HSU Insider

Summer Music Festival Brings Talent, Tea Bags, and Strawberry Smoothies

• By Janlyn Echols Thaxton
• Posted June 25, 2009 5:38 PM
• 0 Comments

After every tough workout Andria Whitley goes back to her dorm room at Ferguson Hall and soaks her fingers in tea. She looks down at her hands and then thrusts wiggling fingers, palms first, forward so you can see the blisters and calluses better.

Andria is part of a growing number of students who make it a regular part of their summer to attend a June camp that includes about eight hours of practice every day for almost a week.

Sound like misery? It's not for Andria and about 150 others students who want to be better at what they may do for the rest of their lives.

Andria is a harpist who has been coming to the Abilene Summer Music Festival at Hardin-Simmons University since she was in the sixth grade.

Whitley has now graduated from Poteet High School in Mesquite and plans to major in harp and business in college this fall. Andria is already a professional musician, and she says she makes pretty good money for herself. Counting events on her fingers, "I play harp for churches, musicals, weddings, receptions, a whole lot of things," she says. In fact, that's one of the reasons she keeps coming to the orchestral camp. "We play really professional music here--music like it is in the real world."

There is no kidding around about that. Director Jason Lim succinctly taps his baton on a metal stand in front of him. "You need to feel this music," he says forcefully. "Right now I am not hearing that. Let's try it again."

Lim says he doesn't mean to sound scary. "I just want the students to be in the moment. They learn when they are alert and focused," he says in a friendly voice. "Students learn by being involved; my job is to involve them."

Hardin-Simmons assistant professors of music, Dr. Peter Isaacson and Dr. Peter Neubert, run the Summer Music Festival camp. When asked how students from so many different schools are able to jell into an orchestra in just a few days, Isaacson says, "It really is very intense. There's always a breaking-in period. We do that by putting them into sectionals--smaller components according to their instruments," he explains. "Then, we start putting the sections together so students can hear how the parts of music work with each other."

In the Cowboy Band Hall, the high school-aged students have gathered to form one of three orchestras. Lim has them play a little of the piece and then stops to work with a flute and some string-plucking violins. "I don't think you are feeling this part!" he says as he instructs them to play it over again and again.

"Now let's take it from the top." Lim raises his baton bringing on a quick snapping sound as mouthpieces fly to lips and violins to chins. Andria raises her blistered hands, placing them on both sides of the strings. A collective breath is heard on the upbeat of the baton, and then...

The sound is like, well, it is a lot like how a creamy strawberry smoothie tastes in the shade of a tree at a picnic. (Seriously, great orchestral music is difficult to describe, okay. Noise is easier.)

Isaacson says of the camp, "We pull three full orchestras together in just six days. It's a very intense experience for them. When the students are in school, they have maybe two months to work on a program. This really is a taste of what it's like to be a real musician in the profession. You have to learn it quickly."

As for Andria's fingers, she says the tannic acid in the tea helps with swelling and makes her fingertips dryer. "My harp teacher here at camp told me about that trick the first year I was here."

The orchestras will perform on three occasions this week. Tonight, June 25, at 7:00, you will have a chance to hear the students at Art Walk in the Elks Art Center in downtown Abilene. Tomorrow night, you can hear a Chamber Music Concert in the Woodward-Dellis Recital Hall on the HSU campus. That is also at 7 p.m. Then on Saturday, the camp will wrap up in a Grand Finale Concert at 3 p.m. in Behrens Auditorium at HSU. Of course, all concerts are free.

If that is not a creamy strawberry smoothie, then what is?