Did you know?
When you buy tickets to Zoellner performances, you help the Lehigh University Music Dept. and Kappa Kappa Psi fraternity engage in community projects with Bethlehem’s Broughal Middle School. Faculty and students tutor young musicians, collect instruments for the band, give Zeek! talks and provide free concert tickets.
Email inzactix@lehigh.edu if you would like to donate an instrument.
Zoellner Arts Center is pleased to strike a chord with the young musicians in our community!
A Bridge to Cultural Citizenship
Sam Belony is one of Broughal Middle School’s most motivated musicians. The eighth grader performs in a half-dozen ensembles, including marching band. He plays a half-dozen instruments, including saxophone. Last spring he decided to learn oboe simply because “I heard it was the hardest—that’s why.”
Sam’s first oboe teacher was Kelsey Stocker, a Lehigh student. She volunteered for the tricky task simply because she likes helping dedicated, talented young musicians like Sam at understaffed, underfunded public schools like Broughal, which is run by the Bethlehem School District, her alma mater.
“It’s nice to come back and give back,” says Stocker, who is majoring in journalism and behavioral science. “Plus, Sam is extremely adventurous. He’s a cool guy. We’re good buds.”
The Sam-Kelsey partnership is part of a remarkable musical kinship between Broughal and Lehigh, which have been neighbors for 95 years. Members of the Lehigh community help Broughal students by donating instrumental lessons, used instruments and tickets to university concerts. Members of the Broughal community help Lehigh students by inspiring them to become better players, teachers and mentors.
Over eight years Lehigh has become Broughal East. Broughal has become Lehigh West. And the street that separates the schools has become a bridge to cultural citizenship.
This bridge was started in 2003 by Jeff Abel, then a freshman bassoonist in the LU Philharmonic Orchestra. One day he learned that Andrew Horvath, a Broughal eighth grader, needed help on his instrument. Abel secured a Lehigh rehearsal room to teach the middle schooler. Then he began recruiting fellow orchestra members to give music lessons to Horvath’s peers. Everyone from graduate students to first-year students signed up to teach every instrument from viola to tuba. Abel even gave Broughal youngsters free tickets to LU Philharmonic concerts, adding: “I could use some company.”
Abel and his peers became honorary Broughalians. Middle schoolers not only gave birthday cards to their Lehigh instructors, they invited the university students to their birthday dinners. “The relationship went far beyond lessons and the concert; it became so much deeper than music,” says Abel, who received a 2007 degree in sociology. “It became about caring.”
It takes a village to educate a middle schooler, and it takes a village to educate an educator of middle schoolers. Carolina Hernandez, Lehigh’s director of community service, served as Abel’s confidante and cheerleader. Kim Carrell-Smith, a Lehigh history professor who doubled as a Broughal band parent, sponsored the school’s marching band by leading a drive to sell booklets of discount coupons to South Side businesses. Chris Klump, a Lehigh percussionist and woodwind player, arranged for Broughal musicians to perform during university basketball games, replacing the Lehigh pep band during the 2003-2004 winter break. Like Abel, he originally taught Bethlehem elementary schoolers; like Abel, he believes that music is a great teaching tool for life skills.
Abel’s rock was Maryann Gross, Broughal’s director of instrumental music and the Lehigh program’s cornerstone. A true missionary, she teaches harmony through harmonious teamwork. She lets members of Broughal’s orchestra organize their own competitions for chair positions. She lets members of the school’s marching band make suggestions when they reach the eighth grade. She expects everyone to raise money, whether by selling candy bars to Lehigh students or buying hot dogs during the Broughal jazz festival. If her charges don’t pay in a timely fashion, their names are chalked on the band room’s Wall of Shame.
Gross is a fun-raising fundraiser. Any time anyone at Broughal uses the word “gross” negatively, they are expected to put a dime in The Gross Jar. One day a coffee-deprived Abel slipped in a $5 bill even before he slipped up during an early-morning rehearsal. “This should cover me,” he said, “for three days.”
Abel admires Gross as an eclectic, electric leader. “She’ll do anything to motivate her students: wear funny hats on the bus; buy ice cream to celebrate a concert,” says Abel, a recipient of a 2008 Lehigh master’s degree in education. “She knows it’s okay to say to children ‘I know you can do better’ without tearing them down. She wants the best for her kids, even if they’re just holding a flag in a parade.”
Gross feels “blessed” by Lehigh’s volunteers. She’s especially blessed by the one-stop shop of in-kind services provided by Kappa Kappa Psi, the university’s band service fraternity. Members donate used instruments to Broughal musicians. Serve food and clean the kitchen during the school’s jazz festival. Discuss compositions with middle schoolers before Lehigh concerts. Coach marching-band musicians to play and step in time at the same time.
University volunteers have helped Broughal’s classical musicians, too. Last January three ensembles—sax, flute, clarinet–were introduced at the middle school by clarinet player Deborah Andrus, a Lehigh adjunct teacher, a member of the Allentown Symphony Orchestra and the wife of Joshua Kovar, Zoellner’s production manager. The first sax rehearsal attracted only two players. Membership increased significantly after the third practice, which featured catchy music from the “Star Wars” movies.
Last summer Andrus became a de facto development director after the Bethlehem School District canceled funds for her Broughal ensembles. She found a new sponsor in the Community Music School in Allentown, which is underwriting the middle school’s new chamber-music program. She hopes to recruit fellow professional players as teachers.
