Junior Orchestra

Auditioning to Begin With
One day, without advance notice, I was asked to direct a junior orchestra.
The Sumida Triphony Hall, operated by the ward of Sumida in Tokyo, waslaunching its junior orchestra and I was asked to be its music director. I had
conducted amateur orchestras countless times, but many of them were made upof adults or college students. From a teacher’s viewpoint, it is not easy toexplain music expression to children. Besides, the practices of an orchestra
made up of mainly elementary junior high school students are laborious.
But Mr. Noboru Yamazaki, the Mayor of the ward of Sumida, had a strong
vision about this project. The Triphony Hall also had its desire to be the central
location where residents could engage in music all the time. After thinking it
through, I accepted the invitation. But I was both worried and excited about how
to raise up this very young junior orchestra.
In September 2005, we had auditions for string instruments to start as astring orchestra. We were not sure how many children would apply for theaudition, but about fifty applicants sighed up. About half of the elementary, juniorhigh and high school students were boys. I realized that the number ofJapanese people playing string instruments had increased. I began visioning
the future of the music field in Japan. While the members of the New Japan
Philharmonic judged the applicants’ technicality, I interviewed them. I wanted totalk with each child. The children, who came to the interview room with theirguardians, looked nervous. When I asked one, “Do you like playing the violin?”
he responded, “Yes.” Immediately I heard his mother sitting right behind him
sternly saying, “Say, ‘Yes, Ma’am.’” So I told her, “Don’t worry. Let the childspeak naturally,” and continued the interview as we talked like friends. Thechildren quickly became relaxed and open, and one of them joyfully talked about
having a turtle as his pet and about the food that his turtle ate.
Through the interviews I had the impression that these children had
unique characters. Each was full of energy and told me about their fun days at
school and their favorite composers. I was especially surprised when one of theelementary school students gave me his own opinion clearly.

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It was then that I made a decision. I wanted to reflect the uniquecharacters of these children directly in the orchestra.
I wanted to make anorchestra in which the children could fully express themselves. I also decided I
would rather have some children face different directions while playing theirinstruments, instead of making the orchestra too unified.
Our first rehearsal began in October. The children, as many as fifty, saton the large stage of the Triphony Hall. Yet because many elementary schoolstudents were present, the stage still had open space. Most of the children had
never played as orchestra members before, and many of them were confused
because they did not know which parts in the music score they were supposed
to play. Several music trainers stayed beside them all the time coaching thechildren. Some of the children were so small that their feet did not touch thefloor when they sat on the chairs. But every one of them played seriously withhis or her small instrument.

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Moved by Children’s Responses
Each rehearsal started at 6 P.M. and the children had to concentrate forthe next three hours. This must have been a huge trial for them. I saw oneelementary school student very tired when it was after 8 P.M., so I asked the child,“Are you sleepy?” I could not help smiling, when the child responded, saying,“Usually I am snuggling in my futon at this time.” The rehearsal time had been
set based on the standard of grownups. It must have been very difficult for theelementary school students to play their instruments until late at night.
rehearsal was filled with new discoveries which interested me.

Each

After a while I visited its rehearsal again. I was planning to have a small
gathering after the rehearsal since the Christmas season was coming. Thechildren sounded much better than when I saw them in October. There weresome parts that were technically unstable, but as a whole they were able to playit as a piece. I was concerned, however, that they were playing with serious
faces. Perhaps, even though they were children, they must have realized thehardness of practice. The liveliness and joy had disappeared from their faces.
I spent the whole evening on that day bringing back the childlike
expressions they had shown on the first day of auditioning. I explained theformation of the composition they were playing was as simply as possible, so thatthe elementary school students as well as the high school students could
understand it. For example, when I explained a form of Rondo where themes
are repeated in various patterns, I compared each theme for a fruit, say “apple,”and explained to them that “the apple” appeared several times. The children
understood the concept immediately when the rondo form was instructed insimilitudes, such as “apple, apple, banana, and apple again.” In another section
when the children had to move the bows fast to play the passage, I advised themto play as if a bullet train Nozomi were whizzing through the station. And they
all played the passage moving the bows fast. Because they could change theirmusic expressions drastically, I thought hard in order to use the right words ofsimilitude to instruct the children. There was a section where I wanted thechildren to play soft with piano, but they could not do it well.
So I told them,“We are all happy and are having a great time together. Then suddenly weremembered the very sad moment. That is how you play this soft part.”1Junior Orchestra

Immediately the children changed their facial expression and produced adistinctively piano sound. I observed their changes of feeling moment bymoment as I used the subtle magic of words.

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Junior Orchestra

Super Excited by the First Concert
The Junior String Orchestra holds its concerts twice a year. We try toplan the concerts during the months of March and August when the members of
the orchestra have no school. However, its first concert was held in February of2006 at the Sumida Triphony Hall. We performed Mozart’s Divertimento andGrieg’s Holberg Suite. The children seemed to be nervous on the stage during
the dress rehearsal.

