The 28th annual Youth Festival took place on Wednesday, April 29 at 7:30 p.m. at Belk Theater. This annual concert highlights the talents of the Charlotte Symphony Youth Orchestra (CSYO), the Junior Youth Orchestra (JYO) and the grand-prize winner of the senior division of the Symphony Guild of Charlotte s annual Young Artists Competition. This year's winner this year is Kiffen Loomis, who is 16 and lives in Asheville, NC. He's a pianist who's been playing since age five. Get to know this talented young man!

---

How were you introduced to the piano?
As a 3 and 4 year-old, I would sit under the piano as my older brother practiced. Hearing each hammer strike the string, and seeing his foot guide the pedal up and down fascinated me. By the age of 5, I was ready to crawl up from under the piano, and play it for myself.

Who is one performer you respect?
Glenn Gould is one of the most enthralling pianists of the last century. His attention to detail, in combination with his fearless interpretation of the hallmark works, demands great respect.

What piece would you love to perform?
Bach's Goldberg Variations carry with them a divine character, making them stunningly beautiful, yet daunting. I would love to study the work, but question whether I would ever be able to perform it. 

What other contests/awards have you won? 
I have won the North Carolina Symphony's Junior Kathleen Price and Joseph M. Bryan Youth Concerto Competition, the Winston-Salem Symphony's Peter Perret Youth Talent Search, the Hendersonville Symphony Young Artist Concerto Competition, the junior division of the Charlotte Symphony Guild's Young Artist Competition, and eight first-place awards at the statewide competitions hosted by the NCFMC.

What else we should know about you?
I serve as president of the Western North Carolina region of the Order of the Arrow, part of the Boy Scouts of America. I devote much of my time to promoting leadership development among those in my region, and serving the community as a whole. In addition to my BSA interests, I play on my high school's varsity tennis team.

I also lead an organization called Notes from the Soul. NFS is a group of student musicians from WNC who performed for over 2,000 children in elementary schools and after-school programs this year. The group exposes its listeners to different types of music and promotes musical interchange among the children and young adults who perform.

Do you know what you'd like to study in college? 
I would like to study Nuclear Physics while maintaining my piano studies. This summer I will be working in the TUNL Research Institute for Nuclear Physics at Duke University and hope to determine whether nuclear physics is indeed my calling.

At 10:15 on a Thursday morning, the orchestra classroom at Albemarle Road Middle School is filled with chatter. Small children, some holding very large instruments, wriggle in their seats as their teacher, Mr. Logan Hughes, interrupts class. They have a special delivery.

For months, the Charlotte Symphony's director of education, Chris Stonnell, has collected instrument donations from across the community, storing them in his office, having them inspected and repaired and ready for this moment. His car is packed with black music cases stacked on top of each other, protecting shiny trombones, cellos, violins, violas, and even a bass guitar and amps.


Albemarle Road Middle School Principal Toni Perry says donations like this mean everything to the students. "We have some amazing students that want opportunities like this - to be in band and orchestra - and don't have the opportunity to do so because they can't get instruments," Perry says. "This [donation] is going to really grow our program and help us to be able to give our students the education they deserve."


Since April of 2012, the Charlotte Symphony has accepted community donations of unused or slightly damaged instruments, refurbished them to working order, and distributed them to local schools in need. Since Instruments for Kids began, we have donated approximately 65 instruments.  

Looking ahead, Albemarle Road's music instructors hope to start up Jazz and Pop bands and even a guitar program. This donation is helping to make these goals a reality.


Following the stop at Albemarle Road, Stonnell and School Programs Manager Phoebe Lustig made a second donation to Sugar Creek Charter School, providing the school its first eight instruments.

We are always grateful for instrument donations from the community and are in special need of full-sized stringed instruments. For more information on the Instruments for Kids program, click here.

Check out Central Piedmont Community College graphic design student Tyler Neal's creative design of our Orchestra On Campus performance poster! This annual concert will take place Wednesday, November 5 at Halton Theater. The theme of the program is "Mavericks of Sound," paying homage to musicians who broke ground in the music industry with their compositions.

"This is an awesome opportunity, to be a part of such an enriching experience for our community," says Neal.

Roger Kalia will conduct the Charlotte Symphony in this performance for a capacity crowd of CPCC students. For more information on our Orchestra On Campus partnership, click here.

Presently I am a sophomore at UNCG for Music Education and interning at the very place that gave me my start, Charlotte Symphony. Recently I was pleased to teach a class of about thirty elementary school students with the Freedom Schools program. My lesson was on the relationships and intersections between music and language. We explored deep into vocabulary, learned that expression can take many forms, and music can be translated many ways.  I also bridged these two concepts at the Winterfield Elementary summer program. By working side by side with symphony professionals and learning how they approach lessons, these musicians have grown to be like family. I am thrilled that I helped to meaningfully impact these students' life with music in the same way it has for me. 

