|
Four little boys with violins crowd onto stage left, forming a tight defensive phalanx, and the three young women who rise to play alongside them whisper to them to spread out. The tune is Dorothy Kitchen's "Hiding Song." The tiniest musician, who plays a quarter-size violin, follows with a solo on "Pop! Goes the Weasel." Yards away, looking enisled at center stage, pianist Sam Hammond '68, M.T.S. '96—best known as Duke's carillonneur—accompanies on a concert grand.
The Duke University String School (DUSS) has begun its fourth and last concert of the spring season, some six hours of performing over the afternoon and evening that mark the school's fortieth anniversary. These four decades represent a signal milestone for the school's founder and director, Dorothy Kitchen—she of "Hiding Song" fame—and an invitation to reflect upon the future. Yet the marathon concert is neither unusual nor valedictory, just one more breathing place on the long upward path to helping the world play, and understand, music.
"This school has seen thousands of people go through it, thousands," says Kitchen. "But the school just kind of happened. It was a necessity. When I came here, there was no string teaching—no string teaching done well—for children.
"We're trying to teach them to read," she continues, "to play in tune, to play in a group, to have a sensitivity to rhythm, sensitivity to pitch, appreciation for sound, and an appreciation for the group experience."
Kitchen teaches the beginners, like the four little boys who lead off the concert. Like the rest of DUSS students, "when they perform, it's amazing how well they do, the poise," says Shelley Livingston, assistant conductor of the string school's Youth Symphony Orchestra, the senior-most group.
Presently, the diminutive but poised members of Beginner I Ensemble are whisked offstage to make way for Beginner II Ensemble, evenly split between boys and girls, who render a unison version of "Camptown Races" at about one-quarter tempo. Incredibly, they are in tune. Unlike their casually attired families in the audience, the performers are dressed in dapper white shirts and black trousers or skirts. Their collective bow is practiced. Teachers beam. Video cameras roll.
Kitchen "demands discipline," says cellist and DUSS alumna Brenda Neece. She also commands respect. Whether eight-year-olds with twelve-inch fiddles or alumni thirty years out with professional careers in music, everybody calls the boss "Mrs. Kitchen."
Kitchen, a violinist who holds degrees from Case Western Reserve and Brandeis universities and was associate concertmaster of the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra for fifteen years, launched the string school in 1967 with Arlene di Cecco, then of the Ciompi Quartet. The school has grown from twenty-five students taking private lessons to more than 250 who study with eleven instructors, populate six orchestras and at least ten chamber groups, and learn music theory year-round.
And it was, Kitchen is quick to add, the university affiliation that allowed people to take the school seriously. "The gift that Duke gives us is the use of the space, and the help of the secretarial staff to handle our budget and help us with employees." All direct expenses are covered by the school's tuition and fees—along with grants from the A.J. Fletcher Foundation that enable DUSS to offer need-based scholarships and pursue programs reaching deep into the Triangle community, especially Durham, where DUSS teachers have offered annual workshops. Every Saturday of the academic year, students pour onto campus from surrounding areas as well, including Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Apex, Burlington, Cary, Garner, Hillsborough, Oxford, and South Hill, Virginia.
What makes DUSS unusual, says Livingston, is "the opportunity to study a high-level repertoire. It's exhilarating for them to play challenging music."
"In high school they read the masters—James Joyce, Shakespeare," says Kitchen. "Why not do it in music?" DUSS orchestras are known for tackling tough works at their four annual concerts, and today's will be no exception. Its chamber-music groups, whose coaches are paid primarily though an endowment from the Dorothy Fearing family honoring the founder of the Duke Symphony Orchestra, perform at retirement villages, malls, Rotary and Kiwanis meetings, garden clubs, hospital fundraisers—wherever they find an audience, whenever their community needs them, and whatever they dare, from the great Romantics to living composers. Kitchen sees ensembles, not lessons, as the core of the school's program.
"There's a kind of thrill that comes with making music with someone else," explains Jonathan Bagg, the Ciompi String Quartet's violist and a former DUSS parent and coach. "Mrs. Kitchen always recognizes that when people come together to make music, it's something that satisfies in a deep way."
Inside the auditorium—its empty seats littered, though neatly so, with open violin, viola, and cello cases—a couple of hundred parents in sundresses and Capri pants, khakis and Hawaiian shirts fan themselves, babies in strollers look around expectantly, and siblings dangle bare feet in the aisles. A teenage violist klok-kloks by in noisy heels, conversations buzz from every quarter, the doors slam as children run in and out.
David Ballantyne, a British radio announcer for WCPE, a local classical music station, has been tapped as emcee for the day. He had launched the Beginner I performance without much fanfare, except to acknowledge Mrs. Kitchen, who rose hastily to take a bow from the third row. But when the seventy-eight members of the formidable Intermediate I Orchestra rise from their places in the audience, the atmosphere changes. Coaches and teachers spring up and issue commands, chairs are dragged to and fro to accommodate sightlines, and the audience leans forward.
The orchestra features one of its own in a Haydn concerto: Ten-year-old Michael Gao, a violinist in DUSS' most advanced ensemble, is also an award-winning pianist slated to perform in Carnegie Hall later this year. The reedy sixth-grader crosses the stage with his hands thrust deep in his pockets. He has forgotten to button his cuffs, which have been hastily rolled back out of the way. He is so physically unprepossessing and so diminutive behind the grand piano that you find yourself wondering whether he can possibly have the strength to pull off a fortissimo.
• continues on
page two.
|
