Primary-school children rework sounds with computers and dinosaurs. Valerio Cappelli · Corriere della Sera · 17 December 2000.
Playing with music instead of making children yawn by turning a score into another assignment: every parent’s problem. From Monday to Wednesday Santa Cecilia seeks an answer through a musical-literacy course for Pastelli primary school’s third-year pupils, with a practical concert demonstration Thursday afternoon in Via dei Greci. Many Roman schools may be involved later.
Want your children to love Mozart? Buy them a computer. “We are not seeking an alternative method of reading music, but bringing children closer to contemporary musical thought.” Composer Michele Tadini, son of painter and intellectual Emilio Tadini, calls himself “an archaeologist, a kind of Indiana Jones of sound”. He belongs to Tempo Reale, already active in children’s musical education in Milan, Florence and Siena.
That sounds alarming: teaching children to love Stockhausen’s difficult serialism or dissonances driving impatient older Santa Cecilia subscribers out early? That is not the aim. Tadini says results show “computers let children control complex musical structures without the instrumental technique normally required”.
With other young musicians—Jacopo Baboni Schilingi, Nicola Zonca and Thierry Coduys, backgrounds ranging from percussion to IRCAM—Tadini remembered the adventure CD-ROM Riven, arriving on an unknown island. Like Indiana Jones, children follow a route interpreting signs, learning an alphabet and numbering system. But it is all a game.
A strange internet message arrives on the computer: a processed voice asks for help because all sounds have been stolen from a desert island. Children must recover them. Computers contain a musical landscape: sounds describing a wave, seagull or footsteps on sand. Some are identifiable, others less defined. “That is where sound’s properties develop: high, loud, soft, low.” Using interactive sensors, children gradually repopulate the island with sounds.
On a black screen, the mouse searches for sounds, some recognisable, others less so: one discovers sound cannot be defined unambiguously. Then harmonic structures are created, timbre and rhythm explored.
What strikes one is not the ease of learning or children’s quick technological familiarity, now taken for granted, but creative sensitivity’s development. Tadini’s own three-and-a-half-year-old daughter is growing up with Nutella and Mozart’s Magic Flute, reasonable enough as a musical fairy tale. But skipping the German recitatives to lighten listening angers her more than removing Nutella. An exceptional case: organisers concede Peter and the Wolf remains a remarkable musical resource for children. Percussion also works, as does the Zecchino d’Oro children’s-song competition, though one whispers that.
Tempo Reale’s technological literacy does not aim to manufacture identical composers standing to attention like Xi’an’s terracotta soldiers. It prepares tomorrow’s public, a first step towards a more open, dynamic taste and expressive horizon. “In interacting with computers,” Tadini says, “there is a playful component that children approach with…” [The sentence’s ending is missing in the clipping.]
What does “playing with music” mean? In Florence pupils practised on Jurassic Park. They had to replace the deliberately incorrect, out-of-sync soundtrack in Thierry Coduys’s work inspired by Spielberg’s film: re-editing and providing sound in real time.
“I remember one child’s face,” recalls Santa Cecilia president Luciano Berio, who attended. “His eyes were laughing. ‘This is the best day of my life,’ he said.”
Santa Cecilia, Via Vittoria 6; telephone 06 328171; www.santacecilia.it.