“The first time they make a noise, they surprise themselves,” said Gina Gutierrez, chief operating officer of the Ojai Music Festival.
“It’s the most wonderful thing in the world,” said Donna Nelson, SPUSD music resource specialist. “Kids love music. It stimulates their brains. They have so much fun.” Some students who started music lessons in Santa Paula schools have gone on to become music teachers themselves, Nelson said.
SPUSD has a solid music education program, with students able to join the band in fourth grade, Nelson said. However, she is dreaming of even more. “We would love to have a strings program, if we only had funding for it,” she said.
Lynne Doherty has headed up the Music Van for 24 years. “It is wonderful to see all the smiles and looks on their faces,” she said of the scores of children making a racket in the Grace Thille classroom as they tried out all the instruments.
Nineteen-year-old Brandon Boyd, a computer science student at Santa Barbara City College, helped Grace Thille students with the clarinets and flutes. He doesn’t remember the first time the Music Van rolled into Sunset Elementary School in Oak View when he was a first-grader, but his parents tell him, he came home that day and announced he wanted to play the saxophone. “That’s what I do now,” he said. After playing many instruments in marching band, jazz band, wind ensemble and even doing a cappella in high school, Boyd now gives back by helping teach music at Ojai’s San Antonio Elementary School. “I love this,” he said, over the din of Grace Thille students blowing horns, pounding drums, trilling flutes and bending bows over strings.
Grace Thille School students have a lot of music potential, Boyd said. “A couple of kids picked up the clarinet and flute and got it immediately.”
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Grace Thille School third-graders banged on drums and xylophones, blew into trumpets, trombones, French horns, flutes and piccolos, ran bows over violins and cellos and tried even more instruments from the woodwind, brass, strings and percussion families. Left photo (left) Francisco Ramos and (right) Johnathan Sierra try out the trombone |
