In Wednesday’s class we began by pairing up and experimenting with long ropes in order to visualize the vibration of a string. One person stood holding their end in front of them while the opposite person swung the rope at different speeds. We attempted to create, at first, one broad swing of the rope (like you might see in a game of jump-rope). Then we doubled the speed so that the rope was divided into two equal parts, each rotating conversely (while one side swung upwards, the other rotated downwards). This increase in speed was continued until it wasn’t possible to divide the rope into any smaller sections (usually occuring around five divisions of the rope). Each dividing point between rotating sections is considered a ‘node’, or a place where the vibration is zero.

We then gathered into a circle in the classroom and used a monochord (an instrument consisting of a single string) to discover the specific ratios that create each interval above the tonic pitch. We began by splitting the chord in half (done by lightly touching in the center of the vibrating string) so that each section of the string was vibrating at twice its original speed. This is the same as what we had just experienced with the rope when we doubled our initial speed in order to create two vibrating sections. This time with the string of the monochord, an octave occured above the original pitch (shown by the ratio 2:1, where the higher pitch is vibrating two times for each one vibration in the lower note). We continued to use this same method to achieve the 5th (ratio of 3:2), the 4th (4:3), and so on through each of the twelve intervals. We discussed that frequency ratios always come in pairs that add up to an octave. For instance, the ratio 3:2 will be paired with the ratio 4:3 (a 5th plus a 4th equaling an octave).

The class reminded me of Stuart Isacoff’s book “Temperament” which addresses the history, problems, and evolution of tempering the Western scale. After the class, I went back and read the section concerning Pythagoras and his original discovery of the geometry of music. Pythagoras, who invented the monochord, stated that “music’s rules are simply the geometry governing things in motion: not only vibrating strings but also celestial bodies and the human soul.” Pythagoras believed that the most pleasing of harmonies arose from the simplest of proportions and that complexity would insight chaos. What is fascinating about this is that behind his discoveries of pure musical geometry there lies a forbidden and volatile darkness. He found that pure octaves and fifths, according to his ratios, are incommensurate (also referred to in Greek as ‘alogon’ meaning ‘the unutterable’). Fifths will never complete a perfect circle (as suggested by the widely accepted circle-of-fifths), but will reach toward infinity in an unending spiral. This essentially boils down to the fact that octaves are based upon multiples of 2 (2:1) while fifths are based upon multiples of 3 (3:2). In this case, no multiple of 2 will ever meet a multiple of 3. If one were to compare the pitch achieved by an octave and that achieved from the completion of a circle of fifths, they would be very similar yet “out of tune”. This spiraling phenomenon hints at a more complex mathematic sequence, that of the golden ratio. Even so, these simple ratios were believed to be an expression of the divine. It is easy to find similar ratios present within nature. Saint Augustine, in fact, believed that churches and cathedrals were to be more than just shrines, and instructed that proper proportions were to be used in their construction. Thus the heights, lengths, and depths of the structures formed the proportions of Pythagoras’s “celestial harmonies” (1:1, 2:1, 2:3, and 3:4).

So what difference does this make to us, as musicians and as people? What effect does this really have on our performance? I think it is crucial to understand the fundamentals of the creation of sound, of pitch, especially when such things are taken for granted everyday. I remember the feeling I had when I first discovered the ratios involved in music. Once I got past the initial migraine acquired from my first lecture on equal temperament, I began to look a bit into proportions. It made perfect sense (and also supplied an interesting and practical perspective to my high school math classes). This is the real foundation of what I do every day, of each note I play. It is a fundamental that comes before technique, before fingerings and musicality. In a sense it is the DNA of music (more specifically of pitch). Yet as crucial as these fundamentals are, an understanding of them is not essential for the enjoyment of music. Recently, Warren mentioned a workshop that he was conducting years ago. During the course of the class, he plucked two notes on a string, the second a fifth higher than the first. Soon after, a young boy came running into the room exclaiming “What was that beautiful music?!”. Like the young boy, a single, simple fifth can produce a level of joy bordering on ecstasy. Warren also noted that infants are particularly drawn to simple intervals. This has been quite a meal for my thoughts (even just thinking back to our class sends my head spinning!). Every time I try to find a solution to these musical systems I find that I develop more and more questions. It is truely amazing how much chaos lies within order!

