From Teaching Music Playing in Groups – to Creating a Culture Preserving Community The “Composer in the Community” projects, Ramat Gan 2007-2011

In Western art music the form of teaching that has established itself as the mainstream is the teaching of individual students focused on achieving excellence. The common practice using this method is training performing musicians to master a specific instrument, based mainly on on-going individual sessions, usually in a dedicated music school – a conservatory.

Teachers in this community perceive teaching in groups as an inferior activity dictated by various constraints. It is considered to merely a temporary measure until the student elects to persist with studying a specific instrument in a music school.

The challenge in teaching instruments in public schools is not to bring the community to align itself with what is perceived to be “what the instrument requires”, but to realize the role of studying in a community, while informed by a meta-cultural, meta-instrumental perception.

The overall goal of the “Composer in the Community” project which I have initiated in collaboration with Ms. Zohar Singer, was not the acquisition of instrument playing skills, and playing the instrument in and of itself, rather we leveraged playing as a way to learn the students` local culture and as an experience oriented means to involve the school community in its entirety with the current music making in the greater local landscape.

Every year a one prominent composer was selected, and through his work connections were made between all parts of the school community: the instrument playing students and those that do not play an instrument, the music teacher and teachers of other subjects, and the parent community.

The composers selected were all composers of the classical art music genre, and not pop music composers. This choice was intended to enable the community to engage directly with music which is usually not accessible by the majority of the population, and to integrate it with the on-going school activity.

The composer himself (or herself) was actively involved in the projects and has joined forces with the teachers and students.

In addition to the individual benefits to the students and the general benefit to the school community, the project also assisted in preserving Israeli art music, some of which had never been performed on stage, and had benefited the composers themselves and the general music scene outside school and the directly connected community.

It is not possible to make this kind of project happen using the individual teaching method, and its cultural influence can only be fully realized within a school community and through group teaching. In the “Composer in the Community” project these influences and their results have been significant both during the project and after it was completed, among the participating students, the teachers, and the parents.

In my lecture I will sum 5 years of the project and show how it affected the school community in the process and years after, and offer this model as a connection between art and the society.