Kids get hands-on taste of symphony music
Watching their eyes light up when they realize they can make music is precisely the reaction B.J. Armstrong hoped she would see.
And it happens every time Niagara Symphony Orchestra gives children an opportunity to pluck away at the strings of various musical instruments.
“Every single time their eyes light up, they get excited, they run from table to table to experiment,” she said. “It’s exactly what we want to happen.”
Staff, musicians and volunteers from the orchestra gathered at the Pen Centre Saturday with all sorts of musical instruments that visitors were welcome to play, during its third “instrument petting zoo” in the past two years.
Children were given an oppor-
tunity to play a trombone, xylophone, violins, guitars, ukuleles, drums — and pretty much any instrument used by the symphony — as a way of letting them know that there’s nothing mystical about those instruments. And even children can play them.
“There isn’t enough music accessible. It de-mystifies all the orchestral instruments,” Armstrong said. “And they can do it. Every single one of them got sound out of an instrument. They got sound out of a french horn, out of a flute, out of a bass recorder. It makes it accessible to them, and I think that’s really important.”
Henri Lutomski, for instance, had a chance to try out a trombone for the first time during the event.
“It’s fun,” he said. “But it’s hard to play, especially because you can’t really tell the different notes when you push (the slide) out, or pull it in.”
Lutomski said he also learned during the event that he’s “really good at the xylophone.”
An orchestra cellist, Gordon Cleland, who also coaches with the youth orchestra, brought his own instrument to the event to let budding musicians give it a try.
“It’s a way to get them to see what there is,” Cleland said. “It’s really just a brief introduction, but if they don’t have a clue what the instrument is they’ll never say, ‘Oh, I want to play violin, or cello.’”