- [Announcer] Live from your public media studios, WVIA presents "Keystone Edition Arts," a public affairs program that goes beyond the headlines to address issues in Northeastern and Central Pennsylvania.

This is "Keystone Edition Arts."

And now, Erika Funke.

(upbeat music) - Welcome to "Keystone Edition Arts," where we'll hear about exciting new ways of making music with young people and adults alike.

Sara Cento keys us in.

(transition whooshing) - [¦Sara] According to the National Institutes of Health, singing in a group has advantages, such as increased positive emotions and sense of connection with others.

The Mosaic Youth Chorus provides opportunities for young people to sing together and feel connected with each other and the audience.

Their mission is to create community, build empathy and affect positive social change through artistic and expressive singing.

In an interview for WVIA's "Art Scene," Joy Hirokawa, the artistic and executive director, describes how she works with young people to help them understand the songs, not only how to sing the music, but also the context of the words.

In the process, the chorus members connect with the historical and cultural influences of the music and its composer.

Hirokawa selects a theme each season, and with the student's input, selects music connected to that theme, often including songs from other cultures, which they sing in the original language.

Hirokawa then organizes a trip with the students to delve further into the theme.

This season, the focus is on water and the environment, and featured songs, including those with roots in West Africa, stories of Sudanese basket weavers and traditional Puerto Rican music.

In late June, the chorus will sing with other international choirs at the Costa Rica Choral Festival for Peace, followed by a visit to a rainforest to learn more about the environment.

The Mosaic Youth Chorus recently received the 2025 Education and Community Engagement Award from Chorus America.

The award recognizes programs that demonstrate mission-based program development, viable music education, a commitment to artistic achievement, and other sustainable, beneficial and meaningful collaborations for all partners.

For "Keystone Edition Arts," I'm Sara Cento, WVIA News.

(upbeat music) - We're hearing Alyssa as she practices her scales.

She remembers when her mother would place a penny on each wrist to keep her hands in place while only her fingers moved.

The great pianist Boris Berman calls that the old school of teaching, which leads to dry and inflexible sound, and even strain an injury for the student.

But what if instead of placing restrictions on their gestures, students were encouraged to listen deeply to themselves and the other players, and find musical meaning, not from the printed notes on the page first, but by letting their gestures flow from within to begin?

We have three guests who have been exploring ways of creating new musical languages to unlock the creative abilities of young musicians and those with disabilities, resulting in original compositions, a sense of community and self-esteem.

Violinist Sophie Till, associate professor of violin and director of the String Project at Marywood University in Scranton, and co-founder of The Till Project, an international organization for string players.

Nick Revel, a Grammy-nominated violist, award-winning composer and founding member of the noted PUBLIQuartet.

He's an educator and author as well.

Dr. Denise White, an award-winning special needs and music educator, and founder of the musical methodology known as conductology.

She is the author of the recent study, "A Music Improvisation Model for Children," and she's based in Eglinton, Northern Ireland.

Welcome, Sophie.

We're actually here because we followed you over the past couple of years and the innovative ways you've been working with students to reimagine the teaching of string playing.

Tell us what you've been up to at Marywood.

What's the String Project?

- So the String Project has, well, first of all, it's part of a national program called the National String Project Consortium.

So there are about 40 of those around the country, all in different universities, and they have a dual mission that's really quite unique.

It's to provide affordable string education, but also to train young teachers.

So our undergraduates have four years of hands-on supervised teacher training before they step out into the profession.

And that's really wonderful, that dual mission is really special.

So that's the heart of String Project.

- And we know, because we've talked to you in interviews, that you've been inviting guest musicians, like violinist Skye Steele and Nick Revel, whom will meet, the violist.

And you've been working with them to develop ways to expand the horizons of the students.

And you have been exploring these ways over the course of a semester.

So it's not just a short master class.

What have you been doing and what are your results?

- So the work with Skye Steele was called "Equity as Ownership."

And it was really to explore the history of these wonderful instruments and the music that comes from that beyond the Western tradition, and to expose the children to that type of music and to making music from around the world.

And I think what we've done with Nick with the Notation Project has continued that, because we've been exploring how to create our own notation, to give these children the tools to make their own piece of music, so that they understand that this wonderful system we have, which is fantastic, of the black and white stuff that we look at, is a system and we can come up with other ways of making music and they can do it themselves.

They can create a notation and share making music all by themselves.

And that's really special.

- And does that loosen them up as players, even if they go back to playing Beethoven and Mozart?

What does it do for them in regard to the classics they might wind up playing?

- I think it changes how they listen, it changes how they feel about the playing.

