YOUTH ORCHESTRAS:All 400 pupils at St Agnes's school in Crumlin learn to play the violin, and the teachers see huge benefits. As school orchestras come together next week, meet two brilliant and committed teachers: Sr Bernadette Sweeney and Joanna Crooks
ARMAGH ROAD IN Crumlin, Dublin 12, is an extraordinary place. One minute you’re driving through the suburban village’s busy, traffic-filled centre; the next you arrive somewhere which might best be described as “planet scoil” – an entire street of schools. Scoil Colm sprawls all the way along one side of the road, Rosary College and St Agnes’ along the other. Its wide pavements, mellow old buildings and dusting of large trees give Armagh Road the sleepy, laidback feel of a university campus – but in the cookery room on the top floor of St Agnes’ primary school, the fourth class string orchestra is wide awake and ready for action.
"
One, two, three, four;
two, two, three, four . . " And they're off with a vigorous rendition of Offenbach's tune
Orpheus in the Underworld, better known to the world in general as the highkicking can-can. Each little face is a study in concentration as they make their way through the
piece, and peering at the music on the stand in front of me I can see why. The second violin part,
in particular, is composed of a series of patterns, variations and repeats. Let your mind wander
for a second, and you're lost.
But what's this? Second violins – in an Irish primary school? "Yes, and we have a double bass,"
says Joanna Crooks, known to one and all hereabouts as "the violin lady", "and some cellos and
even a viola. Hold up your bow!" A bow wiggles in the air as the viola player squirms shyly on her
chair.
Kids with violins are always cute. The extraordinary thing about this particular violin programme, however, is not its cuteness but its inclusivity. There are close to 400 children at St
Agnes' primary school, and every single one of them – including the three-year-old earlystarts –
learns to play the violin. I'm still trying to get my head around this astounding piece of information when the girls of third class arrive to show me how it's done.
“Let’s play Open D,” says Crooks to her charges. She turns to me. “And listen out for the rests. We call them ‘shushes’.” The open-string exercises completed, the girls demonstrate their warm-up routine. Then they run through a rhyme in which they name each part of the instrument in turn. There follows an arrangement of the William Tell overture, complete with fullon Rossini crescendo. As they play, my eye is caught by a rhythmic movement in the front row which is definitely not that of a bow on a string. I glance down and see a pair of tiny red boots, topped by a pair of red tights, tapping along in time. The owner meets my gaze and flashes me a gap-toothed smile.
It makes me regret that I’ve missed the 60 earlystarts, who had their session yesterday – and the boys, who have already been and gone this morning. Boys attend St Agnes’ until second class, when they transfer to Scoil Colm across the road; but they return every week to take part in the community orchestra, as do some of the secondary girls from Rosary College.
"That's a big part of our music project," Crooks explains. "We always said that there couldn't be a cut-off at sixth class – and we're lucky that the neighbouring secondary schools are so close."
Crooks began teaching at St Agnes' on a parttime basis in 2003, when she was still general
manager of the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland. "I just wanted a break from administrative
work – and I loved coming here on that one morning a week," she says. She had always planned to leave the NYOI at the end of 2006. "It was a hugely demanding job, and I had done it for a long time, and I needed more time to be with my father, who was very ill at the time, and for life in general. Then I thought I might come two days a week. But," she says, waving a hand at the chairs and music stands which her students – without being prompted – have arranged into the unmistakeable shape of a string orchestra, "I never envisaged anything like this."
In three academic years they've made astonishing progress: St Agnes' community orchestra now has 11 players in Dublin Youth Orchestras, for example, with a further 10 due to audition this year. They have also picked up a fistful of awards including last year's IAYO Youth Orchestra Achievement award, Lyric FM's Moladh an Cheoilaward for 2007 and, in the same year, an Irish TimesLiving Dublin award.
But musical progress isn't even the half of it. For Sr Bernadette Sweeney, who has been principal
at St Agnes' for a decade, it's all about equality. A trained singer and choral conductor from a
musical family, she arrived in Crumlin with visions of establishing a small violin project at the school. "I went around the senior classes and I said, 'Put up your hand any child who's dying to do the violin – with the emphasis on the word 'dying'," she says with a wry smile. "They were very slow to put their hands up. I had a terrible job to get a group of 15 together. The reason, I suspected, was that those children knew there'd be money involved and that their families couldn't afford it. So immediately I realised that this was something we should be giving to every child."
There was, of course, the small matter of funding. Sr Bernadette applied to the AIB Better Ireland awards and was successful. “That money set us off on a wonderful footing,” she says. “All of it went into buying instruments.” Her own order, the Religious Sisters of Charity, contributed a generous sum which helped to guarantee tuition on a continuous basis.
After that, it was up to the school to run the programme in a way that made sense. "It has to be during school time, because children who don't have a privileged background are not able to facilitate work after school," she explains. "It's also really important that all the teachers in the school should be on board. The project can't just be something that's highlighted in a particular year; it has to be something that's sustainable, so you have to make sure the staff are trained in. It's a joy to have Joanna here – and I never hear any negativity from the teachers about the orchestra programme, no matter what the demands are in terms of time and rearranging classes and so forth."
For Sr Bernadette, having every child in the school learn the violin has nothing to do with aesthetics, snobbery, or personal gratification. Instead the benefits are cognitive, social – and incalculable. "Music makes a difference," she says firmly. "The difference is gradual, but remarkably obvious. It makes the children gentler. It makes them more sensitive. It helps them to cooperate with others and to co-operate with their peers. It builds the family's sense of respect and authority in a unique way – at least, I don't know of anything else that can do it in such a way."
