through all the keys before returning to the original one at the end. The song is thought to have been composed more than 50 years ago in the summer camp that was the precursor to this one, but since no one has ever found a written copy of it, it is passed on to successive generations of campers by oral tradition.

So, as a program for musical composition, what's with all the singing?

"For any musician, the first instrument is the voice," says Patricia Plude, executive director of The Walden School. "Composition can be a very disembodied art form if the composers aren't making music themselves."

At Walden, singing is considered as necessary to fluency in music as speaking is to fluency in a language.

Singing is the foundation of everything taught in this program, but it is a special kind of singing - learned through the solfa method (sometimes called solfege), the do-re-mi system of assigning syllables to notes rather than naming them by letters. Through the approach, students develop an ear for the sound of various intervals from one syllable to another, and thus can readily sight-sing any music, regardless of the key.

Music theory at Walden is also taught through solfa, enabling students to write the harmony to a given line without first knowing the rules of counterpoint.

Solfa singing, however, is rarely a significant part of college or conservatory musical composition programs in the United States. Plude admits that finding faculty members for the school - composers who also sing - is not easy.

Most theory and composition programs begin with harmony. Walden's does not. Instead, students are asked to first consider what music is. After establishing a definition - the organization of sound in time - they realize that music can be made with sounds other than those produced on musical instruments. One of their first musicianship assignments is to compose a piece for the inside of a piano, "so there is no option for traditional pitch choices," says Plude.

From this point, students progress to the overtone series and use the solfa system to learn all the intervals and triad relationships, then the pentatonic and Dorian modes upon which traditional harmony is based.

"It all builds on what came before before, the way music actually developed," Plude explains. "We eventually get to harmony, but we back into it rather than starting with it."

The effectiveness of The Walden musicianship program has proven itself many times over. Ten alumni have won Young Composer awards from Broadcast Music Inc., 17 have been national winners of composition prizes from the Music Teachers National Association. Leo Wanenchak, director of the school's chorus and a 23-year member of the faculty, says several students who have gone on to conservatories tell him they would have been lost in music theory without the Walden preparation.

To further broaden the students' range of inspiration and musical vocabulary, the school emphasizes collaboration with other art forms through talks by composers who work with dancers and visual artists.

In his class last summer, instructor Brooke Joyce focused on the effect of words on the creation of music. His students heard selections ranging from a Renaissance motet, fashioned around nonsense syllables, to 19th-century tone poems of Tchaikovsky and Liszt, to text settings of Barber and Britten, to musical theater and Stockhausen's use of vocalises. As a final assignment, Joyce had the students set portions of Edward Gorey's "The Ghastly Alphabet" to music.

Yet, for all the care and time that goes into music instruction here, Plude insists, "Our goal is not music. That's our vehicle." The main purpose of the camp experience is to build a sense of community around creative thinking and problem-solving, or, as the school's mission statement puts it: "to encourage broad thinking and active listening, teach delivery and acceptance of constructive criticism, plant the seeds of wisdom, and nurture a lifelong commitment to creative expression, all resulting in the development of individuals who are capable of effecting positive change in the world around them."

As much energy goes into development of a strong community at the school as into the curriculum. "Fostering the sense of community is part of the curriculum. It's not an add-on," says Seth Brenzel, associate director of the school.

"In fact," says Plude, "most of our students don't go into music or the arts as a profession." Brenzel is a case in point. He attended the school for six summers. His career is in marketing. "Once students have experienced this strong commitment to community, to working together toward a high-level goal," Plude continues, "they go out into the world and try to re-create it."

Walden students have no access to television or computer games while at camp, and are kept so busy they barely have time to talk on the telephone. Not every minute is devoted to music. The students also have chores - clearing tables after meals, washing dishes, helping a blind faculty member get around - and recreational activities, such as swimming in nearby Dublin Lake and a dance at the school every Saturday.

School officials believe that for the program to be most effective, students should participate more than one summer. About half of the campers each summer are returning students. This means that only 20 or so slots are available for new enrollees. There are no immediate plans to expand enrollment.

Since The Walden School posted a Web site a few years ago, it has had to wait-list many applicants. "We've been forced to be more selective," says Plude, "but we don't want to turn back on our legacy. We've proven we can take good, all-around creative kids and teach them how to write music. Our reputation was made on that. It was not built on taking geniuses, although we've had a few prodigies over the years."

The only firm admissions requirement is that applicants must have studied a musical instrument for at least one year. While the school will accept students who are beginners in composition, it is not set up to teach the basics of reading music. Beyond that, the admissions team looks for applicants with creative juices. "We're more interested in the student who has been writing poetry for four years and had only a year on an instrument than we are with a 10-year musician who's technically perfect but shows no other creative tendencies. We're watching out that we don't become a place with all urban conservatory kids."

This year's artists-in-residence at the school will be pianist Teresa McCollough, a professor at Santa Clara University and recitalist with several national awards to her credit; yesaroun' DUO, an exploratory percussion and saxophone twosome that performs 20th- and 21st-century music written especially for this combination, as well as their own arrangements of older music; a chamber jazz ensemble, The Onus; and Non Sequitur, an ensemble that incorporates improvisation, popular music, jazz, non-Western music, multimedia, and performance art into its concerts.

The composer-in-residence will be James Mobberley, director of the music production and computer technology center at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music.

Applications for this summer must be postmarked no later than March 1. The total cost of the camp is $4,200. Application forms may be obtained by calling or writing The Walden School, P.O. Box 320553, San Francisco, CA 94132-0553; telephone 1-800-323-8653. For more information on the school, check the Web site: www.waldenschool.org.

Copyright 2007-2008, The Walden School, All Rights Reserved.