By Liz Horiatis

Music Education

Nation-wide education budget cuts pose a threat for many school’s music programs, but that isn’t the case at Evergreen Elementary in Spokane, Wash. Kathy Meredith has been the music teacher at Evergreen for the past 27 years.

“We [Meredith and the community] are very fortunate that Mead [school district] supports music education,” Meredith said.

Meredith takes an active role in promoting the importance of music education by sending out a newsletter twice a month called the “Pony Express.” Meredith quotes Plato in a newsletter she sent out in March, the school’s “Music in Our Schools Month.” “Musical training is a more potent training than any other because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.”

Meredith has confidence in her school and community to continue supporting Evergreen’s music program, she said. “Some schools, if you’re not a strong music teacher or if you don’t really promote yourself, your principal may give you $300,” Meredith said. “We had a lot more money 20 years ago. As the years progress our budget has shrunk.”

Meredith received just over $1,000 this year from her school to fund her music program.

“My idea is to teach the kids who don’t have the opportunity the world of music that they would never have,” Meredith said.

Music helps children develop creativity, she said.

“The arts are essential in nurturing the heart and soul of the human being,” says professional pianist and teacher in Redmond, Wash., Mary Anne Szollar.

Mary Anne Szollar in her home teaching studio

Szollar teaches children how to play the piano and says she whole-heartedly believes in the importance of music education and the survival of the arts.

“We know culturally, academically, kids must learn math and science and reading, all those basic intellectual components of life,” Szollar said. “We also have a huge push to sports from little preschoolers, and we’re spending a lot of money on it. Why are we doing that? I assume it’s to develop some physical capabilities.”

Szollar started teaching piano at age 13. She emphasizes communicating with her student’s parents about their children’s progress and time in the classroom, she said.

Through her experience as a music educator, Szollar has seen the importance of music education dwindle in the school systems, she said.

“The arts are grossly overlooked. It’s the first area every school system cuts,” Szollar said.  “I think it’s sad to put music back into schools or to draw funding to the arts we have to intellectually justify it by saying ‘It will help your math if you make music.’”

There is an amount of personal discovery through music that is not likely to occur elsewhere Szollar said.

“That’s the whole emotional heart and soul thing. Math and reading are great, but music and art can help people get to know who they really are,” Szollar said.  “You’re going to get more personal insight exploring music than you will in math, and it seems obvious but I don’t think we think about it.”

Meredith sees some of these same experiences in her students, she said.  Meredith looks at comment cards children have filled out over the years about their time in music class.  “One child wrote, ‘With music you can be yourself. You get to express yourself in music, you can’t do that in the classroom,’” Meredith said.

Along with expression, there’s an emotional context in music that is unavoidable, Szollar said. The experience in the classroom does not match what they can gain from music, she said.

“We’re not sitting at desks here,” Meredith said.

Learning a musical instrument teaches children skills that aren’t gained in the classroom, Szollar said.

“They have to learn to practice or study independently. They have to learn to solve problems,” Szollar said. “They learn to be confident in using knowledge and applying knowledge consistently over time rather than, compared to school, ‘I learned this spelling word; I passed the test; I never have to spell it right again.’”

Meredith says kids are over-busy. They don’t finish what they’ve started. Music can help kids learn what it means to be dedicated and committed, she said.

“What I see [from what parents tell and how children act in lessons] is in the classroom is they are given answers. When they’re asked a question and they say ‘I don’t know’ which is an instant response, they get the answer,” Szollar said. “So in a one on one lesson, if they say to me ‘I don’t know’ I ask them ‘why not?’ Or I ask them to ‘repeat the question.’ And I’ll tell them ‘but we learned this last week’ and they have to think.”

Well-Rounded

A well-rounded education cannot be complete without music, said professional violist and teacher in Kirkland, Wash., Dori Sippel.

“Playing music in a group is the ultimate team sport because you’re constantly engaged in a very high level. You really have to pull your weight,” Sippel said.

The mission of a music teacher is to complete a student’s education, Sippel said. She makes it her professional goal to be a part of the process.

After playing for over 20 years professionally around the world, Sippel settled down in Washington to teach. Her most recent project involves researching the value of music and renovating traditional teaching style.

“I’ve been avidly collecting data, mostly from the New York Times, of different research that’s been done about people who play music and it’s just curious and interesting,” Sippel said.

Sippel can see a direct correlation between her students who are successful in math and her students who excel in rhythm, she says.

Taking music beyond what’s on the page is what she wants from her students, she says.

