Parks and Rec

Children’s Universal Language Orchestra

Reading Time: 3 minutes

A cacophony of sound erupts from a large classroom at the Spring Valley Community Center. Students are banging on pipes, plucking strange wooden contraptions and rattling cans. But the teachers leading the class hear more than a room full of noise. From a myriad collection of discordant notes, the teachers are hearing music, seeing theater and watching creativity at its best.

University of California San Diego doctoral students Adam Tinkle and Bonnie Whiting Smith are shepherding a group of grade school children through a six-week course designed to teach them how to create music from instruments built out of everyday objects. The children and their music form the basis of the Spring Valley Children’s Universal Language Orchestra.

“The goal is to get children to creatively engage in music,” says Whiting Smith. “The universal part is using instruments we can find or make.”

Instruments are made from soup cans filled with popcorn, rice and lentils; golf club tubes, aluminum pipes, plywood and even hairpins. But in the hands of these kids, the soup cans become three-way shakers, the golf club tubes are didgeridoos, aluminum pipes are transformed into what they call metallophones and the plywood boards and hairpins? Well, those are homemade Kalimbas modeled after an African instrument.

“One thing that is really unique, is that you don’t need any musical background to join,” says Bonnie Whiting Smith. “You don’t need to read music; you just need to come with your body and an open mind.”   

One youngster, Irma Moran, is ten years old and a fifth grader at Sunnyside Elementary in Bonita. She signed up for every Universal Language Orchestra class since it was first offered in October 2010. She loves music and plays piano and guitar, but she says this class inspires her. “You learn new instruments, you make them, and you get to play games, it’s really cool,” says Moran. “It’s kid-friendly.”

The assignment for today: use the instruments to compose music to a story based on infamous rainmaker Charles Hatfield.  He was commissioned by the City of San Diego at the turn of the last century to end a drought and bring rain to the area. As the story goes, Hatfield created so much rain that several dams overflowed and flooded the region.

The children break into small groups and add the booming foghorn sounds of the didgeridoos, the tinkling of the metallophones, the discordant notes of the Kalimbas and the rattling shakers to their narration; their voices and motions bring life to the story. Each week, they’ll refine their skits and combine them into a play to be performed before friends and family at the Spring Valley Community Center in December. The following day, the kids will take their show on the road for a field trip to UCSD. Their performance will be recorded on video there and with any luck the Orchestra will perform on stage as they did last year.     

The Spring Valley Community Center is part of the County Parks and Recreation Department. The Center strives to be an inter-generational gathering place and already partners with UCSD on intergenerational math and reading clubs. The Children’s Universal Language Orchestra is the brainchild of the Community Center Director Renell Nailon.  He approached UCSD music professor Charles Curtis and the idea took off.

“Their music program is one of the best in the nation,” said Nailon. “I wanted to take the Community Center in the direction of arts, cultural arts. I think music is the easiest way to pursue the arts. That was our start. We’d eventually like to get involved in theater and dance. ”

For now, Nailon says the children are able to have a hands-on experience with music and show their creative side. The students at UCSD developed the course and they volunteer to teach the course for class credit. A grant from the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts pays for the music kits and field trips. Students also pay a $25 fee for each session.

 Whiting Smith says the children gain a huge sense of accomplishment because they are learning musical skills and creating music from scratch. Irma is one example. “When I first met Irma, I thought she was really shy,” said Whiting Smith, “But she is one of these people who I like to think this program helped to blossom a little bit, and have a lot more courage and self-confidence.”