www.kidpanalley.org
I am very excited to tell you about an incredible program that I am helping to bring to the children in our community! Kid Pan Alley was founded eight years ago by Paul Reisler — songwriter, composer, master songwriting teacher and founder of the musical group Trapezoid — when he was asked to teach a songwriting residency to children at Rappahannock Elementary School. It was there he discovered that kids make the best co-writers. Since then, Kid Pan Alley songwriters have written over 800 songs with 1st through 5th graders in elementary schools across the country, producing two award winning CDs as well. Kid Pan Alley was also recently featured on NPR’s Morning Edition.
I have had the privilege of assisting Paul on several Kid Pan Alley residencies over the past year, and I had the opportunity to lead the residency at Jackson-Via Elementary School this past September. I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am about this program! I am so excited, in fact, that I have signed on as the Charlottesville-Albemarle Kid Pan Alley Project Director. I have organized eight Charlottesville and Albemarle Kid Pan Alley residencies in elementary schools in our area for 2007-2008. We have already worked with Johnson, Jackson-Via, Red Hill, Cale, Broadus Wood, and Brownsville. In December we will work with the children at Greer Elementary, and in February we will visit the Peabody School.
Let me give you a quick description of a Kid Pan Alley residency:
During a five day Kid Pan Alley residency, a lead songwriter and an assistant songwriter work with nine to ten elementary school classes. With a little guidance, the children choose their song topic, come up with their own melody, and then weave their ideas together to make a song. Watching the children — many from high-risk and inner-city schools — go through this process is absolutely amazing. The children learn that they can be creators rather than consumers. They learn about teamwork, about embracing diversity and about collaboration. And — what touches me most — they walk away from the program with a sense of ownership. As melodramatic as it sounds, I truly believe this program changes children’s lives.
Many Standards of Learning objectives are addressed by the program in the areas of creativity, music, English, performance and connection to other areas of learning. Sometimes the children write about topics they are studying in school. For example, kids in Norfolk wrote about life cycles and Black History Month. Sometimes they write about science and math. Sometimes they write about love. Sometimes they write about their school, town or community. Sometimes they write about changing the world. Whatever the topic, the songs are always original, insightful and surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly) good. At the end of the residency, the children perform their songs with Kid Pan Alley songwriters in a concert for the school and in an evening performance for their families. Both concerts are recorded and a CD of the children performing their songs is made available to the school.
While the focus of the program is on the songwriting in the classroom, the Charlottesville-Albemarle project will culminate in a community CD of the songs recorded by professional musicians in the community and the children, and a community CD release concert held at the Paramount Theater on October 4, 2008!
Our plan for the Charlottesville-Albemarle Kid Pan Alley project is modeled after a Kid Pan Alley community project in Nashville two years ago. With the help of the Nashville Chamber Orchestra, Paul worked with 22 schools and then produced a beautiful CD of the children’s songs called Kid Pan Alley Nashville. The songs were recorded by the kids and Nashville artists such as Delbert McClinton, Amy Grant, Kix Brooks (of Brooks and Dunn), Suzy Bogguss, Beth Nielsen Chapman, Lari White, Kim Richey, Jonell Mosser, the Nashville Bluegrass band and more. Kid Pan Alley Nashville has received a Grammy nomination as well as a number of other awards including a Parents’
Choice Gold Award. The recording is wonderful: sweet, funny, poignant and very professionally produced.
Our thought is that if Nashville can do it — so can we!
Kid Pan Alley is an initiative of Ki Theatre, a 501c not-for-profit arts and education organization based in Rappahannock County, Virginia. We have been able to bring this wonderful program to our schools with the support of the Albemarle Schools Fine & Performing Arts Department, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Virginia Museum for Fine Arts, the Ix Foundation, Crutchfield Corporation, Whole Foods and school PTO’s. To date, we have already raised over 50% of the total cost of this project which has allowed us to fund the residency programs and, with gracious thanks to the Ix Foundation, begin our community CD and concert project. We are currently looking for more support for creating the CD and producing the concerts in the Charlottesville area as well as funds to support residencies in inner city and other under served communities across the region and the country.
And we are always looking for interested parties to join the Charlottesville-Albemarle Kid Pan Alley Project Committee.
Please visit the Kid Pan Alley web site for more information:
And please contact me if you would like to help with this incredible community project!