It’s in the often angst-ridden area of discipline that music has the greatest effect, she adds. “There’s only one rule in our school, and that’s respect. Respect is a quality that must emanate from the interiorising of core values. Music is a soul gift, an innate talent in each person waiting to be awakened; and this project acknowledges the soul and equality of all human beings, and particularly of children.”
By way of example she cites the case of the annual sixth-class pre-Confirmation retreats. These demand an entire of day of silence – a huge challenge to the average 21st-century 12-year-old. “Our two sixth classes were silent almost all day, no problem. They’re able to focus, you see. The concentration is developed – and I think they’re able to tap into their own giftedness within themselves. They don’t need this frenetic talk, talk, talk thing. They’re much more spiritual, in the broadest sense of the word. And I think that’s where religion is going today. It’s not about formalised religion. It’s about a divine source in everyone that can be tapped into without any rules or regulations. It’s innate in all of us. And I think music is a key to unlock it.”
Back in the cookery room Crooks' assistants, Pauline Kavanagh and Nicole Hudson, weave in and out through the music stands, and the young musicians gain audibly in confidence as a tutor stands behind each group in turn, joining in with their line. "They learn how to play in an ensemble
by being in one," is how Crooks puts it.
They also, I notice, treat the instruments with remarkable care, setting them down as gently as
they might a puppy. The school has amassed quite a collection of stringed instruments – 33 quarter-size violins, 35 half-size, 10 three-quarter size and six full-size, in addition to three double basses and eight cellos – and each child keeps an instrument as "their" own. Those who play in the orchestra are allowed to bring instruments home to practise – at the moment, for the forthcoming IAYO festival concert at the National Concert Hall.
Of course, they’re still kids. Somebody is always missing a page of music; violins are often missing their tags. And it’s up to Rose, a volunteer who comes from Kildare every week, to sort it all out. “I spend my life replacing tags on violin cases,” she says, with a broad smile which suggests it’s a pretty good way to pass the time. “Younger brothers are particularly expert at picking them off, I believe.”
By lunchtime, fifth class have played a piece called
The Crumlin Polkaand most of the children
have disappeared in search of sandwiches. Yazmin, however, stays to work with Crooks on a
couple of tricky passages. That done, she is joined by her classmate Kelly, plus Nicole, Joanna
and Pauline for a jubilant reprisal of
Orpheus in the Underworld. Amanda and Dara, violin and
cello respectively, come to play some movements from a suite called
Dolphins, all swoops
and dives and spooky shark noises. Claire and Aisling, meanwhile, are expertly manipulating a
pair of double basses which are as tall as themselves. Did Claire ever imagine she'd be playing
one of those? "I'd never even heard of a double bass before," she exclaims, before giving me a
brisk demonstration of the difference between blues style and classical, the various different bow grips for different stringed instruments, and the delightfully gory details of her recent ankle
injury.
“All I can say is, children are magic,” is Sr Bernadette’s verdict. She adds, however, that the music project at St Agnes’ is just a beginning. She wants to see similar programmes in place in every primary school in Ireland and sees no reason why such a goal should be unreasonable. In the meantime, she plans to make music accessible to the community outside her gates. “Because of what I’d read about Crumlin before I came here, I thought it was a balaclava I’d be needing, not a violin,” she says with a chuckle.
“So I was amazed to find a tradition of music among the older people. Now I’m hoping to start a community school of music. A building is being renovated at the moment and we’ll do music there right from pre-natal stage up to old age. For teenagers, I’m hoping to get a drum group going. I did drumming in America, and it’s fantastic.” Nun on the drums? Now we’re both chuckling. “One thing I’m not,” she says, “is pious. I’m not a nun in the traditional sense at all. I feel that I’m a woman of the universe. If anybody asks me who I am, that’s what I say.
“Certainly I’m totally dedicated to the heart and soul of the human being, where there’s so much creativity and so much beauty. The young people in Crumlin all get a bad press thanks to stories about drugs and other such activities. I’d love to get them headlines in the paper for the wonderful creativity that’s in them. And I won’t stop ’till that happens.”
YOUNG TALENT
Crumlin may be a hotbed of youthful musical activity in Ireland, but it’s not the only one. Next Saturday, school youth orchestras from various parts of the country will come together at the National Concert Hall in Dublin for a festival sponsored by the Irish Aviation Authority under the aegis of the Irish Association of Youth Orchestras.
First to perform will be the Co Cork VEC Junior Youth Orchestra, followed by Clare Music Makers, St Agnes's Community Youth Orchestra and St Vincent's School Orchestra from Dundalk. The evening
session will feature High School Orchestra, Dublin, followed by a joint performance from Laois School of Music and the Lir Orchestra. Next up will be Carlow Youth Orchestra and the Cork School of Music Symphony Orchestra who will play – among other things – Ravel's
Bolero. Throughout
the day the young musicians will showcase their talents by performing compositions of all musical shapes and sizes, among them Mendelssohn's overture
Fingal's Cave, a selection of Monty Norman's James Bond themes and
A Caribbean Suiteby Katherine and Hugh College.
The evening concert will also include the presentation of the 2008 Irish Aviation Authority Achievement Awards for youth orchestras. The festival runs from 3pm to 8pm and tickets cost €10.