As an introduction to what we focused on in class this past week, here’s a project:

Take five stickie-notes and on the first write “beta.”  The second should read “alpha,” the third “theta” the fourth “delta₁” and the last “delta₂.”  Now, stick the first on your forehead; you’re alert, and your mind is working at “beta.”  Walk over to your pensive cat that spends hours every day staring out the window and stick “alpha” on her back.  “Theta” belongs on your son who is staring out of the same window, gathering his thoughts for another painting.  The sleeping dog on the floor gets “delta₁” and your snoring husband should wear the “delta₂.”

I’ll explain:

This week we learned that our brains functioning capacity has been categorized into cycles per second.  When we’re alert and actively engaged we’re in a state called beta, functioning between 15-40 cycles per second (cps).  Conversely, in deep sleep (Delta2) our neurons are transmitting information at the rate of only 1.5-3 cps.

Lyle Davidson said that “Theta is a good place to be,” and decided that we needed to be brought down to the 5-8 cps range right away.  We were asked to sit still and quietly with our eyes closed and allow ourselves to really lean into our chairs.  We were to relax all of our muscles and really let our minds be free.

After five or ten minutes we opened our eyes and shared our experiences.  Some class members shared that they were able to organize their thoughts, allowing distractions to come and go without ever focusing on them.  We were also able to focus on different things in our environment, an example of what attention really is.  Also, we could remove ourselves from the current environment address a bigger issue without the current “brain noise.”

The next time you find yourself in a stressful situation, try theta.  Let me know how it works.

Something I’ve noticed outside of NEC

A close friend of mine, a double bassist, is one of the many artists you may find down in the bowels of the city, better known as Boston’s subway system.  If you go to Downtown Crossing on a Friday night you’ll probably see him with this bass plugged into a loop pedal and an amplifier.  He layers loops one on top of the other and then improvises on them, some of the tunes being mellow, others joyful, and he often delves into the realm of raga, which is the genre in which the following experiences occurred.  He moves between arco and pizzacato, and people absolutely love it.

It’s very common for a crowd to build around him, many people staying to watch as two or three of their trains come and go.  Last week I observed a man very interested in the music and exhibiting many of the characteristics and behaviors of a person with mild autism.  He would be silent and introspective, and then would start clapping furiously at some points in the middle of an improvisation.  During the music, after he’d really gotten into it, he was alive in a new way.  It was fascinating; I’d never seen anyone respond that way. 

Last Friday I was sitting on the same bench a few yards from the show and a man sat beside me.  He clearly hadn’t showered in a while and was mumbling to himself in a frustrated voice.  My friend had taken a break and when he started again the man was silent, lowered his head, and began clapping the beat the way a small child would.  When the music reached a place that became really repetitive and, I think, a little boring, the man got up, started mumbling again, and staggered away. 

These people who behave in a way that’s less than socially acceptable have unequivocally positive reactions to the music.  Their behavior moves from one of silence and frustration to a peace and a joy.  I’m sure I’ll have another opportunity to experience someone’s ecstatic happiness inside beautiful music and I’ll be sure to share it. 

I’d love to hear about a similar experience you’ve had, whether it’s a snoring husband or someone being awakened by peaceful tunes.

Learning through Oral History and Morphogenetic Family Fields

In one of our first classes, Warren taught us the first verse of a traditional Indian song. He began the class with a drone and had us repeat vocal warm-ups in order to acquaint ourselves with the intervals in the scale. These fragments were then, piece by piece, combined to form a small melody. At this point, he broke away from the melody to have us repeat 5 or 6 spoken syllables. He then sang the completed piece with the full text and had us sing along when we heard the syllables that we had just learned. Now we had a somewhat ‘fleshy’ skeleton of the piece that we were able to fill out with the missing syllables. After about 10 or 15 minutes the class had successfully learned the verse.)

In our session this week, three of us recollected the song to Krishna that we had learned a few weeks ago while the other five members tried to learn it. This time, though, it only took about 4 or 5 minutes for the class to be able to recite it (as opposed to the 10 or 15 minutes the time before).

This reminded me of Rupert Sheldrake’s studies with morphogenetic family fields. Stated in a question to anthropologist Terence McKenna, a morphogenetic field is “a non-material organizing collective memory field that affects all biological systems. The field can be envisioned as a hyper-spatial information reservoir that brims and spills over into a much larger region of influence when critical mass is reached - a point referred to as morphic resonance.” Basically, one can understand it as a collective memory bank where a species, through adaptation and evolution, stores knowledge that is passed on through future generations of that species. Sheldrake elaborates that

each individual both draws upon and contributes to the collective memory of the species. This means that new patterns of behaviour can spread more rapidly than would otherwise be possible. For example, if rats of a particular breed learn a new trick in Harvard, then rats of that same breed should be able to learn the same trick faster all over the world, say in Edinburgh and Melbourne. There is already evidence from laboratory experiments that this actually happens.