Though they had practiced on the same stage, they musthave felt something different on the performing day. We spent much timepracticing entering and leaving the stage, bowing and so on. I kept comfortingthe children who were entering the stage with serious faces. I said to them, “We
are going to have a fun concert now, so enter the stage with smiles rather thanwith sour faces.” Elementary school boys kept running around the backstage
until the concert began. They must have had been full of energy. The string
instrument trainers made sure that each instrument was in tune. I was moreconcerned about the appearances of the children, checking to see if the boys’
white shirts were tucked in. “Be careful not to trip over the stage! Keep smiling!”
I made friends of dozens of these children in one day. When the concert wasover, all the children were super excited! After receiving applause from theaudience, they all looked proud.

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Children with Much Sensibility
The second term of the junior orchestra began in April 2006. I had been
thinking of having the children compose their own melodies. Among myconcerts that I had conducted in the past, I had been bothered by how musicians
had different attitudes toward compositions arranged by someone else from ones
that were original. They tended to take lightly the music notes played for only
one time, or the notes that had not been written by famous composers such as
Mozart and Beethoven. I concluded that that was because that they did nothave their own experience of writing music in their childhood. I thought, “If thesechildren transcribe the melodies they wrote with music notes, they would not takeany music notes lightly when they grow up.” That was why I gave them one
instruction, “Why don’t each of you write a short eight bar melody in C Major.
Any rhythm is okay. We will arrange them for the junior string orchestra so that
we could perform them together.”
I was amazed by the numerous melodies brought out from these children.
One child divided the melody in two voice parts. Another wrote a melody withan accompany part. Another used rhythm creatively. I had not expected thatthey could create and transcribe melodies so well on their own. They playedeach note of the melodies with the piano or the violin and wrote the notes on theirmusic sheets. This moved me. We picked several melodies to arrange andperform in our next concert. Having added the piano and the saxophone parts
to the stringed ensemble, we completed a pretty medley. Together we weregoing to perform the melody that we had made. It would be our premiere of thecomposition, the only one in the world.
The children named each song as they practiced them. The titles theycame up with also amazed me very much: Symphony of Talkative Winds;
Dreaming Birds in the Future; and Paradise of Butterflies. How poetic these
titles were!
Since we would be performing on the year of the hundredth anniversaryof the birth of a Soviet composer, Shostakovich, we selected his Piano ConcertoNo.1. This work was somehow a strange concerto performed by piano, trumpet
and string orchestra. The concerto contained complex sections for string1

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instruments. But I intentionally wanted the children to play this piece. I wanted
them to know that some compositions had such interesting rhythms. On the firstday of rehearsal, I heard voices of disapproval from the music trainers, sayingthat this would be too difficult for the children to perform. Worried about it, I
asked the members of the orchestra for their opinions. Their response wasinteresting. “We have just started the practice. It is going to be more fun as wepractice.” How differently children and adults perceived the reality!

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The Birth of the Full Size Orchestra
In 2007 the Triphony Junior Orchestra was officially born. In addition tothe current string instrument members, members for the brass instruments andpercussions were auditioned. The Mayor of the Sumida Ward did not limit new
children within the residents of Sumida but recruited them from cities outside
Sumida as well, which made this organization special. I do not mean to say thatthese children came from all over Japan, but many of them commuted from theKanto area, and some from as far as Ōiso in Kanagawa. They practiced every
weekend either on Saturday or on Sunday evening. The rehearsal ended
around 9 P.M., so the younger children went home with their parents. A fullorchestra, as many as one hundred members, gathered in the hall. Trainers forthe brass and percussion instruments were added to the string instrument trainers.
The rehearsal time became lively.
In March, the Triphony Junior Orchestra had its first concert. Theprogram for the concert was Suppé's the Light Cavalry Overture, Voices of Spring,an orchestral waltz written by Johann Strauss II, and Finlandia, a tone poem
composed by Sibelius. With a guest singer, the orchestra also performed “Ozittre nicht, mein lieber Sohn,” the aria of the Queen of the Night from Morzart’sopera, the Magic Flute. I wanted the children to see the singer singing the aria
with her rich expression right in front of their eyes. As I had expected, thechildren accompanied the singer with their eyes wide open. They were stunnedby the extremely high voice coming out of the singer. By the time the rehearsal
was over, I saw the children humming parts of the aria.
The children who played the string instruments showed interest when thebrass instruments or the percussions played their parts. They looked at thebrass and percussion players and listened to their sounds carefully.
When I told them how Finlandia was composed and its historicalbackground, the childrens’ hearts changed, and they started playing with the spiritof the composition and the atmosphere during the time of Sibelius when theGrand Duchy of Finland was under pressure from the Russian Empire. This
made me realize again that a junior orchestra was a place of opportunity forchildren to experience and learn many things through music.
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Unlike adults, children do not improve quickly. We, as instructors,
became worried as the concert date came closer. But a week before they
suddenly changed and improved a lot. I wonder if the children had also felt
nervous as their concert date was approaching. They finished their first concert
as a full orchestra with their faces beaming joy.
Then, in July, the junior orchestra visited the Narihira Elementary School
in Sumida so that the school children could see other children of the same age
performing. We wanted the school children to be interested in the orchestra
active in their very neighborhood. It was during the month of July. The rainyseason had not finished so humidity was high inside the school gym where theorchestra had its concert. That was a hard concert for the children. The
members of the orchestra, despite the conditions, wonderfully performed pieces
like Finlandia and Without a Care, a polka by Josef Strauss. The students at theelementary school were surprised to see the members of the orchestra, theirsame ages, performing.
When I was talking with the principal of the elementary school before theconcert, he proudly told me that the school had a long history and the lyrics of theschool song were written by Hakushū Kitahara and the melody was composedby Kosaku Yamada (a.k.a. Kósçak Yamada). Immediately I had the idea to sing
the school song with the children at the Narihira Elementary School,accompanied by the orchestra. I asked the principal to find a music score forthe song. He found the original score that had been kept safely, and was ofvalue. While the orchestra was doing its dress rehearsal, the trainers quickly
arranged the song for the orchestra, wrote the music parts by hand, and copied
them and distributed them to the orchestra. We rehearsed the song only once
before the concert. But it was perfect to perform the school song together as anencore. Everyone was overjoyed. I was also honored to perform a venerable
song written by the famous composer.

