The Delaware Symphony Orchestra has had years of experience sending musicians to schools to expose students to the world of Classical music. Through our DSO on the GO program, we send chamber ensembles for core curriculum integrated performances, and DSO musicians are available to come to your school to coach sectionals, lead masterclasses, or hold side-by-side rehearsals and concerts. We also offer a Teaching Artist Partnership that brings a musician to the classroom setting to work on a long-term arts project with students. Please call now to book a program.
We have exciting new chamber ensemble programs to send to schools through DSO on the GO, aligning our music education mission with connections to the 3rd and 4th grade core curriculum. We will send groups throughout the state in order to reach more student with live music in Delaware.
With a focus on literacy and math, and an eye to cultural awareness, the DSO on the GO programs aim to enrich students’ classroom learning with non-traditional approaches to the core curriculum subjects. Students will be engaged with these fun, educational, and interactive programs that offer a musical approach to the core subjects.
Some examples of programs we offer:
Culture and Communication: Our percussion trio demonstrates the ways music serves as communication throughout many cultures and eras. This is an eye-opening program with an incredible exposure to the world of percussion. Students will join in, communicating with each other as they play in a percussion ensemble.
Create a Character with Music: The DSO Wind Quintet explores character development through music and the written word. A lively presentation of Peter and the Wolf will be a favorite!
Fractions: A string quartet will guide students through an understanding of how time is divided into parts. With an understanding of simple fractions and their use in music, students will then compose their own piece of music by adding fractions together. The quartet will then play the premier performance of the students’ original composition.
Heroes and Heroines: A String and Brass duo will lead students to identify the qualities of heroes and heroines in our lives and in a wide range of cultural media.
Storytelling with a Universal Language: A string quintet leads students through the musical composition process, with a discussion of the parallels of literary and musical language when creating a story. Students are actively engaged in being thorough observers and participate as narrators in the performance.
Our American Cultural Geography: A Brass group offers a program that incorporates map reading skills to "travel" around the United States -discovering the immigrants who have settled here and made our culture so rich.
Each of these programs offers students the invaluable experience of hearing music performed by professional musicians. The programs are created for audiences of up to 100 students per show, and the shows are approximately 45 minutes in length. Our education sponsors cover the majority of the cost of these programs in an effort to make these programs available to any interested schools.
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The DSO’s Teaching Artist Partnership (TAP) brings Delaware Symphony musicians into its neighborhood schools, providing hands-on musical experiences based on creating, performing, and listening to music in the context of the core curriculum. These programs aim to equip students with the tools to develop a lifelong understanding and appreciation of music. Using music as a powerful teaching tool, core curriculum subjects such as reading, math, science and social studies are addressed with an enriching arts perspective.
In the TAP program, DSO Teaching Artists work in coordination with classroom teachers to develop lesson plans that directly expand upon teachers’ work with the students, and are timed with the curriculum mapping for the year. These programs can focus on literacy, math, or other core subjects. We also offer a music composition-focused program, led by composer Chuck Holdeman, in which students will create and perform their own compositions in the style of this year's recipient of the A.I. duPont Composition Award Winner (Libby Larsen, 2011.) Teaching Artists spend four to six 45-minute sessions with individual classes. With Teaching Artists providing a positive and nurturing environment, students are challenged to express themselves creatively. As a culmination of each program, students present live performances of their original works, and are then treated to a performance by a DSO chamber group visiting the school with a program related to the topics of the partnership.
Please inquire to schedule a program and for pricing: Lisa Vaupel, Education Programs Coordinator, via email (lisav@delawaresymphony.org), or by phone at 302-656-7442, x 105.
