Foundation for the Revival of Classical Culture
SUMMER SCHOOL 2014
SCIENCE AND ART
The 2014 Foundation summer program will focus on discovery and the unity between classical music and science, in an intensive three-week summer program.
Every student in the program is required to join the two-hour morning chorus, leaning choral masterworks spanning four centuries with a focus on understanding polyphonic textures. The students will have the goal of performing in a concert at the end of the summer progrm. Mr. Richard Hyman (who built his HS concert choir into one of the best youth choruses in the tri-state area prior to his retirement in 2013) will be directing the choral program.
The afternoon program of science, music theory and classical literature will encourage and equip the students to discover the pre-estalbished unity between "science" and "art". The topical outline of the three weeks is as follows:
WEEK ONE, July 28 - August 1:
This week will introduce the students to the musical and scientific discoveries made by Johannes Kepler, the discoverer of the geometry of our solar system. who demonstrated that the planets of our Solar System are arranged according to principles of reason and beauty. (1)
WEEK TWO, August 4 - August 8:
This week will focus on a new approach to musical method, not "musical theory". The instructor will utilize an interactive pedagogy, including singing, through which the students will become acquainted wih the device of irony in music, and musical ironies for themselves, as ideas. (2) Students will also be encouraged to engage in elementary musical composition.
WEEK THREE, August 11-15:
This week will continue elements of the work of the first two weeks, but add a third: how to convey "profound conceptions respecting man and nature" to others. For several days, students will work with actors/instructors to understand Shakespeare, Keats and other authors by reading aloud, to advance literacy by becoming story-tellers. Speeches by Lincoln and King will also be reviewed.
(1) In 1601, Kepler proved that the planets were moved around the Sun by the Sun, by the newly discovered (by Kepler) principle of gravitation. In 1618, he made another exciting discovery. Kepler found the reason the planets move at their respective speeds (which nobody before him had known), and that the relationships among these orbital speeds correspond precisely to the notes of a major and minor musical scale! The planets of the Solar System, in a sense, form a polyphonic chorus, conducted by the Sun!
(2) Instead of a series of names and dates, or mere "music appreciation", musical method will be presented as one expression of the way art and science have combined to uplift and advance humanity over centuries. Classical music, and Classical culture will be discovered to be, not a "genre". It is rather the history of, and the future of, civilization's progress, documented through musical discoveries and inventions.
ABOUT YOUR CHORAL DIRECTOR:
RICHARD HYMAN recently retired after thirty-five years as a New York City Public School teacher. In 1991 and 1993, Mr. Hyman was placed on the Chancellor's Teachers Honor Roll for "creating outstanding music programs". From 1997-2013, Mr. Hyman directed the choral program at Francis Lewis High School. In 2007, he was chosen as the first "Queens Music Teacher of the Year". Mr. Hyman is co-founder and Music Director of the Northport Symphony Orchestra, and Music Director at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Huntington, Long Island. Mr. Hyman has reently completed the review of more than 600 studies conducted over the past several decades on the relationship between musical studies, human neurophysiology, and cognition.