PORT ANGELES — What’s beautiful, said 10-year-old Storey Schmidt, is when you hear yourself playing music, and it sounds even better than, say, a month ago.
“I hope we’ll be able to do it more in person,” added Schmidt, who began playing the violin as a Hamilton Elementary fourth-grader.
When she first chose her instrument, internationally known cellist Traci Winters Tyson was her teacher. An alumna of the Port Angeles School District’s strings program, Tyson has performed with ensembles from Seattle to Spain.
With her Port Angeles School District colleagues Teresa Bjornes, Amber Mattfield and Nathan Rodahl — who teach music to elementary, middle and high school students — Tyson is looking forward to a major event Saturday evening.
At 5 p.m. at the Port Angeles High School auditorium, 20 graduating seniors, all orchestra members, will perform a short program of classical music. For the finale, the seniors will join an ensemble of fourth-graders to play Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”
The younger students will then present each of their older counterparts with a red rose.
This concert is a safer alternative to the All-City String Review traditionally held toward the end of the school year, Rodahl said.
“The majority of the seniors have offered to me that they have been vaccinated [against COVID-19],” he said, but to maintain utmost safety, only two adults per student will be permitted to attend Saturday’s concert.
“If you’ve got a younger sibling, that doesn’t count with your two adults,” Rodahl said, adding he wants single parents to be able to bring their younger kids.
The event, not open to the public, will be live-streamed on Instagram via @PAHSorchestra.
For younger players such as Schmidt, who’s now in fifth grade, making music is a sweet part of life. She could have chosen the viola or the cello, but she likes the sound of the violin and revels in the interaction with Bjornes, now her teacher.
“Last year, before COVID shut down the schools, we did play together,” Schmidt said.
Now the teacher posts assignments, she learns them, sends in a video, attends a Google Meets session and receives feedback from Bjornes.
When asked what she’s up to this summer, Schmidt added: “My teacher’s going to send a packet [of music] to learn.”
In just her second year of playing, she mused: “I would say this music experience has brought out a lot more creativity.”
Educators, meanwhile, still worry that some see music as nonessential and the first place to cut. That’s in contrast with the effort teachers have poured into it this year, Tyson said.
Their work and care, she said, is “off the charts.”
“Music is like the crown jewel of the school district,” said Rodahl, who arrived at Port Angeles High in September 2019.
The successor to Ron Jones, who retired after 42 years that included several trips to New York City — where the high school orchestra played at Carnegie Hall — Rodahl now has 153 students.
There are his eighth-graders, the high school Chamber Orchestra and the Symphonic Orchestra, known as the “big blue beast” for their royal-blue performance outfits.
This year’s trip to Carnegie Hall was canceled, but Rodahl has new hope for the day when he and his students will set out for that storied venue.
He’s just put a new parents’ board together. He’s seeking ways to trim lodging costs and estimating a June 2022 trip, “or, if we’re really lucky, April ’22.”
Rodahl added that, while his students are glad to be back in school this spring, “they’re very cautious to be promised anything.”
Yet, “I am optimistic a trip will happen next year,” he said.
“It’s important that every student who wants to go gets to go.”
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Jefferson County senior reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3509 or durbanidelapaz@peninsuladailynews.com.