In this case, knowledge is not limited to growth by future generations, but in fact is immediate.

This seems to be evident in our classroom. It took half the time for the class to learn the song when there were members present who had already learned it than it did when none of us knew it. In relation to this, Sheldrake determines that “animals inherit the successful habits of their species as instincts. We inherit bodily, emotional, mental and cultural habits, including the habits of our languages.” This could also go to explaining the pattern of oral history and tradition that makes our species unique. Warren mentioned in class that oral tradition was learning based upon the human love of imitation. I agree with this, but I also believe that, on a similar scale, oral tradition exists because of our innate capability of memory. Sheldrake in fact proposes that memory is inherent in nature. In this way I see oral learning and history as divided into these two factors; imitation and remembrance.

I watched a series of video clips this week on YouTube of Warren and his teacher, S. G. Devasthali, in a lesson (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4qibmXtTN0). The way in which he learned the ragas was similar to the way in which he taught pieces to our class. There was a call and response throughout the lesson, where his teacher would sing a fragment of the melody which Warren would repeat. The fragments were eventually compiled and through this repetition, he remembered them. This is the basis of oral tradition; imitation and memory. Repetition may also be listed as a component of oral tradition, perhaps as a subset of imitation.

It is interesting that, while he worked with our class, the song was essentially shattered in numerous fragments (phrases, pitches, syllables, physical expressions of the mouth, etc.) which we pieced together in a variety of different ways. I could almost envision a matrix of possible combinations, which after a number of these combinations had been tested, an image of the piece as a whole became more clear. It seems to me that this method is effective in that a deeper understanding of the material is achieved, where one not only learns the song front to back, but now knows its inner workings and could perhaps sing it back to front, or even from middle outwards. This also relates to a matrix, lets say in 12 tone music, where all possible combinations are visible at once (all of the inversions, retrogrades, and retrograde inversions for each transposition of the prime series).

Later in the class, we began to learn the second part of the Krishna lullaby. I was reminded of a piece by Milton Babbitt for soprano and piano (or tape) where, in addition to his systems of 12 tone and duration rows, he devised a system where each pitch was assigned a syllable. In this way, the text of the piece emerged from the music or from the system, rather than the music emerging from a set text. For me, this was similar in that learning this Indian song (where my knowledge of the language is next to none), each pitch or melodic fragment was assigned a syllable or, in a sense, a syllabic motif. It is interesting that in this case, in both pieces, there is a supreme unity to the sound. One piece (the one from class) the music emerged from the text, and the other (the Babbitt piece) the text emerged from the music. Either way, both utilizing a language unintelligible to my ears, both pieces felt solid and complete.

-Chris

NewsBlog Editor’s Note: We are pleased to introduce to you Chris Watford, a new CMIE Guided Intern working as Documentation Specialist for Warren Senders’s Cross-Cultural Approaches to Music-In-Education course this Fall. For more blog entries regarding this semester’s run of the course, and previous years’ runs, please click here. 

Hello NewsBlog readers! I am doing a guided internship this semester as a Documentation Specialist for Warren Sender’s course Cross-Cultural Approaches to MIE. My goals are to examine the roles of both teacher and student within a classroom setting and to collect evidence of the way in which both parties learn from each other. I am also interested in observing and documenting various strategies for effective teaching, and inversely, for effective learning.

What’s This Course About?

The course examines, through immediate experience, how people throughout the world intrinsically learn from one another. It also opens the doors to understanding how cultural structures in education shape the way in which we learn and, eventually, how we will teach. We also focus on understanding how to take what a student already knows and use that as a building block for further learning.

In the course of each two hour class, various activities are performed that demonstrate a number of different aspects embedded within the learning process. The class learns traditional Indian songs, builds instruments, practices the teaching of activities to the class, and participates in group discussions that center on our collective observations from previous activities and experiences. After each class, the students are expected to compose a written reflection on their experience and how it relates to what they are doing outside, whether it be performing, practicing, teaching, or just aspects of general living. The idea is that, by the end of the semester, they will have compiled an in-depth ’syllabus’ that outlines specifically what they have achieved and observed throughout the term (that also makes it possible to read simultaneous reflections from the same class in order to compare our collective learning).

