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Non-profit music school imparts values and fun

by Mike Gibson

Twelve-year-old Joy of Music student Taber Gable’s first paying gig as a musician came unexpectedly, as a guest performer last August at the Knoxville Museum of Art. At a reception there, the youngster played an hour of classical and jazz standards in the lobby and had paused for a snack and a breather, when Joy of Music executive director Marisa Galick suggested that he place a tip cup atop the KMA’s baby grand.

“I said, ‘Maybe you’ll make a dollar or two,’” Galick says. “That’s when his eyes lit up. For the next 45 minutes, he played his heart out.”

When he finished his performance, a set that included a vivacious rendition of Vince Guaraldi’s “Linus and Lucy” theme as well as Beethoven’s feathery “Moonlight Sonata,” his cup overflowed with nearly $40 in singles and change. But on the way home from KMA, he tried to bestow the whole of his earnings on Galick, to help in her ongoing fund-raising efforts on behalf of the Joy of Music school.

“He said, ‘Miss Marisa, you need this more than I do,’” Galick remembers. “That was probably more money than he had ever had in his own hands in his life. I looked at him and said, ‘No, honey, you keep that. I’m going to find us a whole lot more money than that.’”

Though it sounds cliché, Galick and other JOM staffers say the value of an education at Joy of Music Youth Music School can’t be measured in crinkled dollar bills. A non-profit music program founded by former local broadcasting magnate James Dick in 1997, Joy of Music’s aim is to bring both muse and meaning into the lives of low and moderate income children like Gable.

“Our family was going through a transitional period a couple of years ago, and that transition was very hard for Taber,” explains Ronda Gable, his mother, a singer and pianist who began teaching classes at Joy of Music even as her son entered the program as a student.

“This place seemed like a good way for him to get through those difficult times. When he came here, it suddenly seemed like God had opened a door for us. It gave him a sense of stability. Where things had been out of order for him, there was suddenly order.”

Located in the gray, grungy former Knoxville public defenders office on the fringe of the Fort Sanders neighborhood, JOM relies on a tiny handful of paid staff members plus a stable of a few dozen volunteers to bring private music instruction to kids ages 3 and up. The program is open to any children who qualify for federal free and reduced-price lunch programs at public schools.

Unlike ordinary classroom instruction, the JOM program is self-paced, geared to the aptitude of individual students. Says Galick, “You may get some kids who don’t have a lick of talent. It doesn’t matter. If it takes them 10 years to learn one song, and they enjoy it, then we’ve succeeded.”

According to Anthony Hussey, a UT graduate and former JOM volunteer who now serves as the school’s full-time assistant music director, the first priority for kids who enroll is acquiring fundamentals; new students who don’t have any previous grounding in basics such as theory and music history are required to take an introductory class before choosing a specialty.

Those who graduate from the intro course, or who already know the rudiments of theory, receive weekly one-on-one instruction in vocal performance or on the instrument of their choice. (Musical instruments are provided to the students, free of charge, for as long as they remain in the program.)

“The early instruction concentrates on the basics, rather than on a particular style of music,” says Hussey. “It’s about being able to produce a quality tone, having good basic technique. After they learn that, they can expand and specialize. But our goal is to produce well-rounded students, to give them a taste of what’s out there before they concentrate on any one thing.”

Hussey says that so far, providing a suitably rounded curriculum hasn’t been difficult, given the caliber and variety of JOM instructors. Comprised of mostly volunteers, the “staff” at Joy of Music is a diverse lot—University of Tennessee music students, players and singers from area churches, members of local bands, even veteran orchestral performers. One of the percussion instructors is Julia Hungerford, drummer of a local punk-rock outfit The Cuts; JOM board member Keith McClellan, a member of Knoxville Symphony, gives private lessons to the school’s only bassoon player.

On a busy Thursday afternoon, the JOM building is lively with the cacophonic burble of a dozen students practicing almost as many instruments in separate rooms. “We hope to add some sound-proofing very soon,” Galick says, smiling, her words haphazardly punctuated by the crash of cymbals.

In one room, a UT student volunteer compliments a small, frail Asian girl in a pink blouse on her violin technique. In a second, another college-age volunteer leads a pair of bashful 7-year-olds in a game of “Pin the note on the staff.”

