If it can vibrate, it can make music.
Just one of the many lessons imparted to 225 students who visited the Music House Museum last week over three days of the 8th Annual School Days event. Six classrooms of students from four schools listened to museum staff and volunteers explore, explain and expand their knowledge of sound.
Local musician and educator Tom Kaufmann, Raven Hill Discovery Center founder Cheri Leach and Music House Museum curator Andy Struble led the students on their journey of discovery.
"Harmonies are part of nature,” said Kaufmann, starting with the basics. "What's really cool about harmonies is those notes played together make a major chord.”
"Sounds we like are called music but sounds you don't like are called noise,” he added. "And the neat thing is you get to decide what you like.”
The event mixed lecture with demonstration and leaving plenty of room for hands on time, which kept a class of fifth grade students from the Cherry Elementary School in Kalkaska captivated Thursday all morning. Dividing into three groups, they rotated among stations that taught the science of sound, how instruments make sound and the workings of the museum's theater organ and dance hall organ.
"I liked the one upstairs, the huge organ,” said Seth Cunningham, thoroughly impressed by the barn-shaking 1922 Mortier Dance Organ that Struble played for students. After
playing a small violin, Jolean Clay thought about all she had seen and done that morning, concluding that it was "fun here.”
"I learned about that big organ,” she said, also delighted with the Mortier, before adding: "I liked the violin, I'm going to learn to play.”
Teacher Diane Wildfong brings her students to School Days every year because they not only enjoy it but absorb and reinforce lessons while there. She and her students had already been learning about sound and conducting experiments but the venture to the museum deepened their learning.
"I love this place,” she said. "They always try to match up with educational standards as well and their guides have been so knowledgeable.”
This is the first year that the Music House Museum offered School Days in the fall, moving it from the usual spring dates to better leverage scarce field trip funds. However, an overlap between their schedule and the Traverse City Area Public School parent-teacher conference dates cut anticipated attendance so they plan to reconsider which season is best.
"Generally, over two weeks in the spring, we have usually between 450-500 students,” noted Struble.
New offerings this year included sessions by Leach, who brought many hands on items that let kids investigate the science of sound. In addition, the museum's theater organ took center stage during one session as Struble talked about the history of both the instrument and its place in early silent movies.
"Organs were basically giant expensive synthesizers,” noted Struble of the instrument's amazing variety of sounds.
Using the museum's overhead projection system, he showed a snippet of a Laurel and Hardy movie, playing along to demonstrate how the organ's sounds highlighted the action on the screen. Struble told students how organs replaced first a piano and later a full string orchestra, which was used in giant movie palaces like one in New York City that could hold 6,300 people.
"For about 25 years, between 80-90 million Americans went to a movie each week and about half in a theater with an organ,” Struble said.
For more information on the Music House Museum, call 938-9300 or see their web site at www.musichouse.org.