February 27, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Portland, Ore. … The 2003-04 series of Symphony Storytimes programs with live musical accompaniment by Oregon Symphony musicians will conclude at the Gresham Branch of the Multnomah County Library in March. The final series of storytimes will feature weekly events at the Gresham Library on Tuesday., March. 2, 9, 23 and 30 at 4 p.m., where Symphony musicians will perform live with music-related stories read by Youth Services Librarians Natalie Shilling and Peter Ford.
This free series of stories told through music will be followed by an opportunity for kids to play the musical instruments and make arts-and-crafts versions of the instruments to take home. The Gresham branch of the Multnomah County Library is located at 385 N.W. Miller in Gresham. The storytimes series is made possible as a result of an innovative ongoing partnership between the Library and the Symphony’s Education and Community Programs department.
This program has grown in popularity with each series of storytimes; the series taking place at Central Library this month is drawing over 150 people each program. “It’s wonderful for kids to see the instruments close up and to hear the way an instrument can tell a story with sound,” said one parent. “The instruments were very well integrated with the stories,” noted another. Each storytime presents children’s stories enhanced by music from one of the four families of musical instruments: strings, woodwinds, percussion and brass.
The first storytime, on March 2, will feature violist Mara Lise Gearman, who will introduce children to the instruments of the string family and musically illustrate stories such as “Trouble on the Tracks” and “Coyote in Love.” On Tuesday, March 9 flutist Carla Wilson will demonstrate and discuss the instruments of the woodwind section with stories like “The Song of Six Birds,” “Paperwhite,” “Gabriella’s Song” and “The Baby Beebee Bird.” Two weeks later, on March 23, percussionist Chris Perry will bring along several instruments from the percussion section and accompany such stories as “The Rattletrap Car,” “Two Little Trains,” “Shekere, Shekere” and “Bling Blang.” The series concludes on Tuesday, March 30 with trumpet player Sally Kuhns who will present the instruments of the brass family with stories like “Music Over Manhattan,” “The Thing that Annoyed Farmer Brown,” “What Shall we do with Boo-hoo baby?” and “Ben’s Trumpet.”
Each player will choose music for his or her storytime session that illustrates the narrative of the story in an imaginative, compelling way. In addition, each musician from the orchestra will introduce themselves to the children when the storytelling is over, explain how their instrument “works,” demonstrate how to hold it, and help the children try out a real instrument brought to the session for them to use. Kids can then participate in a crafts activity in which they make their own instrument out of common household materials. For the percussion family, kids can make paper plate shakers (paper plates stabled together with beans in the middle); egg shakers (Easter eggs filled with rice, beans or beads) and coffee can drums. In lieu of actual brass instruments, kids can make paper horns and garden hose French horns, a roll of garden hose with baby bottle nipples for a mouthpiece. Woodwinds will be represented by pop bottle flutes and toilet paper roll kazoos, and the stringed instruments will feature shoe-box violins with rubber band strings. Kids and parents will also be given a specially printed bookmark with suggested readings and recommended CDs that features the instruments they have been studying. These recommendations tie into the library’s inventory of books and CDs.
The concept for the musical storytime grew out of the Symphony’s three-year participation in the Creative Empowerment Program, funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which explores ways in which people learn to open their minds to creative expression and the exploration of new ideas. The Creative Empowerment Program emphasizes the use of one’s own prior emotional experience in creating a “point of entry” to the study of a new subject, which has led to the creation of a new storytimes model for children that combines music with literature as a means of enhancing the learning process.
For more information call 503-228-4294 or visit the Symphony’s Web site at www.orsymphony.org.