In November string players in Broughal’s orchestra received a clinic in group dynamics from Eugene Albulescu, music director of the LU Philharmonic. The conductor reminded the youngsters to play the same bow positions and follow musicians in the chairs in front of them. The goal, he said, was to move in the same direction, like a wind-blown field of grain.
Broughal students watched Albulescu practice his advice during the LU Philharmonic’s December concert, which starred a multi-media “Nutcracker Suite.” It was one of a handful of 2011-2012 Zoellner performances open to middle schoolers free of charge. In November members of Broughal’s marching band attended “DRUMLine Live,” a splashy show featuring marching-band musicians from traditionally black Southern colleges and universities. Fahvian Shorey, a seventh-grade percussionist, was captivated by garbage-can cymbals and snare drummers playing in glow-in-the-dark costumes. He thinks he may suggest funkier movements for his fellow snare drummers when he enters eighth grade.
The success of the Broughal-Lehigh program can be measured in numbers and awards. Over six years the middle school’s marching band has jumped from 30 to 110 players. Last spring the ensemble won the Esprit de Corps prize during a band festival in Springfield, Mass. The Broughal group’s longest trip was partly underwritten by Lehigh donations.
Success can also be measured in careers changed. Rohan Shenoy, a Lehigh tuba player and baritone saxophonist, insists the Broughal program led him to become a leader rather than a follower, which led him to seek election as Kappa Kappa Psi’s vice president of service projects. Abel insists that Gross & Co. guided him into service learning, steering him to his current job as director of the Center for Social Justice at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Md. He continues to teach music to middle schoolers. And he continues to keep tabs on his former Broughal buddies.
Chris Klump may be the program’s poster parent. Volunteering at Broughal inspired him to leave Lehigh before graduating as a science major and complete a psychology degree at Muhlenberg College. Today he tutors youngsters in English, math and SATs. He teaches music and other subjects to his former Broughal student, Juan Rosario, now a senior at Dieruff High School in Allentown. Klump even drives his ex-middle school pals to their classes at Liberty and Freedom high schools.
Seven years after starting at Broughal, “Mr. Chris” still teaches there on Wednesdays and Fridays. “He’ll stand behind the kids, tap them on the shoulder, and say ‘Uh-uh’ if he thinks they need to do something better,” says Gross. “I call him my perpetual eighth grader.”
The Lehigh-Broughal program has changed the life of Sam Belony, an actual eighth grader. His teachers claim he’s matured exponentially as a musician and a person. He recruits saxophonists. He teaches elementary schoolers. He’s become a decent oboist after less than a year.
“I just want to show my talent and teach people what I’ve been taught,” says Sam. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll be a teacher.”
–By Geoff Gehman, a former arts writer for The Morning Call
Eugene Albulescu recently visited Broughal Middle School for a fun-filled orchestra clinic. Read more about it:
Who knew that finding a D could make you giggle?
That’s what 25 members of Broughal Middle School’s orchestra did this morning when Lehigh University Music Director Eugene Albulescu held a clinic at their school. His first question, “Do you like to play scales?” The ensuing half-groan, half-ok answer you’d expect from any budding musician was followed by studious bow strokes as Albulescu meticulously went through each section of violins, violas and cellos to help them find proper Cs, Es, and finally that elusive D. “There you go! The cellos found the D!” exclaimed the maestro and the group broke into smiles and laughter.
He met the dedicated, slightly sleepy musicians a little after 7:00 AM on November 22 as they waited on the sidewalk with instruments in hand to be let inside their school on Vine Street for morning rehearsal –a full hour before the first bell of classes. Broughal’s Band Director Maryann Gross sought Albulescu’s expertise to explain how an orchestra should play together, “It’s important for the students to learn how to play as a group. We are thrilled to have a professional like Eugene come to the school and teach them.”
“The whole point about playing in an orchestra is that we’re all trying to find common ground. It’s about how we’re going to do things together,” explained Albulescu to the 6th, 7th and 8th graders as they prepared to play Fantasia on a Theme from Thailand. Then the Broughal Middle School string section was put through their paces musically and academically. Their guest conductor peppered the stanzas with anecdotes about tuning, little known Beethoven facts, the Pythagorean theorem and orchestral seating arrangements. As the hour came to a close, Albulescu reminded them that orchestras are like a field of grain when the wind blows through, “you all have to be moving the same way.”
With that advice, first bell rang, applause followed and violinist/bassoonist/aspiring Liberty High School bagpipe player Wyatt Evans Gartley offered this assessment of rehearsal, “It was awesome!” –By Lynn Farley
Click here to learn more about Broughal Middle School’s music department and their 88 Keys initiative.
2011-2012 Performances for Broughal music students:
For attendance information, contact Maryann Gross 610-866-5041.
Robin Kani, flute & Martha Schrempel, piano – Sun Sept 25 | 3 pm
LU Philharmonic German Masterpieces – Fri Oct 14 . 8 pm | Sat Oct 15 . 8 pm
Fusion Fest Tribute to Johnny Richards – Sat Nov 5 | 8 pm
Jazz Ensemble, Band & Combo – Sat Dec 3 | 8 pm
Drumline Live – Sun Dec 4 | 7 pm
LU Philharmonic Nutcracker & Winter Fun – Fri Dec 9 . 8 pm | Sat Dec 10 . 3 pm
Deborah Andrus, clarinet – Sun Jan 22 | 3 pm
LU Jazz Faculty – Sun Feb 12 | 3 pm
Timothy Schwarz, violin – Sun Mar 18 | 3 pm
LU Wind Ensemble, Good Friends - Sun Apr 29 | 3 pm