Sometimes it feels a little odd that the program that I am now teaching I was only a student in not too long ago. I believe this goes to show that music can be a hobby or a creative outlet, but it certainly also is a career. Whether music selected me or visa-versa I will never really know, but I do know that my heart beats for all things music.

This post was written by Patrick Hoffman, Summer 2014 Education Intern  

Hometown?
Born in Chicago, raised in Rock Hill

Describe your Role with the CSO?
Education Intern.

(CSO Staff Note: Charles has been involved with numerous projects thus far in his internship but the largest has been designing and building the Teachers Guide for our Education concerts on April 2, 2014. This is the first time the Guide has been entirely online (thanks to our newly designed website!) and we couldn't be more pleased with the results of Charles' hard work. The response from the Teachers has been overwhelmingly positive!)

Where are you studying?
I'm a senior at Winthrop University, majoring in Music Composition with a Business minor. I will graduate in May 2014.

What are your plans after graduation?
Apply to NYU Steinhardt's Masters program in Film music at the end of 2014. In the meantime, work on projects already lined up around the Charlotte area and at Winthrop University.  

What would you eventually like to do?
Work with interactive media, perhaps as a Music Producer or in the Film Industry as a Film Composer.

What instruments do/have you played?
Several Bass, Piano and Trumpet. I played trumpet in marching band in High School.

What's your favorite part of volunteering with the CSO?
Engaging with musicians and regularly attending the concerts. It was really enjoyable to meet composer Dan Locklair and join the Recital Seminar students at Northwest School of the Arts in meeting him as well. 

On Friday January 24, 2014 Assistant Conductor Roger Kalia gave a lecture at Christ the King Catholic High School in Huntersville. He spoke on sacred music and the differences of performing works (like the Bach Passion) in a cathedral or church versus a performance hall. He also discussed how the pieces were performed historically against how they are performed today. For the second half of the talk he spoke on the role of a conductor, had students watch video clips of famous conductors and then compare/contrast their varying styles. The students even convinced Roger to show a YouTube clip of him conducting!

Students were asked to write a blog entry on their response to the talk. Logan Thayer, a student at Christ the King Catholic High School had this to say:

 

I have been participating in "Bridging Musical Worlds," celebrating the legacy and life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. since January of 2009 (the date was the day before President Obama's first inauguration).

For the past six years A Sign of the Times of the Carolinas, a local jazz group, and musicians from the Charlotte Symphony (myself included) have presented a collaborative performance at The Historic Excelsior Club, the first African-American nightclub in Charlotte, to mark MLK Day.



Among the goals of this collaboration for the Charlotte Symphony is to expose audiences who may not necessarily have been to a Symphony concert to classical music in a setting other than the Blumenthal, and I applaud that. However, I feel that these concerts have served as outreach in both directions, helping symphonic musicians expand our horizons too.

An attitude trend among some classical musicians is that classical music is the apex of musical art; however, I have learned that this can be a rather tunnel-vision view.

The Excelsior experiences have been extremely beneficial to me because they take me out of my classical comfort zone. When the Symphony ensemble performs with A Sign of the Times, Tyrone Jefferson, the leader, encourages us to improvise; for most classical players, if you ask us to improvise a tune by ear, we freeze because there are not notes on a page! This is a skill which is second nature to jazz players...basically composing on the spot, which actually used to be an expected performance practice for classical musicians back in the 18th and early 19th centuries. To do this is both rather frightening and liberating, and I am grateful to the fact that Tyrone is very accepting and encouraging of our baby steps in that direction, no matter how tentative.

We are so fortunate to work with Tyrone, who served as the music director for the great James Brown. The things he learned about music (rhythmic feel, improv, etc.) from Mr. Brown he shares with his band, the young people who sit in on their rehearsals and with the Symphony players. Jazz has been called, on more than one occasion, "America's Classical Music." It is one thing for the Symphony to play arrangements of jazz works on a pops show, led by a classically trained conductor; it is a completely different level when one gets to play these pieces in a group which is steeped in that tradition and led by someone who thoroughly understands the style.

The performance venue and format of "Bridging Musical Worlds" at the Excelsior is quite different than a concert hall, but we Symphony musicians are given an extremely warm and gracious welcome by the audience and the jazz musicians. When we get into the jazz pieces, the classically trained musicians can be ducks out of water, but everyone from the band members to the people in the audience help us to swim.

