Music Education

SMITH ISLAND --Michael Lisicky had the kids of the Ewell School right where he wanted them yesterday - in their classroom soaking up every note, every passage, even a few honks and squawks thrown in for laughs by his Trio La Milpa. Unlike other music education programs that the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra oboist has conducted, this one couldn't have been any cozier. The entire school - 14 students from pre-K through seventh grade - took part. The children listened to the oboe trio while sitting at their desks in their one-room schoolhouse here in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. None has ever heard a symphony orchestra.

It's Saturday morning, and 34 young people are assembled for practice.With a few warm-up exercises and directions to "reach for an apple from the tallest tree," and "blow on hot soup," the group is ready to begin with one more instruction from its leader."

William Ryan gets the chills when he hears River Hill High School's musicians play. "It gives you goose bumps when you hear students at the high school level performing pieces that are such high quality," said Ryan, the school's principal. He attributes much of the music program's success to band director M. Joseph Fischer. "Joe has worked with [students] and supported them to be able to play at that level," Ryan said. "To know that you have a strong teacher that's really supporting and pushing to a strong level makes you feel good about our music program."

THE HALF-DOZEN teen-agers in Alexandra Suhoy's music theory class at the Baltimore Music School in Pikesville must have thought they were going crazy last week.Suhoy, a twentysomething, Kiev Conservatory-trained pianist who immigrated to Baltimore from Ukraine five years ago, was playing the role of stern taskmaster. First she would play a short selection from one of the great composers on the piano or a tape she had brought, then quiz her students to identify the pieces."Dvorak?" ventured one youngster after a particularly fiery exposition of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto.

BLUEMONT, Va. - The holidays are here, which means public school teachers across America are presenting "winter programs" with music selected to challenge students and delight parents - but too often sacrificing artistic merit to avoid singing of the Bethlehem Babe. One program I attended featured songs about Santa, chimneys, and reindeer, plus five Hanukkah tunes and one Kwanzaa melody, even though the school had only one (nonpracticing) Jewish family, and not a single African-American.

When conductor David Effron arrived in Annapolis last Sunday, his phone began ringing off the hook.And why not? So many talented graduates of the Eastman School of Music are musicians in the Baltimore-Washington area and relish the prospect of greeting the teacher-conductor with whom they loved working back at their prestigious alma mater in Rochester, N.Y.Indeed, Effron, who comes to Maryland Hall this weekend to conduct music by Rachmaninoff, Mendelssohn and...

McDaniel student to give senior flute recital today Clara Werner, a McDaniel College senior from Mount Airy, will present her senior flute recital at 7 p.m. today in Levine Hall, Room 100. A music major with an education minor, Werner will play pieces by Antonio Vivaldi, Antonin Dvorak, Claude Debussy and Georg Philipp Telemann. Rachel Andrews on the harpsichord will accompany Werner on the wooden flute during the Vivaldi piece. Information: 410-857-2294. Fiber art is focus of Scott Center exhibit Art created from fiber materials will be the focus of an exhibit in the Scott Center Art Gallery at Carroll Community College from Sunday to March 30. The exhibit, Layers: The Fiber Artists of Baltimore, will open with an artists' reception from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday.

Whenever she has a free Saturday night, Carol Nethen plunks down on the sofa to watch Fox TV's "America's Most Wanted."But it isn't the gritty crime re-enactments that interest the 43-year-old Annapolis woman. It's the music that underscores the action that she wants to hear. It's her music.Ms. Nethen has been writing the scores for "America's Most Wanted" for six years and watches the show frequently. "But I always hear the mistakes and am immediately imprinted with the thought, 'I'll never do that again,' " she says.

When Marin Alsop began her tenure as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra last year, she put a high priority on developing educational projects that could bring together the institution and the surrounding community, especially those parts not being reached by the orchestra. Yesterday, Alsop announced the launch of OrchKids, an after-school music program spearheaded by the BSO, in conjunction with a partnership of city organizations, and pledged $100,000 of her own money to support it. Inspired by the success of the countrywide El Sistema program in Venezuela, which provides musical training and social outlets for several hundred thousand low-income children, OrchKids will begin as a pilot program with about 25 first-graders at Harriet Tubman Elementary in West Baltimore, starting in September.

IT WAS AN accident that placed Nichole Barner at a xylophone about10 years ago. A percussionist with the North Carroll Middle School band had broken his arm, and music director Jim Ryon asked Nichole to take his place. Try something new, he suggested. "I had put years into the viola, and he was desperate for me to try something else," Barner recalled. When she rolled mallets on the xylophone keys, "it was the perfect fit," she said. "I just fell in love with the instrument." It was a match so perfect that it's become her life's passion.