It's very spontaneous, obviously, when they're just (laughing) standing there in a group looking at the symbol on the screen.

(bright music) And I think it makes them sort of communicate more with their own body what they're doing in that moment.

And then they start to listen around and outside of themselves in a different way, because they don't have this sheet of paper (laughing) in front of them that they're trying to obey.

And what we're hoping is that not only do they take those skills and use them again maybe with each other, but that when they see the printed page, they understand it in a different way.

It's just a way of communicating sound, it's symbols to communicate sound, and then we make the sounds on these instruments.

And so I'm hoping that it breaks down that barrier of the music notation being something to obey and get right, and something to treat as very creative and to really interpret.

- And why did you choose violist Nick Revel?

How did you see him as someone who could collaborate with you to do just that?

- So it took a long time.

(Erika laughing) I had this idea of a Notation Project for about three years, and Nick's wife, Nora Crone, is part of the Till Project.

and she's one of my co-founders.

And then I met Nick through Nora, and I saw his wonderful Dragon Scale series and the hero levels.

He's written these etudes for violin, viola, cello, and they have this find-your-own-adventure theme to them, and there's improvisation in there and notation in there.

And he was sharing those with us over the summer, and I thought, "Ah, this is the person I need."

(laughing) - (laughing) He's the one.

- This is the person who's a string player and can explore this type of work with children for us.

- And you and Nick, you brought Nick and you came to the WVIA radio studio to talk with us about the Notation Project.

And you had a chance and Nick had a chance to talk with us.

And here's what we recorded there about his vision of what you're doing.

(transition whooshing) (upbeat music) - Playing a violin is a hundreds of years' old craft that is still progressing to this day.

And in order to play some of the music that we find in our canon, you do need to achieve a certain level of mastery on your instrument.

So it's not that you can just approach the hardest pieces with less than what skill that you need and expect to be able to play it, it's more that you don't need that skill in order to have fun on the instrument.

I think students come away with a variety of experiences from improvisation.

Some are really opened up and only want to improvise, and some are enlightened to the fact that the piece that they do wanna play, they're struggling with it and they need a little bit of technical help and they need to practice those techniques in order to be able to play that piece.

- But you have prepared a way for them to do that by listening, right?

- Yes, and that is sort of the core of this project.

The original proposal was to create a brand-new notation system in which we would create among all four groups a brand-new piece of music using structured improvisation.

Sophie mentioned the pizza paper, the very famous pizza paper.

This is our staff paper essentially.

This is what the music is written on.

It's a half pizza, and it represents the four sections on stage that we will be occupying.

Each slice is a different group.

They're color coded, they know exactly which colors they're supposed to be looking at.

And in those sections, the symbols to represent various musical devices that we have invented over the last couple months will appear.

So every page is a new scene, and we move through the scenes as we want.

It's open-ended in terms of the length and the tempo.

A student yesterday asked, "How many symbols are there?"

And I didn't count them, but I think there's at least 10.

So they all mean different things, and all the students know exactly what they mean.

(upbeat music) This is another one of those things where you're looking for how improvisation kind of comes back to the written music.

And I'll say that I've had experiences personally as a performer where I've all of a sudden been practicing a very difficult piece and I've realized that even though all the notes and rhythms are printed on the page, I still choose to play them.

So even though it's there, it's all a choice.

And I think as soon as a musician can get a taste of that, that literally every sound that they make on their instrument is a choice, whether it's subconscious or fully conscious, there is just a freeing joy that comes with playing music and you feel the passage of time as you're playing.

And to be able to do that alongside others who are potentially having that same experience is kind of where the magic is for me.

♪ One, two, my turn ♪ I hope that in doing this project that the students will be aware of sounds that their instrument can make that they were not aware of before.

Certain techniques that they'll be able to use on their instruments to make their existing pieces sound better to them.

And again, that's kind of up for grabs, what does better mean?

And that they'll be curious about different kinds of music as well, not just classical music.

(upbeat music) This is a viola.

It's like a violin but lower.

I always make this joke when I'm with quartet and it's not appropriate elsewhere, but I say, "It's like a violin, but better."

But we're not in that context, I won't say that.

You can cut that.

- I will.

(laughing) - (laughing) So the viola has this kinda rich C string.

(upbeat music) And one of the things that we have really focused on in this project, one of our musical devices is called a rhythm train.

And a rhythm train is basically a way for a large group of musicians to interact in a structured improvisation.

So if we're in the key of A major, which we are for this piece.

(upbeat music) I can choose any of those notes and just find a few little grooves that we can loop.

So if our tempo is one, two, three, four.

(upbeat music) That's fine, right?