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Remarkable Growth of the Children
August in 2007 was the month I saw much growth of the junior orchestra.
The orchestra played Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with a guest pianist, Mr.
Masahiro Saitoh. The composition had become popular through a television
program. We also selected Ravel’s Boléro for the program. We were a littleworried about having the children perform many solo parts in the piece. But thechildren bravely accepted the challenge of the fun music. Within these twoyears they had improved greatly. The little children who had not been able toreach the floor two years ago could sit steady on the chairs and play. They wereable to understand my instructions without using children’s terms.
There were many jazzy rhythms in Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which
was fun for the children. When the pianist was playing while feeling the rhythmof the composition, the children seemed to believe that they were supposed to sit
still. I told them, “You can move your body, just like the doll that we used to have,the one that responded to sounds.” But they did not show much response tome. I realized that they had not been born yet when these dolls were popular.
But their face changed as soon as they found out that they did not need to be still.
I told them, “You can be lost in your own world while playing.” They
could enter their own worlds so easily. Adults who tend to think too much have
hard time doing it. I loved to watch the children playing the violins as theywanted, and their expressions were wonderful.
One of their guardians said to me, “At home it is impossible for thechildren to stay focused and practice for one hour.” Around this time, thenumber of attendance at the concerts had increased. And members of theorchestra had also increased, so the concert stage was filled with children.

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The First Concert Tour
Then the orchestra had its first concert tour. There was a juniororchestra festival in Niigata City. Nine organizations from as far as Kitakyushu,Sendai, Okayama, and Toyota performed in the festival. The Sumida Junior
Orchestra rode in three charter buses to Niigata. I rode in one of the buses
because I wanted to go with the children. It would take us almost six hours toget there, so Ms. Masaki, an administration staff, prepared lots of games that wecould play during the bus ride. Many children displayed wonderful skills otherthan music. I could not believe how much fun I had with the children.
We began our practice as soon as we arrived in Niigata. But since someof the children could not focus, we finished the practice early to rest for a while.
Other orchestras were curious about the Sumida Junior Orchestra which wasattending the festival for the first time. We were a brand new orchestra. It
made me glad to see the children performing at their best on the stage.
They
performed with character. The children, who had been happy and romping in
the buses, performed with the same liveliness.
Many children did not go to bed in the hotel for a long time. Many ofthem made a game of ringing door bells and then running away, until late in thenight. The children who were freed from their guardians’ eyes became trouble
makers for their music trainers and staff. This trip was a big lesson for the wholeorchestra. The junior high school students, as well as high school students,
regretted the trouble they had made, and initiated some rules to govern theorganization. They chose leaders and created various roles such as managing
their music sheets.
For the concert on March 2008, we selected compositions with the themeof legends and magic. We also decided to perform Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lakewith a ballet dance. With the collaboration with the Inoue Ballet Foundation, weperformed famous scenes of the ballet such as Waltz, Scène, and HungarianDance. The children must have been blessed by performing while watching theballet dancing right in front of them. Many of the members of the orchestra hadtaken ballet lessons. The ballet performance was gorgeous, but the orchestra
performance was superb as well. Tickets for the concert sold out quickly. In1Junior Orchestra

front of the packed audience loudly applauding, the members of the juniororchestra proudly stood on the stage.
So, as their music director, I want to have the members experiencevarious types of music. Performing a symphony well does not automatically
prove that it is a good orchestra. I wish that this orchestra would be an orchestra
distinct in the free expressions of the members. That would keep these children
fond of music even after growing up.
I am utterly thankful to Mr. Noboru Yamazaki, the Mayor of Sumida; Mr.
Kohya Nakamura, Ms. Kazuyo Yamada, Mr. Yoshihiro Ueno, Ms. Teiko Masaki,
and Mr. Hidenori Sano, who have actively supported the children at the office; all
the music trainers who have never given up on the children; and the staff who
have set up the stage for each concert.

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