New Haven Independent

The Truman School’s dynamic music teacher, Margaret Ohara-Best, led her percussion ensemble Monday afternoon, filling the imposing lobby of the school with the ascending rhythms of Schiller’s Ode to Joy, set by Beethoven for the conclusion of his Ninth Symphony.

It was a hopeful as well as strategic way indeed to bring in parents on their way to teacher conferences, and an expression of Truman staff’s belief that music will increase performance across the whole academic curriculum.

It was also a celebration of a grant that Ohara-Best wrote and won: $4,000 from the Muzak Heart and Soul Foundation. That’s right, Muzak, the company that creates environments through music, also gives away money to reward innovative music education. There were 120 applicants last year to the South Carolina-based foundation. Truman School was the only winner in Connecticut.

The veteran music teacher used the funds to purchase much needed instruments for Truman

“I taught for 27 years at [Lincoln-] Bassett, and I had to leave my instruments there!” she said with the dramatic flair of a natural performer, and teacher. “Then when I was transferred here two years ago, I found I had so few. I’ve borrowed basses from Betsy Ross and elsewhere.”

With those purchased through the grant, she now has enough instruments to put together percussion ensembles that in just a few days of practice sounded, to a reporter’s ear, thrilling.

These were not ordinary instruments but Orff instruments. They were inspired by the teaching of the German composer Carl Orff, including glockenspiels being played by Michaella Gonzales (at right in photo) and Veronica Zimmer. Roto-tom tympani are tympani smaller and more appropriately sized for kids. Xylophones, both alto and soprano, and also metalaphones, are the same as xylophones but should not be called that, she explained to listening students, “because ‘xylo’ means wood in Greek.”

“Orff instruments,” said Ohara-Best, “are specifically designed to be child-sized; the bars come off them and I can teach, for example, just two notes to begin with, and so forth.”

Orff, named for the famed composer of Carmina Burana and other works, has also given his name to the American Orff-Schulwerk Association, which is part of an international network of music teachers; Ohara-Best is on the board of the Connecticut chapter, a genuine musical evangelizer for the Orff instruments and methods.

She, as well as Truman Principal Roy Araujo (pictured with the foundation’s representatives Debbie Girt and Andrew Scott), believe in music’s ability to enhance general academic performance.

“Kids who participate in the ensembles,” said Araujo, “feel much more committed to the school, to coming in and working hard. They have a much deeper sense of belonging. We have a hard time getting the kids to leave.”

Students at Truman, Araujo said, have about two hours of music per week. He and Ohara-Best are going to track how the kids who participate, in addition, in the ensembles fare on the CMTs [Connecticut Mastery Tests] compared to those who don’t.

One parent who is already is a committed believer in the power of music to improve academics is Fayina Bell. Her daughter, fifth-grader Christina (pictured at the top of the story with her teacher), learned to read using the driving rhythms of rhymed, musical words, ala hip hop. “Music is all over our house. Clashing of the pots in the kitchen. Things like that. I taught her math by adding up musical notes, wholes, halves, and so forth.”

The Bells not only have a good name for a musical family,. They also hope that Ohara-Best might be able to guide Christina, who is a talented drummer, to a music scholarship.

The general public can hear the Truman ensemble’s Ode to Joy along with a program of Christmas music next on Dec. 18, at 11:00 at the Yale Center for British Art.