And it doesn't necessarily sound like much on my own, but when you've got a whole group of people adding their own story to that, it really comes alive.

And so one of the things that happens, of course, in every musical group, even experienced ones, is you tend to overplay, you tend to play too much, you take up too much space.

And so part of the training in this situation, this ear training is listening for the pockets where you might be able to add your little contribution.

(upbeat music) Rest.

So if I was player two.

♪ Bum, bum, bah, dah, bum, bum ♪ (note ringing) ♪ Bum, bum, bah ♪ ♪ Dah, bum, bum ♪ (note ringing) And now, all of a sudden, there's a second voice that doesn't compete with the first one, right?

So that's kind of a bit of the basis of the rhythm train, which is a device that we use throughout the piece.

(audience clapping) (upbeat music) - Nick Revel, violist and award-winning composer, speaking about the Notation Project that the violinist Sophie Till and he directed during the spring of 2025 in the semester there at the String Project at Marywood University in Scranton.

And Sophie, before we get to our next guest, tell me what you feel when you see that.

I could see you looking at the recording and feeling that like it was really very special, huh?

- Yeah, I mean, to see about 100 children from sort of four through to 18, so we've got all different levels, which is (laughing) a real challenge to get that age group, that range to do something together, creating something on the spur of the moment that hasn't been created before.

They got together for the first time the day before in a different space.

So they'd never met all together.

We'd never actually tried this with all the groups together.

And so to see those little tiny kids with those older kids doing it live.

It's very much a live project this sort of Notation Project.

And I think also the progression across the semester was a real live thing from week to week, how the kids understood what they were doing with these symbols.

So it's really powerful to see them together.

- Well, as we've heard, improvisation has been a central aspect of the Notation Project at Marywood.

Dr. Denise White has just released a study titled "A Music Improvisation Model for Children," because it's at the core of conductology, a methodology which she's researched, developed and tested over a number of years in Northern Ireland.

Her innovative work has come to our attention through her aunt, Dr. Deirdre Mullan, RSM, who is on the board of directors at Misericordia University here in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

We had a chance to speak with Dr. White on Zoom about her important work.

(transition whooshing) You use the word, or we see in connection with connectology, the word gesture.

How does gesture bring about the results that you are speaking about?

- There's 18 gestures in the universal gesture system, which is conductology.

There's nothing like it in the world.

We looked at other gesture systems, such as Butch Morris's conduction or Walter Thompson's sign painting, both Americans, the only thing quite close to it was Makaton.

But the beauty about our gesture system and the 18 gestures is it was co-created with four of my musicians, who were all diagnosed with severe learning disabilities and were told from a very young age that they wouldn't really be able to do anything with their lives or whatever.

Yet they have performed in Portugal, they have performed in London, they've performed in Dublin and Cork.

They're on a par with professional musicians.

And it's the simplicity of the gestures.

For example, the very first one that they decided with me was, they said, "We don't really know when we're meant to start playing.

The conductor comes on and then he kind of, or he or she looks at you, but we would like to be ready and be professional and the backs up straight or whatever."

So they suggested we need something that will prepare the orchestra to perform.

So the first one really was the two fists, up along here, just like that.

And as soon as I do that gesture or any of the other conductologists do that, the orchestra knows, "Right, professional."

They know the word professional now as, "Yeah, we can be professional just like anybody else.

We're talented, we're brilliant."

So in terms of the musicality and the elements of music and whatever, we covered everything in terms of developing their creativity, and for them to believe that a human being is born with unlimited creative potential, which they really know now.

And some of the stuff they're creating is like, wow.

(laughing) They have free improvisation, okay?

So the gesture for free improvisation would be like a wave.

You're free in the ocean.

And then you would have return to the little motif that you have and you play throughout.

And then you would have a beautiful gesture for solo or empowerment.

And that's where they show off their biceps.

And this is just.

So it's all this cooperative and collaborative approach to their gesture.

So it's the ownership of this group of musicians that have been neglected for far too long.

So that's why I want this global mission to happen because it's the ownership of this vulnerable group in society, that have been just dismissed.

And they have so much creative potential, they're much more creative than me.

They go for it.

The stuff that they create is absolutely amazing, it is mind blowing.

We had a rehearsal last week with our northwest conductology orchestra.

A few weeks before that, we actually had the privilege to perform for the king and the queen of England.

And we actually met with the king and the queen.

And he said, "You are a very energetic conductor and the music is just sensational, and how do you go about this?"

And I said, "It's through this world-first conductology innovation."

And he said, I would like to hear more about that at some point."

So we have written a letter, but last week, we actually created a piece called "Summer Bliss" for the king and the queen's 20th wedding anniversary.

And it is absolutely stunning.

