Paint, Poetry, and Movement to Music

One of the highlights of The Phoenix Symphony's education program comes with the final Symphony for the Schools concert in the Spring of each year. For this concert, students who will be attending the performance have the opportunity to participate in the Paint, Poetry, and Movement to Music contest. A couple of months before the concert, each class receives a CD containing the music which will be performed and they can choose to respond to that music with a painting, writing a poem about it, or creating an interpretive dance and filming their performance of it. Schools from all across the Valley participate and send their contest entries to The Phoenix Symphony.

This year, the poetry portion of the contest was to be written in response to Brahms' Hungarian Dances No. 1. One of the winning poems was written by Alex, a 6th grader from Benchmark Academy:

"The Moonlit Dance"

There upon a moonlit night
The stars awake and dance with delight,
Fireflies are lit aglow
With flashing lights they make a show

Tiny crickets chirping on the right
The wind is ready to sing all night,
In the trees the birds now sleep,
But upon the crystal dance floor
The stars now cheer!

Beneath the surface of the lake
A creature shall now awake,
Its heart is now sparked with fury
Upset to have been awaken,

It charges up and breaks the surface
The water falls to earth like broken glass,

The fireflies flee in fear
Stars now start to reappear
Music starts to play again
Ready to run at dawn.

Great job Alex! For the painting contest, students were asked to paint a picture inspired by Scott Joplin's ragtime masterpiece, The Entertainer. Below are two of the winning paintings from the two grade-level categories (click on each thumbnail to see the full size image). The first is by 2nd grader Ryan and the second is by 6th grader Alexandra:

Special thanks to ALL the students who entered the contest this year. Your creations are inspirations for us to keep making music that stirs the imagination!

For more information about Symphony for the Schools and how your school can attend, please visit the Education department's section of The Phoenix Symphony's website. We'll leave you with one more of our favorite paintings from the contest, this one by Olivia, a 4th grader from Benchmark Academy: