WHY BOTHER?
Mal Hewitt, May 2003
On October 31 2003, I will be just two years away from the magic "three-score years" (sixty in modern currency), or, to look at it from the other end, thirty-seven years on from taking those first tentative, self-conscious, naïve, frighteningly incompetent steps as an ill-prepared (despite conservatorium and teachers college "training") but desperately keen twenty-one-year-old music teacher. I learned more in those first four months than I had in four years of tertiary education (but is it any different these days?).
At a time in my career when many colleagues of my vintage spend their working hours, calculator in hand, ensuring the maximum return from all those years of contributions to the state superannuation fund (old scheme, of course!), I find myself planning yet another event involving many hundreds of adolescents, quite a few fellow teachers and several long-dead composers. Celebration Concert Number Eleven is off and running, with all the time, energy, perspiration and inspiration that such events require. To echo some of those calculating colleagues: why bother? Especially at a time when the daily grind of work in schools (whatever our job) becomes ever harder, for diminishing remuneration and recognition from department, government and community. So, why bother?
I feel I owe it to those who opened musical doors for me. Every year of my five years in high school, the high point was singing in the massed choir in Sydney Town Hall, with orchestra and grand organ, under the often circular beat of Terrence Hunt. The organisational genius behind the schools concerts was Barbara Mettam, and I was easily persuaded into participation by my music teacher at North Sydney Boys, Les Buck. The seed was sown in fertile ground.
As a fourteen-year-old, I experienced the extraordinary power of music to stir emotions, even to change lives, as I sang In tears of grief from the mighty St Matthew Passion with six hundred or so other musically impressionable youngsters. Nothing has changed in the forty-five years since then — music can still lift us out of the mundane and the everyday in a way that no other form of human expression can, especially music made in partnership with hundreds of others. Kids have the right to experience, and we have the responsibility to expose them to the greatest artistic achievements of our cultural heritage. Students of art study Leonardo, Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Picasso to learn how they did it. We can and should involve our students in performances of Bach, Brahms, Mahler and Bernstein — I know of no better way to find out how they did it.
Yes, some of this music is challenging, even hard for kids to come to terms with, yet how often do we hear them comment that the most intimidating music on initial contact was ultimately the most rewarding in final performance? I had an "advisory" visit from Barbara Mettam in my first year of teaching (yes, that used to happen!). She took several of my toughest classes and proved to me that, provided we teach with enthusiasm, belief in ourselves and in the value of what we are teaching, we can convince kids that virtually anything is possible. In the 2003 world of "dumbed down" entertainment and education, where the lowest common denominator is often the benchmark, we owe it to our kids to challenge them to reach for the sky.
The "bums and tits" approach of the Schools Spectacular and its many regional imitators seems to be confused by some amongst our educational leaders as music education. Whilst there is great value in kids’ learning the teamwork skills necessary to put on one of these variety shows, they are in no way a substitute for the kind of experience in learning, rehearsing, musically assimilating and performing the Gloria from the B minor Mass, Mahler’s Resurrection symphony or those wonderful spiritual settings by Michael Tippett. We must keep providing the opportunities for kids to experience great music for its own sake.
There is a special bond formed with someone you have stood beside in a choir or sat beside in an orchestra — you know you have shared in a unique and wonderful experience the mystical process of transforming notes on a page into a performance of great power, able to move both participants and listeners. Music has given me valued life-long friendships, many of them students who were part of a particular and special performance. I often hear: "Do you remember when we ..." followed by an account of a fondly recalled performance.
This is why I bother, and why the small group of teachers who organise the Celebration Concert bother.
The Celebration Concert continues to provide students with those opportunities to perform great choral repertoire, in contrasting styles and periods, and to sing with an outstanding orchestra (made up of teachers, professional musos and advanced tertiary and secondary students) in a venue full of history (Sydney Town Hall). Schools which have been involved each year since 1993 have experienced repertoire from Bach and Vivaldi to Peter Allen, as the list at right indicates. Each concert is also a fundraiser for children’s charities — the ten concerts have contributed $130,000 to Stewart House, Canteen, Westmead Children’s Hospital and Armidale Paediatric Unit, thereby continuing a tradition begun in 1939 with a fundraising concert for the child victims of war in Poland.
It is worth the bother!