CLASSICAL
Youth groups are taking their music to the streets.
No longer bounded by four walls, concert hall design continues tomorph into more nontraditional spaces .
This holiday season, AFA — Houston’s largest nonprofit provider of music education — is taking to the pavement, launching AFA Neighborhood Sessions on Dec. 5 with the Gulfton Community Youth Orchestra’s Sinfonietta at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church Gethsemane campus. Over two weekends, the free outdoor series will also include performances closer to AFA’s home in historic Sixth Ward, featuring GCYO’s String Orchestra, the Houston Girls Chorus and the Chamber Music Academy.
Pre-pandemic, AFA — which was founded in 1993 by Houston composer J. Todd Frazier — was serving more than 3,000 students annually and presenting nearly 50 programs throughout the Greater Houston area. Nomatter the magnitude, such occasions allowed its young musicians to share their progress and achievements in the classroom with friends and family.
The significance of the upcoming concert series, however, is greater than the chance to perform, explained AFA executive director Amanda Fisher, who has been an integral part of the organization for 28 years. In a time when routine has yet to be re-instilled, the events celebrate the continuation of a therapeutic creative outlet, as well as the opportunity for in-person social interaction, which has become a rarity, especially for those attending school virtually.
“The students have taken this so much in stride,” said AFA alumna Amanda Heathco, who has worked her way through the ranks, from college intern to director of artistic programming. “Yes, they’re wearing masks, but once they’re in the room with each other, and they’re working with their faculty, they really are focusing on the music, and everything else kind of goes away.”
Under the guidance of coordinator Erika Lawson, the Chamber Music Academy consists of 38 members divided into nine chamber ensembles, froma gradeschool trio of female violinists to a string quartet of upperclassmen. In such small group settings, the students gain lessons in selfconfidence and teamwork, as they are responsible for mastering their individual parts to then play together without a conductor, Heathco explained.
Just as the academy’s wind and brass ensembles are on hiatus due to the pandemic, the Houston Girls Chorus was downsized to 16 high schoolers, from about 40, in order to safely conduct rehearsals in the AFA facilities. With the help of artistic director Amy Moore, the girls have relearned the skill of voice projection with the added barrier of masks, while mastering a mix of traditional choral pieces and holiday favorites.
Also performing festive tunes like Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Reed Flutes” from “The Nutcracker” are the 12 young musicians of GCYO. The tuition-free program, led by founding artistic director and conductor Theodora Prunoske, is AFA’s newest partnership and one of the more inspiring stories to come out of the pandemic.
“Music and the arts, that’s who we are as people, the culture of who we are,” Fisher said. “I think experiencing livemusic is something people have really missed, that shared experience of sitting in a room, or even sitting in a parking lot, and hearing it together and letting it really soothe your soul through this time.”