There is a feeling of fellowship, mutual respect and goodwill that can be quite a rarity, and that has touched me deeply.

---

Martha Geissler has been a violinist with the Charlotte Symphony since 1981. This year she is joined by fellow Charlotte Symphony musicians Jane Hart Brendle (violin), Joseph Meyer (Associate Concertmaster) and Matthew Lavin (extra/substitute cello).

Senior Patrick Hoffman plays viola for the CSYO and values the unique experience the Youth Orchestra provides: "[The CSYO is] an opportunity to play mature repertoire where people want to play because it's not something that's required." Hoffman also appreciates the connections he's made saying "Maybe you sit next to someone you've never met from Cornelius. ... [The CSYO] really brings the Charlotte area together."  Patrick will attend UNC Greensboro in the fall where he will pursue a degree in Music Education.

For their next performance, the Youth Orchestra will play to a crowd of more than two-thousand on Sunday, June 16, presenting the prelude to the Charlotte Symphony's "A Summer Pops Fantasia" concert at Symphony Park.

Other summer activities include the Charlotte Symphony Youth Orchestra Summer Camp July 31 August 4, and a once-in-a-lifetime trip to DC in June, where the young musicians will train and perform with prestigious youth orchestras from other cities.

Written by Kristen Freeman, CSO Intern

This program provides opportunities for growth not only for the students, but also for the coaches: "Answering questions and working with the students keeps our artistic lives focused and sharpened, therefore keeping our standards high while out in the community," says violin coach Susan Blumberg, who has been a part of the Instrumental Music Initiative at Northwest for five years.

Thomas Burge, who works with the program as a brass coach claims, "The most important work we do as musicians, both for the future of the musical world, and the future of community is to inspire young people to devote their energies to artistic pursuits. The work that I do through the Instrumental Music Initiative at Northwest School of the Arts ... utilizes all the schools I have as a musician and teacher, right where they are needed most."

The "Recital Seminar" chamber ensembles will hold their Spring concert at 3 pm on May 5, 2013. The program hopes to continue building on its past growth and success in the 2013-14 school year, with plans to premiere a new composition by acclaimed composer, Dan Locklair.

Written by Kristen Freeman, CSO Intern

 
After losing funding for field trips to arts performances three years ago, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools partnered with the Arts & Science Council to not only reinstate them but provide a more complete experience.

In seven waves this week, more than 11,000 fifth-graders will attend "Endless Possibilities," an event with the Charlotte Symphony, Opera Carolina and North Carolina Dance Theatre. The program features music and dance chosen to stimulate 10- and 11-year-olds and is accompanied by curriculum addressing this performance.

More than 51,000 students will participate in field trips, including third-graders and middle schoolers, at a cost of $338,000, mostly funded by ASC. Wells Fargo, Ulysses Festival, UNC Charlotte and CMS also contributed for the fifth-grade trips.

When the schools and ASC formed a partnership to bring field trips back, they wanted students to get more from the experience than a memory of whatever the arts groups chose to present usually something from their current season. The partnership outlined what artistic material was appropriate for fifth-graders and reached out to the opera, symphony and dance company.

What they came up with was Bach's "Toccata and Fugue" arranged with a Latin beat, accompanying four couples dancing a salsa; Mozart's "The Magic Flute," the Queen of the Night aria and the duet between Papageno and Papagena; the first movement from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, played with a rock, Latin and hip-hop beat; and in dance, Alonzo King's "Chants;" "Warehouse Medicine," a piece by Mason Bates for DJ and orchestra; and the overture to Bernstein's "Candide."

Students learn about the composers, musicians, choreographers and dancers before they see the show. On Tuesday, their familiarity and enthusiasm was evident as they joined Charlotte Symphony Guest Conductor Jacomo Rafael Bairos in chanting "Johann Sebastian Bach" and "Ludwig van Beethoven."

The effort to make this traditional yet innovative program happen was immense. Aside from the 18 months of planning, the partnership formation, Wells Fargo's donation, the arts organizations performing at cost (rather than charging $4 per student), 40 school buses were required to transport 1,700 people to each of the seven performances.

The curriculum continues after the performances with journal activities. Students will be able to design their own costumes for Papageno or write a tweet about the event. The partnership expects benefits to continually reveal themselves for years to come.

Judging by the number of kids perched on the edge of their seats mimicking Bairos' baton pattern with their hands, Charlotte can look forward to a flood of conductors.

Source The Charlotte Observer 

This article is part of the Charlotte Arts Journalism Alliance, a consortium of local media dedicated to writing about the arts.
Read the full story here.