“Music is like a Xerox process you replicate what’s on the page, but the page is where you start. It’s what you put into it personally. It’s what you put into this barren thing, this page of music, because it’s soulless until you enter the scene,” Sippel said.

Diversity

More than learning patience, focus, and music notes, children are given tools to praise God and bring joy to others, said Sherri Snyder, founder of the children’s choir, “Hiz Kidz” at Cedar Park Church in Bothell, Wash.

When Snyder was pregnant with her first child she came across a verse that would forever be the pillar of Hiz Kidz, the children’s choir that has been in place for more than 10 years.

Sherri Snyder at Cedar Park Assembly of God Church

“I was reading the Bible one day and came across psalm 8:2 and it just jumped out at me,” Snyder said. “It’s the psalm that says ‘Out the mouth of children and infants God has made praise because of his enemies to silence the foe and the avenger.’ And at that point I was like, ‘wow.’”

As a music teacher, Snyder sees the immense benefits of music on children as well, she said.

“From a music education stand point, music is important for a child’s development, the whole cognitive end of things, and the way their brain works together.  The discipline of practice, the social end of how they become involved with a great group of kids, and how they’re working toward a certain destination are important. From so many different standpoints, it [music] feeds into their hearts and minds and strength,” Snyder said.

Music can heal and touch people’s hearts like nothing else can, Snyder said.

“We [the choir] would do an outreach over Veterans Day weekend and when we would sing patriotic songs, audience members who showed absolutely no expression throughout the whole thing would start to sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ or ‘God Bless America’ with us or they would sing ‘Jesus Loves Me,’” Snyder said.

“That was just such an exciting thing to see. That was hidden in their hearts sometime over the course of their life and here at a time where they could hardly say their name they would start singing with us,” she said.

Snyder continues to see the positive effects music has on her children and the children in her church, she said.

Meredith couldn’t see herself any other place than the Evergreen music room. “My whole goal is to create a spark somewhere,” she said. Next school year will be Meredith’s 28^th year teaching music at Evergreen. What children write to Meredith about their time in her class touches her heart, she said. “One child wrote, ‘Music makes me free from my worries.’”

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Mexico City

Dori Sippel playing her viola for students

After working as a professional violist for more than 25 years, Dori Sippel says she will never play for money again.

“I feel gleeful I’m not playing for money anymore,” Sippel said. “That is the operative word, gleeful. I have no interest in selling my soul in order to get that kind of work.”

Sippel started her career as a violist in the Mexico City orchestra under the direction of Carmen Romano de Lopez Portillo, the first lady of Mexico from 1976 to 1982.

“She was an amateur pianist. She studied at the conservatory,” Sippel said.

“The Mexican conductor there, they became lovers and she promised him that when her husband became president she would create an orchestra that was worthy of him, so she did. That was my orchestra,” she said.

Americans, Mexicans, Russians, Polish, and Bulgarians played in the orchestra, Sippel said. “This was before the Iron Curtain came down.”

Sippel says the Mexico City Orchestra accounted for the most outrageous time in her life.

“For the first six months nobody spoke the same language and then after a while we all started speaking Spanish, a strange Spanish, and then we became really tight,” Sippel said.

“We taught each other our languages’ curse words, of course, and we greeted each other every morning by cursing in the other’s language,” she said.

The orchestra traveled to Cuba, Argentina, China, Japan, South America and Europe, Sippel said.

“We would travel and people had no idea what our connection was because our instruments were under the plane,” Sippel said. “They had no idea what connected all these very diverse people. They were like, ‘What is this?’”

When the Mexico president’s term came to an end in 1982, Sippel said she knew it was time to move on.

Italy

Sippel vacationed in Florence that October and ended up auditioning for the Florence orchestra.

She played there for a year.

“I didn’t like Florence. I didn’t know what to do. I came from Mexico which is full of light. It’s crazy and chaotic,” Sippel said. “Florence in the winter time is very gray and the buildings are built like fortresses. The streets are narrow so it’s dark.”

She turned to a Tarot card reader.

“I walked into this store and said, ‘Can I have a card reading?’” Sippel said. “They brought me to this very other-worldly looking, very pasty looking man. He didn’t look like a Florentine at all. I picked seven cards and he really said ‘Water, water, I see water everywhere. I think you should go to Venice,’” she said.

Going from Florence to Venice in terms of priorities of orchestras is a step down, Sippel said. She played in the Venice orchestra for seven years.

When fascism started to rise in Italy Sippel’s loyalty to the country became an issue, she said.

