Hmmm, interesting. There was one piece called "The Evil Genie" and another intriguingly named "Pancakes on Mars." There was "World Peace, Food and Presents," a nod, evidently, to the holiday season, and the postmodern-sounding "Floured Child."
Amid silence, the first performer, Jenna Lipscomb, daughter of William, took her place confidently at the Steinway grand piano, and with great composure rendered a rhythmic version of "Wild Horse Dancing." The audience burst into applause.
After all, it's not every 11-year-old who writes her own music, albeit with major assistance from her teacher, Ben Schwendener of Jamaica Plain.
But then Schwendener, 37, is no ordinary piano teacher. A jazz composer and member of the jazz-rock group Falling Objects, he offers students what he calls a "customized education" in piano. You won't find any standardized beginning-level piano method books in Schwendener's third-floor home studio, with their pictures of cute frogs hopping over notes, or clowns juggling clef signs. You won't see any smiley-face stickers proclaiming "Wow!" or "Good job!" on students' music after they've tackled a new piece.
Instead, Schwendener's piano students (four adults, 14 children, ages 7-15) all receive a blank composition book. The rest is up to them - and their teacher. During the first lesson, he talks to them about their musical interests and abilities, figures out their strengths (strong rhythmic sense? melodic inclination?), and he helps them write their own pieces, based on themes they plunk out on the piano.
"Basically, I'm the artistic director" as well as piano teacher, Schwendener says. "I have yet to buy stickers for my students; they can stick anything they want to on their music, because everything they do is a work in progress."
Yes, his students learn how to read music and the rudiments of theory, and are gradually introduced to the musical masters. But they don't start their musical training the traditional way, through scales or finger exercises. "I don't go down that road," says Schwendener.
Instead, aiming to broaden their musical experience, he goes the improvisational route, indicating even to the youngest students that their musical instincts are worthwhile and relevant, and that they don't have to be a Bach or Bartok to compose a meaningful musical theme. He might throw a scale into the lesson now and then, but it's a scale on which to improvise.
"I want to demystify the compositional process and encourage improvisation and ear training," said the upbeat, boyish-looking Schwendener in an interview after the recital, which featured 11 enthusiastic students playing an assortment of tunes from blues to a tango, a Celtic dance, a new arrangement of a Burt Bacharach tune, and variations on a song by John Lennon.
"Ultimately," he says, "it's the organic process of creating new music that appeals to me. I love the way all students are all different, and every student has different ideas about how the themes develop."
He maintains that every child has an innate creative ability that can be expressed musically (though piano may not be the perfect outlet for them at the time, he allows), and that profound ideas can be conveyed in the simplest terms, even by a little person. Witness the creation of "Flower Fox," a happy little folk ditty he wrote last year with his daughter, Elodi, then 3. It is based on three notes - E, F, and C - that Elodi picked out on the piano. She might not have been aware of it, but her dad harmonized her notes, using the inner modal harmonies of the F Lydian scale.
"That's `Flower Fox'!" she said to him excitedly, spontaneously naming it.
On the day of the piano recital in Jamaica Plain, everyone seemed excited.
"Ben has a way of bringing out the best in people," says Jenna's father, himself a classical clarinetist. "He tries to find out what students are interested in and reaches them that way, through the composition."
"We made up pieces together; they're really cool," Jenna beamed.
Hovik Papazian, 14, of Belmont, was all smiles after his performance of three pieces, which included a variation of the song "Money" by John Lennon, and an impressionistic homage to Erik Satie called "Eiffel Down." Schwendener has been working with Papazian since he was 5. Now, says Schwendener, Papazian is "a self- motivated, creative pianist."
"Sometimes, I hear something on the radio and tell [Ben] about it, and he changes it around," says Papazian, describing how they work together. "But he prefers creating things, like jazz. We've tried something traditional, like Bach, and I was able to play it, but it's different. You can't mix it around, and if you make a mistake you can't cover it up, really. I might have missed out on some stuff, like technical things, but I've also gained. With Ben, you can be free with the music."
Piano students, however, represent only a fraction of Schwendener's work. He records albums with Falling Objects and teaches composition and piano at the Longy School of Music and New England Conservatory of Music (from which he graduated in 1986 with a degree in jazz composition). He teaches a graduate course in creative and critical thinking at UMass-Boston.
He also started a pilot program, though his nonprofit organization called Gravity Arts, to provide customized education to an unlikely population: corporate employees. The idea is to assist employees who play or have played an instrument - at any musical level - in forming an ensemble, by custom-composing music for them.
"There are corporate softball teams, why not a corporate ensemble?" Schwendener reasons. "How many people are there in corporations who have played a musical instrument and love it but don't have some sort of venue in which to express it?" he says. "This teaches diversity. It teaches creative problem-solving. It provides employees with a response to their creative needs."
It's a surprise to learn that such an innovative musical thinker was trained in a fairly conventional way - method books, stickers and all. "None of my early piano teachers was comfortable with improvisation," says Schwendener, who grew up in Okemos, Mich.
He joined a jazz band in high school and was increasingly drawn to jazz, rock music, and improvising. He moved to Boston in 1982 to study at the New England Conservatory with the imminent jazz musician and musical theorist Russell, and was heavily influenced by the composer's Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, the first modal theory of music coming out of the innovative jazz tradition. Based on the Lydian scale and a ladder of intervals of fifths, it made possible a new approach to improvising.
Russell himself made an appearance at the recent children's recital, dazzling the audience with his story of how he came to write "Cubano-Be, Cubano-Bop" for Dizzy Gillespie in New York, a piece that was performed at Carnegie Hall. "What I heard here today was amazing. Thank you," he told the children. "You're all fine young people, and bright lights like you will pass your knowledge along to everybody. That's the way it seems to go."