In yet a third, hyperkinetic local rock and blues drummer Michael “Bones” Allen coaches Pine Gap Elementary student Leon Blevins through a series of basic rolls on the snare drum of a five-piece trap set.

A reserved boy of about 10, Blevins has been enrolled in the program about a year, enough time to graduate from music theory, acquire a pair of sticks and learn some rudimentary beats. Soft-spoken in a red Chicago Bulls T-shirt, he says he entered JOM because his older sister was a pupil, and because playing drums seemed like such a righteously fun proposition.

“Drums are cool; they have a nice sound and stuff,” says Blevins, explaining his choice of instrument.

“And don’t forget what I told you; the best thing about playing drums is that you don’t need any drums to practice,” Allen says, cheerfully firing off a lightning roll on the vinyl seat cushion of a chair. “I’d like to see a piano player do that.”

Galick affirms that what Allen says is true. JOM’s drum and percussion students are accommodated at a relatively minimal marginal cost; given an inexpensive set of sticks, students have the means to practice their newly acquired skills almost anywhere they go.

But providing other students with instruments is more problematic. The storage room at JOM is full of donated equipment—a dozen or so trumpets, a handful of electric keyboards, a stand-up bass, a clutch of old flutes and clarinets. But many of them are broken, and will remain so until Galick finds regular funding sources outside the government grants that have traditionally provided most of JOM’s income.

And the demand for popular instruments such as guitar and saxophone always exceeds the supply, which derives principally from the benevolence of local musicians and music stores.“It takes about $350,000 to run this program optimally at the size it is now, and last year we got $200,000,” Galick says. “That’s why there’s no air conditioning in one half of the building, and why so many of those instruments are sitting in that room unrepaired.”

Galick has another favorite story about talented Taber Gable. It happened at the second of two annual recitals in 2003, a show which, for various reasons, most of JOM’s advanced pupils were unable to attend. Concerned that the audience hadn’t seen the best the school had to offer, Galick asked Gable to play a song at the end of the night.

“He wasn’t scheduled to play, but I wanted to add a little something,” she says. “I asked him if he could do a number on piano. A few minutes later he had everyone in the audience on their feet, dancing and clapping.

“It was an amazing performance, but I had never heard the song he was playing before. So when he came off stage I asked him, ‘What was that? Did you just make that up?’ He looked up and me and smiled and said, ‘Yeah.’”

The annual recitals are but a couple of the many opportunities Joy pupils have to perform in front of an audience in the course of a year. JOM also offers students the option of joining a choir, a violin group, or a wind ensemble. All three units play regular public concerts and occasionally perform at local civic functions.

Galick says the ensemble groups are in some ways more important than the private instruction, in that they provide kids with a healthy peer group at a crucial developmental stage.

“The middle school kids especially are at a place in life where they’re really looking for something to belong to,” she says. “That can go a positive way, or that can go a negative way. They can become a member of something worthwhile like a band, or they can become a member of a gang.”

In that respect, the Joy of Music program seems to be working; delinquency is rare at JOM. And though most of its students aren’t as electrifyingly gifted as Taber Gable, Galick says a majority of them do well in school, and several will eventually attend college through the help and encouragement of JOM faculty.

“Research shows that music studies open up different areas of the brain, and our results seem to bear that out,” Galick says. “Lots of these kids get phenomenal grades. It doesn’t matter that they may not all turn out to be great players. Our real objective isn’t to make child musicians but to make musical children.”

Her last remark is punctuated by yet another unexpected blast of percussion, this time a series of syncopated snare beats emanating from the room where Allen and Blevins are practicing.

Allen is instructing his charge in the finer points of the paradiddle, working the pattern across different sections of the drum head. Leon tries to follow along, repeating the licks with varying degrees of success, until he finally pulls off a rumbling roll on the thick, taut edge of the drum head next to the rim.

“Excellent. That, my friend, is a buzz roll,” Allen says, playing it again at an even faster tempo. “After a while you’ll be able to play it just like that, without even having to think about it.”

Leon doesn’t say much, but he’s obviously pleased. As he plays another imaginary paradiddle in the air, his face softens into a slow, satisfied grin, a smile indicating that, if nothing else, the little gray music school on the edge of Fort Sanders is aptly named.

July 8, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 28 © 2004 Metro Pulse