My Guided Internship Plan

Having already participated in and completed this course, I have an understanding of the end product. My plan is to observe the process again from a new perspective and to gather visual, audio, and textual information throughout the term. This will be compiled into a final presentation that focuses on the dynamic between learner and teacher, and stems from the hypothesis that they are both equal and similar parts of the same system, rather than opposing ends. In addition, I will also be exploring aspects of oral tradition along with different ‘cultural’ and scientific approaches to learning (genetic, morphogenetic family fields, etc.).

Warren and I will be collaborating extensively throughout the term in order to produce a multi-media project to encompass the collective learning of the class and to highlight various aspect of effecting teaching/learning. I will keep you up to date with new information and media as each class approaches, so please check back frequently for new posts! I am looking forward to an exciting year!

NewsBlog Editor’s Note: We are pleased to introduce to you Jenny Giardina, a new CMIE Guided Intern working as Documentation Specialist for Lyle Davidson’s Music, Brain Development, and Learning course this Fall. For more blog entries regarding this semester’s run of the course, and previous years’ runs, please click here. 

My generation has been part of the blog explosion, as I like to say.  After being a part of the common social networking sites (names I’m sure I don’t need to list) I am very pleased to now be a part of New England Conservatory’s MIE NewsBlog.  I recently entered into an MIE Guided Internship as a Documentation Specialist and will be providing updates and peeks into the learning going on in Lyle Davidson’s Music, Brain Development, and Learning course.

So far we’ve done a great deal of studying the brain from a biologists viewpoint: the anatomy, neuronal activity, and the physicality of a learning brain.  With the aid of our current text, A User’s Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain by John J. Ratey, M.D, we are being encouraged to delve into our personal questions and curiosities regarding the learning process as relates to the brain, as well as the effects of music on the brain.

Along with this focus we’ve been given the question “what was my best learning experience and why?”  The more we work with this question and our personal answers the more I’m sure that all teachers need to think about personal experiences and be aware of all the possible approaches that could help a person learn in a more complete way.  We’ve all heard the old adage, “Some people learn best by reading, others by listening, and still others by seeing someone do it.”  We’re finding through our experiences in class, our reading and classmate comments that these standard approaches are only addressing the tip of the iceberg. 

My BEST Learning Experience

I spent a semester teaching in a private school last year.  I was the first music teacher they had and the teachers, parents, and most importantly students loved me.  I taught music once a week to all the students one grade at a time.  Not only was this the most rewarding experience of my life, but the most difficult. Throughout the semester I learned more than I ever thought I would from the preschoolers alone.  The challenge was working with such a wide range of age groups—Pre-K through 6th grade.  The most exciting moment was when I had the Kindergartners clapping rhythms from the board.  I first used circles to indicate a clap, and vertical lines for silence.  After a few times through I replaced the symbols with quarter notes and rests.  They couldn’t wait for it to be their turn to come up and put the notes and rests in the order of their choice.  Through this process I found that not only can the youngest students follow what I teach the oldest, but they are more involved, active, excited, and quick to learn the skill.  Looking back now and thinking about what I learned in music at that age I’m almost sure that the music curriculums are nowhere close to the level they can and should be.  These 5 year olds need more.  Much more.

As the Documentation Specialist for my current MIE class I’ve outlined some questions to focus on:

Goals for the Class

• To spark an interest in the class to uncover and experience as much as they possibly can to be part of the final product.
•  To carefully document accurately and thoroughly so that no one is cheated of the priceless opinions and comments of the teacher, students, and authors.
•  To collect and interpret these findings by the end of each week in a way that is easily transferable both in format and language to the CMIE NewsBlog.
•  To encourage my classmates to read and blog on the NewsBlog, both to experience what is being said about their class and to comment themselves.

Personal Goals for the Future

I’ve recently begun research into Music Therapy and find that every page I read convinces me more that I should pursue this field as a career.  My personal goal through this internship is to uncover more information regarding the techniques of this field.  I also hope to answer a few more specific questions:

• What are the proven methods for using music to positively influence the brain with learning disabilities, dementia, or other abnormalities?
• In this relatively new field, what are some of the methods still in the research stage not yet commonly practiced?
• What are the physical attributes of a brain that functions differently than my own?  
• How do these characteristics change during/after musical experiences (taking note of specifics)?
• With the help of my classmates’ individual curiosities, what discoveries will prove to be the most useful to my own inquiries and how can I apply them immediately?

I will be posting weekly with updates of class activities, discoveries and even pictures and hope you will check back to follow our progress. 

Your comments are encouraged, especially those about your favorite learning experience as they can only help us in our learning process.

NewsBlog Editor’s Note: This post is the first (of hopefully more) to share documentation from the Fall 2008 semester of Anne Hallmark’s Teaching Music History course, a MIE cross-listed course. The assignment given was for students to present a ten-minute straight lecture on a piece of their choice, then watch the videotape of their presentation and write a reflection/analysis following the viewing of their tape. This report comes from CMIE Program Coordinator Randy Wong.

Hello, CMIE NewsBlog readers! This semester I am taking Anne Hallmark’s “Teaching Music History course” and will be acting as one of its Documentation Specialists—that is, posting my class experiences to the CMIE NewsBlog so that others in the MIE community can get a bird’s eye view of the course, and articulating my work in a public forum with the hope of receiving constructive feedback, etc. Expect to read some more blog posts from me over this semester. I will also make a MIE portfolio for the course as an example of what a MIE portfolio would look like for a cross-listed course. I look forward to your comments and feedback!

The Assignment

In our first class, Dr. Hallmark announced that we’d each have to give a short lecture on the piece of our choice. I think she made this assignment as a ‘diagnostic’, of sorts, so that we could each figure out what we already bring to the table and set some goals for the semester. Our assignment had three parts, and this post is a partial extrapolation of the second part. (I wrote a more fleshed-out analysis that you can download here). Here’s the assignment:

1. Give a short lecture to the class on a topic/piece of choice (and videotape that lecture). 
2. Watch the videotape and write a reflection/analysis paper based on your reactions to the video. 
3. Meet with the instructor for further discussion of your reactions and to set goals for the semester.

The presentation requirements, as I understood them, were open-ended: Choose a piece to introduce to your classmates. Use a ‘straight lecture’ format. Use of Powerpoint presentations, hand-outs, audio or video recordings, etc. would be allowed; the only real requirement would be that each presentation must fall strictly within ten minutes. Following each presentation, the floor would be opened for questions or comments from the audience (our classmates). Comments from the audience could pertain either to the lecture style and presentation attributes, or to the content itself.

Pre-Viewing Reflection on Lecture Success

As it is for many, pre-presentation anxiety is one of my faults. I think my biggest worry is getting up to present and either forgetting what I want to say, or trying to say it but not being articulate enough and thus getting a lot of blank stares. Ancillary worries are: rambling (in which main points and others get tangled, and so the audience doesn’t know what the presentation’s ‘take-aways’ are) and running out of time and having to leave off main or important points. Thus, I scripted my lecture… but at the risk of reading my presentation instead of actually presenting it. I know the audience caught on to this pretty quickly, but I might not know until viewing the tape what reactions they each made, and how that affected the overall quality of my presentation.

The Video of My Lecture

Post-Viewing: Analysis of Videotape & Goals for the Semester

The same thoughts I had post-presentation (pre-viewing) applied when I watched the tape. Although the tape does not show the audience while I was presenting, my guess is that if it did, there would be body language from the audience that shows them being ‘turned off’ by my reading from the script vs. me presenting in an organic way.

The videotape also reveals how my body language plays into the way I suspect my audience interprets the tone and formality of my lecture. For much of the video, I am leaning on my hands, slanted diagonally towards the lectern/computer, and the eye contact I make is in short spurts—not for long periods, neither with audience members nor with the projected slides. This coupled with my script reading was surely a turn-off and disengaged my audience.

My main goal for this semester is to feel comfortable giving lectures, short and long, without the crutch of a script or extensive notes. I have long felt comfortable internalizing subject matter and leading discussions on it and buttressing these conversations with audio-visual material. But giving straight lectures is a different animal, and it’s a skill I must master if I continue public speaking in any context.

James Wilkinson, author of the “Varieties of Teaching” essay in The Art and Craft of Teaching (Margaret Gullette, Editor), refers to the varying skills a successful teacher needs:

A good lecturer may experience problems leading a successful discussion; the discussion leader skilled in asking questions may feel ill at ease when conducting a monologue from the lecture podium. But it should be a teacher’s goal to master the full scale of teaching styles, and to know the strengths and drawbacks of each (Gullette, 1984).

This straight-lecture format was definitely good practice for me, because as much as the topic and content is put front and center, so are my methods of organizing and presenting that material. I suppose another crutch I have is to put the student at the center of the conversation; after all, there is a huge push for education these days to be learner-centric rather than topic-centric, and my own philosophy and background in education is from that standpoint (learner-centric) as well. So, this was all a good exercise.

Further Thoughts

As an aside, I think that this course (like other education-focused courses at New England Conservatory) is an important parallel to the school’s performance-based curriculum; particularly because it encourages budding teachers to freely and openly explore and develop each’s own personal teaching style. So often teachers-to-be (also known as pre-professional teachers) are thrown into classrooms with little preparation or minimal chance to practice teaching.

While at NEC, I spent many hours practicing pieces in small motifs, and then slowly linking those motifs together to create longer phrases. Those phrases then had to be linked to each other, and so any transition that occurred between phrases would have to be carefully planned and executed, in accordance with accompanying parts, harmonic structure, rhythm, and form. In other words, it would all have to make sense. I have since come to understand the art of presenting and teaching to be no different. As is stated by Wilkinson, part of the trickiness of lecturing is in the way that one must analyze the subject matter and present it in a logical, flowing, way:

How to argue a point and not simply present data; how to link arguments in a logical chain; how to sum up with a sure sense of what is essential and what is merely extrinsic to your case are skills that require coaching and practice. Students need to be helped to present their ideas with grace and to strive for the control, confidence, and economy of means that help make what Alfred North Whitehead once termed a “sense of style.” (Ibid.)

I have already spent many nights working on this from the standpoint of the written word, and have slowly begun spinning this experience out, into other forms of teaching that I am comfortable with: double bass & music reading lessons; ensemble coaching; and informal lecturing on Exotica music and the Hawaiian culture. However, what I need more practice with is working in more formal venues, with a larger and/or mixed audience, and in extended time periods. Thus, I am excited to conduct the 50-minute classes that are part of the assignments for this course, and hope to further develop the “sense of style” that Wilkinson, Whitehead, and others often refer to as being a crucial characteristic of effective teaching (Ibid).

Read my Reflection & Analysis Paper (PDF)

Work Cited

Wilkinson, J. (1984). Varieties of Teaching. In M. Gullette (Ed.), The Art and Craft of Teaching (p. 4). Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.

Powerpoint Slides (click to enlarge)

NewsBlog Editor’s Note: This post is the fifth of a series written by CMIE Guided Intern Hermann Hudde, as part of the documentation for Hudde’s CMIE Guided Internship. See other posts in this series here.

Project STEP was created in 1982 in answer to the need for including minorities or other cultural communities that do not have access to the classical music world. According to its home page history, ” Project STEP (String Training and Educational Program) identifies musically talented Black and Latino students and provides them with a comprehensive music training program, the primary goal of which is to prepare them to compete and succeed in the challenging, rewarding world of classical music. The program was spearheaded 25 years ago by the Boston Symphony Orchestra as a means of addressing the under-representation of Blacks and Latinos in orchestras. The founders’ idea was to identify and train minority students who did not have ready access to the best available training. Today the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New England Conservatory, and the Boston University School of Music support Project STEP with cash contributions and in-kind donations of space and services, and as advisors on our Board of Directors.”

The program provides music instructions by very talented teachers to African-American and Latin-American children and youth in order to generate diversity among the orchestra’s members. The program has several different levels:

• Focus: This beginning level is divided into Sections I and II. During the first section children start having recorder lessons and receive instructions in the fundamental’s of music. During Section II, the children begins learning violin, viola, cello and bass.
• Pre-Training Division: In this level the children continue receiving instrumental lessons, but at the same time instruction in chamber music and orchestra is added. At the same time they are required to participate in community concerts, attend concerts, write reports, and take part in clinics and master classes. Academic excellence at school is also required.
• Training Division: Continuation of the former division.
• Pre-College Division: At this final level, the students are required to play exams to finish the program.

According to the information on the PS homepage, the students participate in the following suggested music education program:

• Weekly private lessons
• Weekly class instruction in music theory and solfege
• For advanced students, piano lessons may substitute for theory classes
• Two master classes each season taught by established artists
• Chamber music coaching
• Student recitals
• Orchestral music coaching
• Opportunity to attend numerous performances each year by established artists and ensembles
• Summer music study
• Parent Council with monthly meetings
• Continuing guidance into the conservatory / university level and beyond
• Low-interest loans available for the purchase of musical instruments after graduation.