MFS Music & Arts
“At a time when some schools are reducing contact hours with art and music, we have been expanding our offerings here in El Cerrito. The brain likes art and music, the body likes art and music and we know for whole child education, children need multiple avenues through which to express themselves.”
- Alissa Stolz, Head of School
The Buddy Bench
In memory of his kindness and deep friendships, MFS dedicated a Buddy Bench for the play yard at the El Cerrito Campus. The Buddy Bench is a place where a student in need of a buddy can sit and a fellow student, seeing that need, can respond by joining them on the bench to act as a buddy. We truly feel that this embodies Neel's spirit and we regularly see an extension of his care and love of others live on at our school.
- Alissa Stolz, Head of School
The Music Program
Both winter and spring semesters at MFS culminate in an all-school performance, where students share the music they have explored throughout the year. It’s an exciting time for our musicians as much of what appears on stage comes directly from them, choreographed, arranged, and sometimes composed by students. The music and arts fund has allowed MFS to upgrade our child-friendly sound and lighting systems, giving students even more agency in the production of the show through sound and light design.
Beauty and aesthetics are at the heart of the music program at MFS. Through chant, song, movement, and instrumental work children discover the thrill of creation, improvisation, composition, and interpretation. Students support each other at their most vulnerable in a space where ideas and risk-taking are qualities held in the highest regard.
Besides the body itself, barred instruments live at the heart of an Orff-Shulwerk music program. These beautiful, professional quality instruments, with removable keys, are a child’s introduction to melodic instrumental music. Because the instruments have a reliable and sonorous tone, requiring minimal technique other than a gentle stroke, they offer an immediate musical response, and are a delight to play. Although developing a subtle technique on string and wind instruments is an important part of musical development, Orff instruments allow even our youngest students the immediate pleasure of a musical experience, opening ears and hearts to the act of creation.
Neel was a student, always hungry for more music. His interest in rock, blues, and jazz inspired the musical choices of his peers and influenced the music his class would present at concert time. Through the Music & Arts fund, MFS has doubled the music time for all students, and through the purchase of chromatic barred instruments, our musicians can pursue any music that energizes them, in any genre, with tools that inspire.
A 12-week residency with teachers from the Ali Akbar College of Music, is an opportunity for our middle school musicians to delve into the world of North Indian classical music. Ali Akbar’s son Manik Khan and tabla virtuoso Jim Owen will work with our students weekly to gain a deeper understanding of the rhythmic and melodic framework at the heart of hindustani music, culminating in a performance at the 2020 fundraiser at Freight & Salvage!
- Micah McClain, MFS Music Teacher
The Drama Program
Self-expression is an intrinsic human desire. Like music, the theater program at MFS is trans-disciplinary across time as well as themes. The Foon Fund supports the expressive arts and provides a stipend for an artist in residence or for a theater teacher as well as support for materials needed to make sets and props. Rich with heart, the work is student driven and the teacher works as a guide for the students as they explore and create. Some of the works the theater program has presented: The Bacchae, Eurydice, Romeo and Juliet.
- Alissa Stolz, Head of School
Placing this theater program in the crosshairs of middle school is purposeful. In her writings about secondary education, Dr. Maria Montessori proposes that for adolescents, the internally transformative juncture of “new identity” necessitates a holiday from the traditional classroom environment and calls for self-expression as teens mature and reorient to their new selves. The arts are not only critical to this developmental plane but also incredibly useful to it.
Developing empathy through story is at the core of the visual and performing arts program I run within a pre-K-8 Montessori school. By middle school, the program becomes an intensive workshop in ensemble-based theater, culminating in an adaptation of a full-length play that students author, devise, design, and build. Within the heart of the project is the simple question that serves as a touchstone for their artistic inquiry: What matters?
Not only do students master the art of moving together onstage, they are tasked with every artistic decision. Creating a play lends itself seamlessly to this goal; in devising a piece of performance, the only way forward is to work as a team; problem-solve with courtesy; and make strategic, inspired choices on the spot as a group. On the road to crafting a play, the ensemble encounters practical skills that prepare them to move through life with resourcefulness, bravery, humility, and integrity.
In an attempt to answer, students are asked to respond to social issues through visual and physical storytelling. They have set the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in a mystical underground subway at the border of life and death, adapted Romeo and Juliet as a choral love story in a high school divided by class, retold The Bacchae as a 7-piece chorus, and presented Much Ado About Nothing with a set entirely made from their old homework.
- Rebecca Deutsch, Drama Teacher
