Academy Fellows Do Good by Playing Well

In the not too distant future, classical music virtuosos could make their New York debut at P.S. 153 — at least that's the plan of a newly expanded venture jointly initiated by Carnegie Hall, the Juilliard School, the Weill Music Institute, and the Department of Education, which will put rising talents to work in public school classrooms.

The project, dubbed the Academy, last spring finished an initial pilot program of training recently graduated instrumentalists from the nation's top classical music programs and sending them into public schools to teach and engage the students in musical education. "Looking forward to the future of music, I feel that one has to be able to have a portfolio career, not just be about performance," the executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall, Clive Gillinson, said. Along with the president of the Juilliard School, Joseph Polisi, and the schools chancellor, Joel Klein, Mr. Gillinson put together the program in less than a year.

"It will be about communication, about education, to contribute more in the communities in which they live," he said.

After the success of the six-month pilot program, the Academy has expanded from 16 to 34 fellows, who will perform and participate in music instruction at 34 schools throughout the city, altogether reaching about 10,800 students, for the 2007–08 school year.

"It's the idea of capturing topflight musicians who have a connection and a desire to teach and give back," the Department of Education's educational administrator and director of music, Barbara Murray, said.

"Arts education is of supreme importance to the department. It's of supreme importance to every human being," Ms. Murray said. "Arts education contains all of the strategies that are hallmarks of education: to listen, to observe, to reflect, to count, to work in the community. We've had a tremendous reception. Schools are clamoring to get in — for students to get to go to Carnegie Hall, to Juilliard, to have famous musicians coming in and out of their building, principals are delighted about that."

Mr. Gillinson sees this as part of a potentially significant movement. "What is interesting is how many of the best musicians coming out of colleges are saying, ‘We would love to do this,'" he said. "In my day, everybody wanted to be a performer. People didn't think of their wider responsibility to society. It was about me, and fulfilling my talent. What's great about this generation of musicians is they're really engaged in fulfilling a greater role in society. The program seems to be speaking to the way people feel."

Along with intensive chamber music practice and a series of 21 concerts in which they perform with other Academy fellows, the musicians are each assigned to a school and spend two days a week doing hands-on music instruction in cooperation with the school's existing music programs.

Cellist Caitlin Sullivan, one of the program's new fellows, said she agrees that today's rising musicians are placing a greater emphasis on their lives outside the concert hall.

"I am doing this program because, as a person and a musician, I know that I have a place in my community, but I'm trying to find the most meaningful one for me," Ms. Sullivan, who will be working with the string program at P.S. 153, said. "I feel that the Academy is the most useful tool for that. In the past, music education has been a little one-dimensional; people believe that it's not for everyone, that not everyone has innate musical talent. This is completely untrue. We've been learning about the different ways of tapping into everyone's innate musical confidence and to find creative ways of making music — specifically classical music — relevant in everybody's lives."

Now that the Academy has been expanded, a new range of projects will be initiated, including one that will combine the programs of three schools to create a large-scale concert. It's all part of a strategy that a cellist fellow teaching at P.S. 157 in the South Bronx, Claire Bryant, believes is working well. "The first time I performed for my group, I had quite an emotional reaction. I was playing the Elgar Concerto, and when I reached the top of the scale, one of the children burst into tears," Ms. Bryant said. "She said something like, ‘I don't understand why it makes me feel this way, because there aren't any words.'

"They can't relate to who Elgar was — not even many adults can. What they relate to is their own experience, their own emotional core. They've brought it back to that simple level that music is what connects human beings. It reminds you why we the heck we do this," she said.

The Academy's fellows, who perform as Ensemble ACJW, will play a free concert on Friday at the Juilliard School's Paul Hall at 8 p.m.