Music Links Mississippi With Carnegie Hall

Morgantown Elementary School students play with the USM Orchestra

After weeks and weeks of hard study, hundreds of Mississippi kids left the classroom this week for the final phase of their classical education. MPB's Ron Brown has the story.

The anxious crowd of 900 murmurs with anticipation as the symphony orchestra begins tuning up. Something special is about to happen and the audience has been waiting for this day for a full year. With this level of anticipation, you’d think the concert was being held at Carnegie Hall. But it’s not. In more ways than one, Carnegie Hall has come to Mississippi… the University of Southern Mississippi.

The median age of the audience is between 10 and 11- years-old. They’re fifth graders from schools in southern Mississippi and they’re doing more than just listening to the orchestra. They’re part of the concert thanks to a New York based educational program called “Link Up.” That’s how the Mississippi Arts Commission helps Carnegie Hall “Link Up” to Mississippi.

Malcolm White is the Commission Executive Director. “Link Up is a community partnership based with Carnegie Hall and the Weill Music Institute. It’s an arts education outreach that combines orchestral music and arts education in schools. This is a program that Carnegie developed for the city of New York for the school systems and they’ve done it for many, many years and it’s been so successful that they decided to take it out into the rest of the country, and Mississippi received one of the training programs, back in ’03 I believe so we’ve been participating ever since.”

With “Link Up”, the arts commission aren’t the only ones actively participating. On stage playing right along with the University of Southern Mississippi Orchestra is the string section of the Morgantown Elementary School. Shawn Smith is the string orchestra director in the Natchez Adams school district, and a big believer in “Link Up.”

“You know, when you can educate kids and entertain them at the same time, you’ve really got ‘em.”

The theme this year is “America; My Country My Music.” The education begins in class 36 weeks before the concert.
Those kids not on stage in the string section also play along on some songs, with recorders.

The kids begin learning about the music they’ll hear with study materials provided by Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute.
Currently the Meridian Symphony Orchestra and the USM orchestra in Hattiesburg are involved in the program. Marte Siebenhar is the manager of the Carnegie Hall elementary school programs in New York.

“When we hear the same songs here in Hattiesburg that we hear in New York City it’s just really great and it just shows you that music is the universal language and something that is linking kids up across the country.”

Siebenhar and her associate, Sue Landis came to Mississippi to try and recruit more state orchestras to the Link Up cause.
And they are not going back north empty handed.

“We have been very successful. With the help of the Mississippi Arts Commission we’ve been able to, I think we have three sites for next year, hopefully four.”

As "Link Up" grows in Mississippi, so does the fanfare.

Malcolm White: “The schools love it, the parents love it, the orchestras love it, it gets them exposure in the community, we have new business partners, new community partners who are investing in the program, and in orchestral music. So it’s very successful from our standpoint.”

Next year, just like this year, one of the most important things the kids will learn in the "Link Up" program is that the answer to the old joke about how you get to Carnegie Hall, is true.

Sue Landis: “Practice, practice, practice!”

For MPB news, I’m Ron Brown