Music begets art - Children's Arts Festival Sunday

When Dr. Robert Gifford retires from the Department of Music at Southeast Missouri State University at the end of the school year, one of his legacies will be the Children's Arts Festival he founded four years ago. Another will be the Southeast Chamber Players, the ensemble he has directed throughout its nearly 15-year history.

The festival brings professional musicians into the schools to promote the integration of music and art. Students create art inspired by the music they have heard. The concert and art exhibit at the conclusion results in "a greater interest in the arts on the part of both children and parents," Gifford says.

The Southeast Chamber Players will be joined by St. Louis Symphony Orchestra horn player James Wehrman in a concert Sunday that will start the festival. Other soloists will be contralto Dr. Leslie Jones and tenor Dr. Christopher Goeke, both Southeast vocal music professors. The 3 p.m. free concert at Old St. Vincent's Church in Cape Girardeau will be followed by a reception for the student artists at the Arts Council of Southeast Missouri.

New to the festival this year is Shere Khan, an ensemble of Cape Girardeau Middle School students who play recorders and percussion instruments. The group is directed by Pam Dumey, a music teacher at the school.

Shere Khan and the Southeast Chamber Players will join to perform the premiere of "KEBYAR!," a composition by Southeast music professor Dr. Robert Fruehwald. Fruehwald composed the work in collaboration with students in the Cape Girardeau and Jackson schools.

Early in October, Fruehwald talked to students at Cape Girardeau Middle School and South Elementary School in Jackson Middle School about the process he goes through as a composer. He asked them to sing or tap out rhythms that he incorporated into "KEBYAR!"

"They generally either were imitations of traditional children's songs or they were imitations of contemporary music," Fruehwald said. "... Some were more sophisticated than I would have guessed."

The Balinese word kebyar means "to burst forth." The four- or five-note ideas provided by the students echoed the short, repetitive melodic patterns of the Balinese equivalent of jazz, Fruehwald says.

In addition to recorders, Shere Khan plays instruments developed by Carl Orff, the German composer who created the instruments to teach children music. A Balinese orchestra sounds much like an ensemble using Orff instruments, Fruehwald says.

The 25 fifth- and sixth-graders who volunteered for Shere Khan rehearse before school at 7:15 two mornings each week. The group, whose members memorize their music, will have only one rehearsal with the professional group.

"The challenge will be to fit our part in with the chamber players," Dumey said.

Shere Khan, named for a tiger in Disney's "The Jungle Book," also will perform an African folk melody titled "Everybody Loves Holiday Time" and Margaret Murray's "The Drums of Noto Hanto."

The 20-piece Southeast Chamber Players include music faculty from Southeast along with area musicians and music teachers. They formed after a 1990 performance by the American Wind Symphony at Old St. Vincent's Church, which at the time was still being renovated. "I said, Why can't we do something like that?" Gifford recalled.

Jones will sing "Salve Regina" by Giovanni Simone Mayr. Goeke will follow with "Qui tollis," a work by Gaetano Donizetti.

Wehrman, who has been an adjunct faculty member at Southeast since 1994, will perform the "Fanfare and Three Masquerades for Solo Horn and Wind Nonet" by Malcolm Forsyth.

The Southeast Chamber Players will bookend the performance with "Partita in B, Op. 45 No. 3" by Franz Vincenz Krommer and "Echo Sonata for Two Unfriendly Groups of Instruments" by P.D.Q. Bach.

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182