Every
second Saturday of the month for two hours of the morning, parents,
siblings, students, and children alike gather at seven elementary
schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District to learn about cats
in hats, hungry caterpillars, and mice ballerinas. For the third year in
a row, the sisters and prospective candidates of Epsilon Kappa joined
them for a special performance in honor of March as National Reading
Month! In dedication to serving youth and exposing young audiences to
the fun and joy of marching band, we traveled to Magnolia Elementary
School and performed a few choice stand tunes!
The
event was coordinated by EK’s Director of Service & Music, Sydney
Dychiao of the Alpha Rho class. In preparation for this event, Sydney
and 16 sisters combined to form a repertoire of four classic Solid Gold
Sound tunes: “Sons of Westwood,” “How Far We’ve Come,” “Ow! Word Up,”
and last but not least, “We Are the Mighty Bruins.” This was one of our
first music events as a sorority to include one of every instrument, a
feat we were incredibly proud of as a brass-limited group! Some creative
switches, including our Parliamentarian Chris Torres switching from
tuba to snare and Director of Sisterhood Activities Jessica Leatherman
trading in her flag for some cymbals, enabled us to have the most
complete instrumentation possible!
There
were definitely a few special moments throughout the gig. After our
first song, we had the kids learn the UCLA 8-clap with us. One girl
shouted, “I learned this! I know this!” and was spot on! We also took a
few minutes to introduce ourselves and all of our instruments’ unique
names and sounds. (The crowd favorite was definitely the trombone,
played by one of our candidates Brian Sydow!) But the best moment of the
day was at the finish, when kids flooded us for pictures and one girl
even handed us a note - “I like your music.”
It
all brings home for me what it meant for me to join TBS more than three
years ago as a freshman. And it underscores why it is so important to
have music in children’s lives. I would not have made the friends and
the values that I have today without having been part of music programs
ever since the fourth grade. In addition to giving children an outlet of
expression and a skill they will have their entire lives, reading and
music are more intimately tied than we think! It is my humble opinion
that music is our core language - it is read on a page, it is made up of
symbols that are each attributed to a special character of sound, it
follows rhythm, tempo, and patterns just as books do, and it helps us
learn to listen, not only to ourselves but to each other.
(To learn more and sign up for a program near you, please visit the Reading to Kids website at <http://readingtokids.org/Home/main.php>!!!)
And with that, I leave you with two quotes about reading and music and how they make our lives better!
“You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read with a child.”
- Dr. Seuss
“Shh.
Listen to the sounds that surround you. Notice the pitches, the volume,
the timbre, the many lines of counterpoint. As light taught Monet to
paint, the earth may be teaching you music.”
- Pete Seeger
Alyssa Lee
Alpha Omicron
March 10th, 2014
