By Sarah Hall
shall@salisburypost.com
Performance and pedagogy permeated the chorus classroom at Erwin Middle School Friday as visiting composer Micah Levy demonstrated how to combine words with music to form songs.
Groups of students from language arts and music classes listened attentively to Levy’s animated and interactive presentation as he moved from classroom whiteboard to piano keyboard and engaged the students in dialogue.
Levy’s composition, “Peter Piper’s Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation” will be a featured work in today’s Salisbury Symphony Concert at 4 p.m. at Varick Auditorium, on the campus of Livingstone College.
The partnering project with Erwin Middle School was made possible by a Rowan Investment Company Arts-in-Education grant administered by the Rowan Arts Council and also funded in part by F&M Bank, and other business and individual sponsorships.
Sixth grade language arts teacher Maria Freeman had the students in her three classes write alliterative paragraphs in “Peter Piper” style. Their creations were mailed to composer Levy, and he selected a few to set to music.
The exercise was both a learning experience and a contest, since the young authors of 11 of the works were chosen to receive free tickets to the symphony concert.
Levy had a full day of teaching Friday in chorus teacher Elizabeth Cook’s classroom as each class change brought in a new group of chorus, band and language arts students to hear the presentation.
One group’s experience was cut short by a fire drill. Then a bad sensor in the fire alarm caused it to continue to make noise intermittently then more persistently, for quite a while after the students had returned to their rooms. But Levy proceeded unperturbed by the noise competing with his presentation.
He explained his steps to writing a song, starting with the text. Meaning of the words, motivation behind the text, deciding which words are most important ó these are all aspects of beginning the process. The melody, harmony and tempo arise out of the energy and meaning of the words, and the rhythm of the piece matches the inflections and length of the syllables.
Some choices are a matter of taste. Will it be sung by a low voice? High voice? What sort of instrument will accompany?
Student Stephen Ward was absent Friday, so he wasn’t around to accept accolades or hear the performance when his paragraph that began “Danny Daring Dated Drinking Death” was chosen to be performed.
Levy turned the young writer’s absence into a teaching moment. He pointed out that when you read a poem in a book, you have to figure out the meaning yourself, the writer isn’t there to explain it to you. He told the class the next time they saw Stephen to ask him the meaning.
Another student’s work that was set into a Levy arrangement was Jessie Parnell’s “Taylor Tower got too tall to talk to the teachers.”
Levy’s musical education was not in composition. Instead, he focused on conducting. In fact, he never really thought he could compose anything. Then he decided to try it, thinking composition exercises would make him a better conductor.
Levy, originally from California, taught just one year in the mid 90s as the orchestra conductor for a high school in Tennessee, an experience he calls “a nightmare.” But it was during this time that he decided to “get his feet wet” as a composer. He wrote a ballet in keyboard form.
He then moved on to “Peter Piper,” which he considers his first real piece, and that was when Levy, at age 42, decided “this is it” and made composition his main pursuit. He now supports himself entirely through a combination of composition, arranging and piano teaching.
While some of his works come from commissions for bands and other performance groups, he is also hired to write songs for toys. That’s right. The “Mary Had a Little Lamb” you hear coming from that stuffed animal may have been arranged by a highly-trained musician. He puts his toy arrangements on sound files that are sent to China to be inserted in toys and sold back to Americans.
The book “Peter Piper’s Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation” is the source of the famous “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers…” a woodcut page of writing for each member of the alphabet, all of which will be heard at today’s concert.
The anonymous book was a pamphlet in late 18th century England, first published in the U.S. in 1830, and reissued in 1911. Levy, who currently resides in Maryland, came across the book in the gift shop of an 18th century trade fair in Annapolis and felt inspired to set it to music.
The work was performed twice by the Jewish Community Church in San Diego, and now the Salisbury Symphony brings it to the East Coast as the second orchestra to present the piece.
A conductor who had played viola in the first performance wanted to do the work with his orchestra, but being located in the Imperial Valley near the Mexican border, where many concert-goers are Spanish-speaking, it was felt the language would be a barrier to the audience’s enjoyment of the work, so it was never performed there.
But that conductor described the piece in glowing terms on an American Symphony Orchestra League listserv, where it was read by Salisbury Symphony music director David Hagy. Hence, the invitation was issued to Levy.
And so today’s Salisbury Symphony show should sound splendid.