Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the portly silhouette of Fats Waller peered down at them from the playbills that adorn Carnegie Hall’s backstage as the musicians of Brockton’s World Music Program waited.
Oh, they didn’t come to New York to win. With their mixture of thunderous marimba percussion and unconventional arrangements, they were pretty sure they could make it anywhere without making it there. And, truth be told, the notion of demolishing your competition becomes a problem when your goal is to spread global compassion through music.
Still: they waited.
The winner would be announced soon.
• • •
Geographically and musically, Brockton music instructors Paige Freeborn and Adrian Dyck had come a long way.
“We are Prairie people,” Freeborn says over a cup of tea.
After meeting at the University of Alberta the pianist and violinist headed west to pursue master’s degrees at UBC. Dyck was working as a teacher when something marvelous happened. Of course, it didn’t look marvelous, it just looked like a scheduling conflict. His Seymour Academy student was having trouble negotiating violin lessons and after school activities and so perhaps, Seymour Academy’s headmaster suggested, the student could take lessons at the school.
It got “our foot in the door,” Dyck recalls.
They started teaching more students and when Seymour’s headmaster moved over to the newly founded Brockton School, Dyck and Freeborn were picked to head up the music program.
And what would that program be? Not choral, not strings, and not a band, Dyck recalls.
“They didn’t know what they wanted it to be,” he recalls. They just wanted it to be different.
Given the budget, Freeborn recalls, it would have to be different.
“The headmaster said, ‘By the way, we have no money for instruments.”
They had a “not so well loved” Heintzman piano that had all its keys when the District of North Vancouver was first incorporated. There was a rented bongo and a whistle on loan from the gym teacher.
It was around that time Stomp was blowing away New York audiences with elaborate music and dance numbers that utilized instruments you might have found in an alley.
The idea circumvented Brockton’s budget constraints. But the real brilliance of forming a percussion-based group is that it relies almost entirely on energy: the one thing Brockton’s small ensemble had plenty of.
The kids played garbage can lids, brooms, and the aforementioned gym teacher’s whistle. Their first show was greeted with a five-minute standing ovation, Freeborn recalls, likening the reaction to something you’d expect in an after-school special.
The kids had energy. The next step was finding a worthwhile place to put it. Dyck and Freeborn implored their students to look inward and consider everything they have to be grateful for. And as the young musicians ruminated, the teachers exposed them to “Different Trains,” an avant garde piece by Steve Reich that incorporates the voices of Holocaust survivors into music.
Brockton’s students had plenty to be grateful for. Love. Parents. Food. Music.
“Now break off into different rooms and figure out a way to translate those statements, ala Steve Reich, into musical sounds,” Freeborn recalls telling them. “And then we crossed our fingers for 45 minutes. … Lo and behold, they all came up with almost exactly the same musical snippets.”
They performed the piece in China alongside a government censor whose job was to cut the lights if they deviated from their script.
With a philosophical and musical direction formed, all the group needed was the right instrument.
Freeborn and Dyck were at a convention of musical educators in Italy when an Ivory Coast musician gave them explicit instructions. Forget the Norwegian choir you’re planning to see, he told them. Instead, get tickets to see the St. Stithians marimba band out of South Africa.
“Within the first two minutes of those students coming out, the audience was just up on its feet and it was electric,” Dyck recalls.
The duo walked the streets of Bologna until the wee hours, plotting the future of Brockton’s music program.
“That is what we have to do. We need to have these instruments,” Dyck recalls.
Once they returned home, they found a Vancouver Island craftsman who makes Zimbabwean-style African marimbas by hand. A gala fundraiser or two later, they had their marimbas. They just needed to learn how to use them.
“When they arrived on our front door, we essentially knew nothing about them,” Dyck says.
“Not a clue,” Freeborn chimes in.
But it was also love at first sight, she adds.
They spent hours listening to recordings of different marimba groups, painstakingly transcribing each note and eventually forming their own arrangements and compositions.
A student, Josh Handford, penned his own song, “Darkness Into Light,” which he calls a musical representation of his life as a visually impaired person in a sighted world.
• • •
That energy, philosophy and 1,000 pounds of marimbas all made their way to Carnegie Hall, where Brockton played amid schools from North America and Australia.
The sound check was tense. But with a few jokes and a little chatter, an invisible fist seemed to loosen and the band found themselves relishing their roles as ambassadors of marimba music.
“It was the best performance they’ve ever done,” Freeborn notes.
The acoustics of Carnegie gave the marimbas a weight and beauty they’d never had before, she says.
Once the performance was over they huddled backstage and waited. Sure enough, Brockton School earned the gold medal as the event’s top performer. Some musicians cheered. Some burst into tears. And as for the instructors?
“Totally neutral,” Freeborn responds.
Dyck nods in agreement.
“There was absolutely no emphasis in our program at any time, not even for a millisecond, of it even being a competition,” he says.
There’s no quicker way to kill creativity than to focus on the next bigger and better thing, Freeborn explains.
There was glory and pizza after the show, courtesy of Famous Original Ray’s. There were dozens of cellphones buzzing.
But for Freeborn and Dyck, the overwhelming feeling was one of gratitude.
They were grateful to Brent North for schlepping 1,000 pounds of marimbas through the back alleys and thoroughfares of Manhattan in a moving truck and for finding parking in a city with more cars than spots. They were grateful to the kids and their parents.
“It takes a village to play Carnegie Hall,” Freeborn says.
