An Unforgettable Moment in Music Education

I am the choir director for 2 different private schools in Durgapur, and there is a certain amount of 'friendly' competition between the 2.  An ordination is occurring in the new cathedral on Nov. 14. (Just alittle pressure) and the students have been out for almost two weeks for a Hindu holiday or poojah..

St. Michael's has had a music teacher, so he hand-picked 30 of the best singers, and there was my choir. St. Peter's, on the other hand, has never had a music program and the principal wanted to ensure that I got all the best voices, so he asked me to audition every student from 4th grade to 7th, which is 350 children.  I told him I would NOT audition Grade 8.  I whittled it down to 150 students (there'actually quite a number of musically talented students here.)  That means there would be 2 choirs.  Principal says great. Then sthe teachers rightly ay that their students cannot be away from their academics that much. Then last Friday the principal asked me to form a choir of 30 students in 3 days, and there would be a rotation of the periods the students would have for rehearsal. Then he stopped talking as though I would
know how to arrange the rehearsal schedule.  Ah, yes.I made it clear
with a smile that I had no idea how to do this and that he would have
to do it.

So, how to choose 30 from 150?  I wanted something objective and fair without auditioning 250 students again.  So I decided to go down the list and circle every sixth student, which came to 32.  I couldn't
read their writing, although it was in English.  So I asked the wife of a visiting Indian couple to help me sort this out further.  You see, I had no idea whether each 6th student was a boy or a girl. So we
went through the list and found that I had chosen 18 boys and 12 girls. We  got to 15 each by a unique method.  She read through the names, adding names she liked the sound of, and discarding the names she didn't like.  So unique, so elegant, don't you think? Most of all, it's DONE!  Done is good!  And June and I had great fun concocting this plan .  Then the principal tells me he really wanted 20students.. "Cheese andRice!!!"  I told him that we're fine as e are. What the principal wants most is for the
students to sound good, so we're going to sing 'Simple Gifts' by rote, learning the song by reading the words.  And teachers, now I know what it means to travel from school to school to school.

The really neat thing about it, though, is that the children are so adorable and physically so beautiful.  They love the kind of playing you get to do in music, because in each of their other classrooms of
50 students, they are very regimented so they can get academic work done.  As I have always said, It's all a grand experiment!

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