In tune with dreams

Beaming dignitaries watched a group of 13 fourth-graders from Sonora Elementary School in Costa Mesa sing backup vocals Tuesday for Grammy-nominated band Trout Fishing in America while the group performed a song the students helped write.

As part of an initiative jointly sponsored by the Orange Country Performing Arts Center and the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, the kids got a chance to participate in a songwriting workshop with the nationally renowned professionals.

The fruit of their labor, a song titled “Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks,” was dreamed up by fourth-graders David Gonzalez and Bryan Segovia.

“We were into history a lot. We were looking at history books, and that’s how we got the idea,” Bryan said.

Bryan and David said King and Parks inspired them because they fought hate.

Tight budgets have squeezed music out of the curriculum of many schools.

The Sonora students take a short, weekly music class, but opportunities like this one are more inspiring for David.

“These guys write songs and stuff, and our music teacher just sings songs that were already written,” he said. “When we grow up maybe we’ll want to be musicians.”

Ezra Idlet, the taller member of the folk music duo, describes his childhood self as a “terrible student, unfocused and not really present.”

This would probably come as no surprise to the audience of educators who assembled to hear him and his partner, Keith Grimwood, irreverently sing and strum their guitars.

One of their more memorable songs sounded like it sprouted straight from the chimerical, destructive mind of a young boy.

The artists asked for audience suggestions of nursery rhymes, played them, then tacked on the refrain, “then (he/she) threw them out the window.”

For instance, “Mary had a little lamb, a little lamb, a little lamb/Mary had a little lamb, and she threw him out the window.”

The kids listening to the song screamed with glee each time the performers sang the chorus, as though they had just meticulously built a sandcastle then stomped on it. The concert culminated a multi-day workshop at the school taught by Idlet and Grimwood late last year.

“I probably would have flowered under a program like this,” Idlet said. “In today’s educational system kids become receivers of facts instead of givers of ideas.”

School board President Martha Fluor also sees a problem with how children are taught these days.

Test scores, especially in subjects like math and English, have been too heavily emphasized at the expense of subjects like music, she said.

Of course, it doesn’t detract from Sonora’s pioneering music collaboration’s merits that the school’s students saw the biggest bump in the district last year in No Child Left Behind testing scores. Fluor says it is no coincidence.

“There’s a direct correlation: We integrate the arts in the school, and we see the improvement in the test scores,” she said.

Often music has the greatest positive effect on the kids that are the most disruptive, according to Idlet.

Some of the most creative kids are the hardest to deal with, he said.

Sonora was one of eight schools countywide chosen from a pool of 18 applicants for the Performing Arts Center grant, and the only one from the Newport-Mesa Unified School District.

The program started in 2004, when the students who performed Tuesday were in first grade, and it will continue until they graduate at the end of next school year.

Nancy Warzer-Brady, the Performing Arts Center’s director of education and community programs, is not sure whether the center will continue the program past that point, but she says if the initiative has been successful, the teachers at Sonora should have learned the tools to continue high-caliber music education on their own.

She helped pick Trout Fishing in America to teach the Sonora students when the touring band came to the Performing Arts Center to give a family concert.

“I wanted to bring these guys in because they’re excellent musicians, but they’re children at heart,” Warzer-Brady said.

ALAN BLANK may be reached at (714) 966-4623 or at [email protected].