Moved by the blues
Music has a transforming effect but showing kids that isn't just a matter of handing them a mike.
It looks like a teacher's nightmare.
Forty-some teens are milling around a room in a large urban high school. Many arrive late, with friends in tow. It takes five minutes just to sort out who belongs there. Half the kids don't bother to remove their coats, as if it might not be worth the effort.
Finally, Gregory Rahming a dapper African-American baritone with flashing eyes steps forward and calls for order in sonorous tones.
A casual observer could be forgiven for not knowing this group has already met several times to compose blues music with guidance from Mr. Rahming. It would be even more difficult to guess that their performance at the New York Festival of Song is just a day away.
What is clear is that it won't be an easy journey from here to the stage.
Schools are generally very open to outside programs, like this one, that many believe can reach students in ways that math or English may not. But it's one thing to cherish faith in the power of the arts. It's quite another to be the instructor charged with forming a connection that powerful as it can be is not automatic.
These close encounters with the arts take different forms. In Boston, the Cantata Singers sends composers and chorus members into classrooms to help students write groups of songs. In Columbia, S.C., and other college towns, the American String Teachers Association puts college-level music students in schools to help kids play stringed instruments.
The New York Festival of Song (NYFOS) places professional singers in high schools for lessons designed to spark interest in various forms of song. But much can depend upon the depth of an instructor's conviction that what he is offering the students whether they appear initially to want it or not is of genuine value.
Rahming has been teaching for NYFOS in New York City public high schools for seven years now, and has become accustomed to success. In his first year with NYFOS, he was assigned to a special school serving kids who had been expelled from other schools. He remembers the experience as a challenging but rewarding one in which the students made a strong connection with both him and the music.
And in a Connecticut high school where he performed an opera program he created, a teacher was astonished to see three of the toughest boys apparently moved by Rahming's staging of a scene from "The Marriage of Figaro" linger after class to shake his hand.
But this year, his third at Hillcrest High School in southern Queens, Rahming has struggled with undisciplined classes and students whose enthusiasm he can't seem to tap. To make matters worse, an illness has prevented him from singing for them and has thus deprived him of a technique almost guaranteed to generate interest.
It's been a tough month, and Rahming is even wondering if he wants to put out the effort to teach for NYFOS next year.
In theory, this should have been a relatively easy assignment. Some years, Rahming has labored to interest high-schoolers in more-esoteric genres, but this year NYFOS decided to focus on the blues, a form not too far removed from the music most of the students favor. Rahming has spent eight days, scattered over a month, at the school, teaching three different classes about the basic elements of song.
The lessons began by defining terms like "melody" and "rhythm," and then moved on to give students a feel for the twelve-bar structure of a blues song.
Next, Rahming asked them to write poems on two topics food and love that could be shaped into lyrics. He then put their words to music and began to help them prepare for a performance in conjunction with four New York high schools.
