Mozart! - Is There NO Limit??
What some of us won't do for Mozart...
I taught at all levels; from elementary to college-level.
One of my memories at elementary level was to contrive an approach different from the usual musical projects that deal with children at those age levels.
I decided to write a play depicting the life story of the fabled composer, and present it in the following manner:
There would be not one child in the audience, only those family members and/or friends of those children going to that particular school.
I assigned a sentence of my play to every child in that school, including the kindergarten kids. I had them lined up in order of the story line, each child moving up to a microphone and speaking his or her sentence, then moving on so that the next child would be able to speak the assigned sentence into that microphone. In that mode, the entire story of Mozart (as I wrote it) would be related; after all, there were several hundred children in that school, which gave me plenty of room to have the Mozart saga given out to that particular audience.
It was a most difficult project for me to do, but it was worth the expenditure, if for no reason other than those kids getting to really know who Mozart was.
And that line of kids was indeed long! From the microphone in the auditorium to the halls in the school. The teachers dutifully help herd the children along as the play proceeded.
It required about two months for me to produce this performance, and I was told that it was indeed a "class act;" however, never again would I do such a thing - I was exhausted for a solid week thereafter!
I taught at all levels; from elementary to college-level.
One of my memories at elementary level was to contrive an approach different from the usual musical projects that deal with children at those age levels.
I decided to write a play depicting the life story of the fabled composer, and present it in the following manner:
There would be not one child in the audience, only those family members and/or friends of those children going to that particular school.
I assigned a sentence of my play to every child in that school, including the kindergarten kids. I had them lined up in order of the story line, each child moving up to a microphone and speaking his or her sentence, then moving on so that the next child would be able to speak the assigned sentence into that microphone. In that mode, the entire story of Mozart (as I wrote it) would be related; after all, there were several hundred children in that school, which gave me plenty of room to have the Mozart saga given out to that particular audience.
It was a most difficult project for me to do, but it was worth the expenditure, if for no reason other than those kids getting to really know who Mozart was.
And that line of kids was indeed long! From the microphone in the auditorium to the halls in the school. The teachers dutifully help herd the children along as the play proceeded.
It required about two months for me to produce this performance, and I was told that it was indeed a "class act;" however, never again would I do such a thing - I was exhausted for a solid week thereafter!
Labels: Mozart and the kids
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