By Wynne Delacoma
For most of us, the word “Ravinia” conjures up images of a specific time and place.
The time, summer; the place, Highland Park, 36 acres of lush lawns and towering trees with an open-air pavilion offering concerts ranging from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to King Crimson and The Zappa Band.
But for decades, the Ravinia Festival’s reach has extended far beyond summertime and its north suburban campus. Every year Ravinia sends hundreds of musicians into Chicago Public Schools as well as classrooms in Highland Park, Waukegan, and North Chicago. What began in 1965 with the Women’s Board’s program of making lawn passes available to low-income music lovers has grown into Reach Teach Play, a year-round operation that reaches 75,000 children annually through a dozen distinct programs.
“…it helped the kids understand the power of music—how music can heal, how music can help you relate, how it can help you express and get some things off your chest”
While both Ravinia’s concert ticket sales and the annual support of its donors help underwrite those music education and engagement programs, each of the festival’s three boards hold signature fundraising events to further contribute to their operation. For over a half-century, the gala hosted by the Women’s Board has been a visible fête at a CSO concert each summer; this year, the young professionals of the Associates Board bring their Music Matters benefit to the festival’s grounds for just the second time. Normally a springtime event, the live fundraiser takes place on September 18 before the performance by Ben Folds with the Ravinia Festival Orchestra, where all attendees will be adding their support to Ravinia and Reach Teach Play.
After an exceptionally challenging year and a half with classrooms convened remotely, the teachers and teaching artists involved with Reach Teach Play are an especial focus of the event. The teaching artists—musicians engaged by Ravinia to work in partner schools—take on a variety of roles. Some of them focus on gifted students, becoming mentors and leading master classes in jazz or classical music. Others belong to chamber ensembles that bring a unique performance to many schools. But some of the musicians devote their time to one Chicago elementary school. Working over a three-year period in a school that otherwise has no music program, these artists spend an hour every week in each kindergarten through third-grade classroom. This, for example, is the essence of Reach Teach Play’s Music Discovery Program: the teaching artists open the children’s ears and eyes to a world of music they might otherwise never encounter.
The effect is transformative, according to Heather Smith-Vanduan, a teacher at Washington Irving Elementary School in the Tri-Taylor neighborhood on Chicago’s near southwest side. Ravinia has partnered with the school since 2009. Smith-Vanduan, now Irving’s resident music teacher, first encountered Ravinia’s visiting artists while working at Irving as a teacher’s assistant and then as a third-grade teacher.
“We had some wonderful artists from Ravinia,” she said. “All of them were fantastic. But this one artist, Matt Lewis, he was really like a rock star when he walked in the door. The kids would scream,” she added with a laugh. “He would walk in playing his guitar, and we would get started right away. It was like the sun walked in. The kids would just light up. The energy in the room was palpable.”
Smith-Vanduan first connected with the school, which her children attended, in 1999 as a parent volunteer. She and her husband are longtime Tri-Taylor residents, and she’s noticed that many local parents send their children to private schools rather than Irving, their neighborhood public school.
“So, a lot of our kids at Irving don’t necessarily live in the neighborhood,” she said. “We get students from all over the city, some from typically low-income areas. We get a really different kind of blend; they come from all over. It’s kind of like a best-kept secret on the West Side of Chicago.”
Lewis, she said, immediately picked up on Irving’s distinctive vibe.
“He understood the assignment right away,” she said. “He understood the climate, the culture of the school.
“We would have about an hour,” said Smith-Vanduan, describing Lewis’s weekly visits. “He’d start out with a ‘hello’ song, then some kind of movement. The kids would just be jumping and dancing; they would follow his every move. I mean, every move. They would get into some of the deeper concepts of music [like rhythm and harmony] even without the kids really knowing how deep this stuff was. They were just enjoying and loving it. We would sing Stevie Wonder, Louis Armstrong, [Peter Ilyich] Tchaikovsky. They were being filled with joy.”
As so often happens with arts programs, the music classes helped some students blossom.
“You would see kids who weren’t necessarily vocal,” said Smith-Vanduan, “these kids would come alive. They would be singing and talking and dancing—kids who really didn’t think they were doing well in certain areas.
“Music is powerful,” she continued. “Music teaches so many things. It teaches cooperation, problem solving, fine motor skills. You have kids who might not have been able to show leadership in other ways—the kid who is shy but is maybe a vocalist. When other kids discover that, that kid becomes a rock star, right?
“It teaches them so many [long-lasting skills]—self-discipline, stress management. Music is something that should be at the baseline for education. I watch kids who don’t connect with any other area, kids who have trouble. Some of the toughest kids in my school come and play the marimba and the xylophone, and they rock it. That’s where they come to get themselves together.”
The Music Discovery Program typically sends artists into schools for 15 weekly visits the first year, 10 visits the second year, and five the third, said Madelyn Tan-Cohen, associate director of the Reach Teach Play programs. The aim is to help the school’s primary grade teachers learn how to integrate music into their regular classroom lessons. That idea launched Smith-Vanduan on an entirely new career path.
Born and raised in Dallas, she comes from a family of singers. She attended a magnet high school of performing and visual arts and won a music scholarship to Clark Atlanta University in Georgia. But she didn’t pursue music as a career. Not until she moved to Chicago with her husband in 1997 and started volunteering at Irving did she think about becoming a classroom teacher. Encountering Ravinia’s Reach Teach Play programs at Irving prompted her to take a deeper plunge and become a certified music teacher.
“I learned so much from Matt Lewis,” she said. “It kind of ignited the spark, about music and the power of music. I studied his classes.”
Knowing Smith-Vanduan’s music background, successive principals at Irving asked her to become the school’s music teacher. She had enough academic credits to meet CPS certification requirements, and the Reach Teach Play staff also encouraged her. But the prospect was “scary,” she said, and she repeatedly declined. But one day in 2019, a group of her former third-graders, now in seventh and eighth grades, staged a kind of intervention.
“I have a couch in my room,” she said, “they all [piled onto] my couch, and they’re sitting on the floor. They said, ‘Why can’t you teach us anymore? The last time we had fun in school was in your class. We don’t have fun in school anymore.’ ” An hour later Irving’s newest principal asked her to become the school’s music teacher. This time, she agreed.
Given the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown and subsequent shift to teaching via Zoom, last year was daunting even for veteran teachers. Amid the worldwide protests following George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, Smith-Vanduan once again found support from Ravinia.
“Before COVID, we were two weeks away from having our very first musical—Aladdin,” she said. “My kids were severely disappointed. It was heartbreaking. And after George Floyd, oh my God. I was feeling very lost. My students were feeling really, really, really lost. I was looking for a way to connect to them about what was going on. We were going through different protest songs, things that musical artists had done to express what they had felt during tumultuous times. I called Madelyn. I asked Matt to sit in on one of my classes. We were crying. My kids were crying. It was cathartic, and it helped the kids understand the power of music—how music can heal, how music can help you relate, how it can help you express and get some things off your chest.
“It was a pinnacle moment with me and the Reach Teach Play program,” she said. “It showed me why music needs to be present in kids’ lives.” ■
Wynne Delacoma was classical music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1991 to 2006 and has been an adjunct journalism faculty member at Northwestern University. She is a freelance music critic, writer, and lecturer.