“Fascists don’t like foreigners,” Sippel said. “Italy was stuffing their orchestras with Italians before they had to open them up to the rest of the community.”

In June of 1990 Sippel came to work in Venice and saw her orchestra was holding auditions for her spot, second assistant violist, she said.

In order to secure her spot in the orchestra Sippel had to forgo her American citizenship and acquire an Italian citizenship.

“The more I lived abroad the more American I felt. You can’t get away from that,” Sippel said. “I think that year in Italy I realized that Italian language does not have a word for freedom. It has a word for liberty, but it’s not the same.”

She left Venice during the Gulf War in February of 1991.

Los Angeles

Sippel returned home to New York City and stayed with her parents while she figured out her next move.

“I was turning 40. They loved that. They were thrilled,” Sippel said. “I stayed there for about eight months doing absolutely nothing. At a certain point my father said ‘Can I give you money to learn data processing or something so you can get a job?’” she said.

A distant friend talked her into moving to Los Angeles to freelance, she said.

“I did a little bit of everything,” Sippel said. “I played in orchestras. I played opera. I played casual stuff which I actually loved and kind of pop stuff which I never played before.”

“I was on Snoop Dog’s album, Death Row Records; we had to open our cases so they made sure we didn’t have any guns with us,” Sippel said.

Sippel played for Denise Richards and Charlie Sheen’s wedding and worked with world renowned tenor Placido Domingo in the LA Opera.

“The crème de la crème of that existence was I played Oprah’s 50^th birthday party just before I left, the really nutty one, the $5 million one,” Sippel said.

After her 13 years as a freelance violist in LA Sippel decided she never wanted to see a celebrity again, she said.

Final Stop: Seattle

Sippel left LA in 2004 when a friend convinced her Seattle would be a good fit, Sippel said.

“A friend said, ‘You know people in Seattle would get you and down here [LA] you’re just getting smudged out. Why don’t you come to Seattle and teach?’” Sippel said.

The week after Oprah’s birthday party, Sippel moved to Kirkland, Wash., and started teaching. Sippel continued to do some freelance work when she moved to Washington.

Sippel recorded for the movie “Akeelah and the Bee” and all “The Grudge” movies.

“We[Sippel and Seattle freelance musicians] did the cowboy movie, the gay cowboy movie, ‘Brokeback Mountain.’ We won the Academy Award. We were very happy,” Sippel said.

Sippel says she’s fallen off the list when it comes to her demand as a violist.

“I realized about in the last month or two that I’d never play for money anymore and I never realized what a burden it was,” Sippel said.

She focused her attention on teaching, she said.

“I started cognizing it was far more thrilling to me personally, to see a kid have an ‘aha’ moment rather than tripping across Placido Domingo in my workplace,” Sippel said.

Sippel started her career as a music teacher in the early 1970s in Long Island, N.Y. Her mother wanted Sippel to remain a music teacher, settle down, get married and have kids.

While the latter two never happened, Sippel decided to pick up teaching again in 2004, now that her professional career had come to an end.

For the first time Sippel went to sleep knowing she did something good that day, she said.

“I have parents coming to me saying, ‘Thank you for helping my child play in this concert so successfully,’ and I think, ‘Well, you’re paying me to do this, isn’t this is what I’m suppose to do?’ I’m glad it’s working,” Sippel said.

“They’re acting like somehow I’ve given them something that hasn’t been paid for and that is amazing to me,” she said. Well aware she will have to work until the day she dies, Sippel says she embraces her teaching career.

“Until very recently I thought of it as kind of a sentence; ‘Well this is the price you pay for enjoying yourself.’ But I’m seeing that teaching is not just ‘child in, payment, child out.’  It really is not that at all,” Sippel said. “I have such freedom in what I do. It’s amazing. I feel very thrilled about it and I’m realizing it is my life’s work.”

As a teacher Sippel wants to be a part of the process of a well-rounded education, she said.

Teaching music as a creative art interests Sippel the most, she said.

“I’m trying to figure out a way to integrate teaching music the way graphic art is taught so that you actually create something;  you’re not just copying something,” Sippel said.

“That’s something that completely confounds me, interests me and I’m still pursing. On a very deep level it terrifies me. To make something out of nothing really intrigues me,” she said.

Sippel says she has no regrets when it comes to ending her career as a performer.

“Even when I was playing the best stuff musically, which was mostly in Italy, I always found it far more creative to make a loaf of bread, really because it comes from nothing. It comes from scratch,” she said.

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