American Recorder Society

Kelowna Recorder Orchestra's Tale Winds Ensemble Shares Music with Kids

TALEWINDS IN KELOWNA ENDS ANOTHER SEASON
 
The end of winter means the completion of another season for our TaleWinds ensemble performing at local schools.  Over the past eight  years, Bruce Sankey and Carol Postle have written and composed four original musical stories aimed at the Grade 3-5 student population.  Our goal is to entertain, educate and motivate young people using recorder music.  We target schools having an active music program, mostly involving recorder playing.

Typically, over the winter period we visit about ten schools; audiences can range from 30 to 500 at one performance.  The format we use is to first give an introduction and demonstration of recorders (we use S, A, T, B and contra-bass), followed by the musical story comprising 14 segments, each having a short narrative and short piece of music descriptive of the story line.  This all takes about a half-hour.

In addition to the story and music we have generated slides for each segment from Bruce’s water-colour paintings, which are projected via PowerPoint onto a screen.  This has proven to be a big asset in holding children’s attention.

A recent innovation, at a teacher’s request, was to hold a short workshop where we discussed musical terms, coached recorder technique in small groups, then played with them a harmonized arrangement of a simple tune they had previously practiced.

With our repertoire of four stories, a potential audience of twenty schools and an always advancing student population, Carol can set up a new combination of story and students each year.  Our players really enjoy the experience; most have been with the group continuously from the beginning, and feel that the kids’ excitement is an excellent antidote to the winter blues!