The Essential Question that guided our projects’ focus was:
When is a performance judged ready to present? How does the manner in which music is presented influence audience response?
Kids Mountain Music Camp in 2022 was focused on returning to its folk and bluegrass roots, and engaged with 5 new professional musicians from Idaho to join one returning instructor from California.
These instructors had teaching experience and were all in their own bands. The campers came from Valley County, Ada County and a few from out of state. For three days from 9-3 each day, campers worked toward learning their instruments, choosing between vocals and songwriting as electives, and then practiced to perform in their individual bands. The focus of camp was to learn what they would need to pull off a 1.5 hour performance, kicking off The Summer Music Festival in Roseberry.
KMMC hosts a wide variety of skills and ages, but the collaboration as a community is strong and focuses on supporting each other. It is a joy to watch the kids encourage each other and offer help to one another. From learning chords, to song selections, to singing and writing songs the days are jam packed and the final performance showed off the kids’ talents and allowed them to connect to music they enjoyed as well as make new friends.
At the conclusion of the project, students responded to questions related to the identified Standards:
Anchor Standard 6: Convey meaning through the presentation of artistic work.
– Student – Age 8: “Mandolin is hard on my fingers. We had to take breaks to let our fingers rest. My teacher taught me other things during those breaks about how mandolin can be played in all kinds of music, not just bluegrass.”
– Student – Age 13: “I play violin and piano. But at this camp my violin becomes a fiddle. It is the same instrument but even the position is different when playing it and it is a lot of fun to see how to perform an instrument and take breaks to sing while still playing.”
Anchor Standard 5: Develop and refine artistic techniques and work for presentation.
Two students, age 16 and 17 wrote their own song with both lyrics and music and “auditioned” at the end of the second day and got approval. They continued to practice and after performing on stage said to each other afterwards:
“I like that you learned guitar enough to pick up the main part so I could do a solo in there”
“I like that I could sing something that we connected with together”
They both said: “It should have been longer, it went so quick”
Impact
2022 KMMC was the best we have had to date. Justin Nielsen, the new music director, had significant experience in running camps and performances. The instructors did blocking with the kids at camp and a full dress rehearsal, which made a huge difference in the performance outcome. Many parents made comments about how professional the performance was.
The instructors also really came together and complemented each other. They focused on the kids, were patient and had their area of expertise, and really communicated with each other for the best outcome for the students. The result was the students got to experience multiple instructors and feel supported by all of them.
My favorite moment was during the performance, the two intermediate guitar players were performing with the Teaching Assistant. One student was singing and playing guitar for the first time, and the other student was only playing the guitar. The TA was backing them up and helping with vocals but the song started to lose interest when, like magic, two instructors appeared on stage with a fiddle and mandolin to add to the song lightly. You could see the relief on the two students’ faces. This supported them and let them get through the whole song beautifully.
Reflection
Having Camp back at MOSS center was great for the shade and more of a camp feel. The new instructors all did a great job at camp. It was hard to coordinate them for conference calls prior to camp, so in the future I would schedule two meetings with all instructors prior to camp well in advance to make sure they could make their plans for songs and such in advance.
We would love for the camp to be able to have more loaner instruments for kids. Guitar is the largest class by far, because it is the most accessible instrument for parents in rural areas to get. Violins are fairly common too and can be rented in Boise. However, Banjo and Mandolin are much harder to find or rent, and are not anywhere in McCall. I would like to see the camp get two of each instrument so we could offer them to students who want to try but don’t have one. We also need to get picks and banjo finger picks as the kids don’t show up with them and lose them.
I would also love to see the audience grow. More advertising in the local community that it is free would be nice. While I think things run more smoothly with kids camp being separate from the locals night of The Summer Music Festival at Roseberry, I think we should tie it to the festival more and have it listed as a night on the posters and advertising.