- Does it start with one of the musicians, part of the orchestra selecting a motif, and the others have a conversation with that?

How does a piece develop?

- What we do, first of all, is everybody decides on what particular instrument they would like to play.

So then they decide on a motif or a little rhythmic pattern that they want to keep repeating whenever they're invited to play.

So if you're invited to play, you play your motif, and then it's the other gestures, then, that lead and develop and connect everything.

Now, whenever I'm conducting, whenever I'm stepping into the role as conductologist leading an orchestra, I have no idea who I'm going to start with, what gestures I'm going to use.

It just evolves like a painting.

And we even have a gesture, thin, thick, thin, where you just go round everybody.

And it's that combination of sound that you hear in the moment, you're living in the moment.

And it's just something really, really special, because if you go to play that piece again, you can't, it's never gonna be the same.

It's out there in the world for the first time and the last time.

- It's not just a matter of generating individuals who can play music, but they learn to work together with other people.

- Oh yeah.

- It's a human development, right?

- Absolutely, yes.

The scientific data indicates positively that even leadership skills, that ones that have very little communication, they're now starting to communicate and use language, their social interaction, mental health.

There is one of our students who has an eye condition called nystagmus, where the pupil flicks just constantly, especially when her mental health and anxiety is raised.

Whenever she's actually involved in participating in a conductology music-making session, it stops, she's totally focused.

I have another musician, and her anxiety is absolutely just, it's really social anxiety.

So she recently performed in front of a couple of hundred people and she broke down with pride because she said she never in her lifetime thought she would be able to do that.

And then one of our master conductologists, Mr. Sean Healy, who has now turned 30, he would love to meet the doctor that actually diagnosed him and said to Sean's mom, "I'm sorry, but Sean will have probably limited life skills.

He'll probably not hold down a job.

It's very likely that he will not be able to communicate, socially interact with anybody."

Sean is a master conductologist.

He's leading the training with me and another master conductologist in a couple of weeks' time.

He has a really bad tremor in his right arm.

Whenever he uses the gesture system and leads in a music-making piece with our orchestra, the shake just completely disappears.

But I could tell a story for every individual, and I could tell a story about what skills are progressed and advanced, and it's just a plethora.

- Thank you so much, Dr. White, in Northern Ireland.

Sophie, as you listened to Dr. White, what are the echoes that you might have heard in terms of what you're doing?

Are there echoes?

- There are many echoes.

When she's talking about hand symbols, and we had the children designing their own symbols, they were just printed, that was really wonderful to see that they're doing something very similar.

And talking about using a motif, we were using these little rhythmic loops or we were using this little melody that would come in and out, and we would have a sparse version and a thicker version of that, very similar idea.

What's wonderful about what they're doing and what she's doing is that it's more (laughing) transportable than all the technology that we used.

And that's wonderful to see, because making it more transportable is a great idea.

But there are many similarities, yeah.

- Tell us where you're taking what you've discovered in this recent exploration.

Where are you going to speak and present?

- So next week, I'm off to the Netherlands.

I'll be speaking with a Till Project colleague, Sally Anne Anderson, from the UK.

And we'll actually be speaking to European string teachers about what we call steering versus obedience, which is a way of working with our instruments where we're taking normal daily patterns of movement and we're applying them to the specifics of playing.

- And that's international.

- That's international.

- Wonderful.

Well, congratulations.

We have a chance for you as a viewer to get information about the String Project, stringproject@marywood.edu.

For more information from Dr. White, conductology.co.uk.

And for information on the Mosaic Youth Chorus, you can go to mosaicyouthchorus.org.

We'd like to thank our guests, Sophie, Nick, Denise, and you for watching.

This, and every episode of "Keystone Edition" is available on demand on our YouTube channel, and now as a special audio podcast, so you'll never miss an episode.

Just visit wvia.org/keystoneeditionarts to stream episodesm or subscribe to the podcast.

For WVIA and "Keystone Edition," I'm Erika Funke, thank you for listening.

And Sophie, just tell us a little bit, we're going to hear a snippet of "A Musical Adventure" from the String Project, so we probably have about 30 seconds for you to tell us what we're going to hear.

- You're going to show a clip of the kids?

- Yes.

- Or would you like me to show?

- No, we have a clip.

- You have a clip?

- Yes.

- Okay.

- But we're going to hear this concert that was a culmination, right?

- Ah.

So we're gonna hear the children with their pizza paper.

They called it "The Musical Adventure."

They chose the title, they voted for the title.

And we're gonna hear a short clip of that piece.

- Thank you, and congratulations on the great work you're doing.

And thank you all for watching.

(upbeat music)