Classic kids stories meet classical music in “Symphony Storytime”

The early months of the pandemic forced performing arts organizations like the Oregon Symphony to pivot, shifting performances online and developing new digital content such as “Symphony Storytime.” Launched in July 2020, the series premiered its third season last month. Each episode is 10 to 15 minutes long and features a narrator reading a classic children’s story such as “The Snowy Day,” accompanied by a musical score inspired by the story and performed by a symphony musician. Several episodes in each season are also narrated in Spanish. Joining us are two classical musicians who have performed and narrated episodes of “Symphony Storytime.” Jeff Garza is is Principal French Horn at the Oregon Symphony and an adjunct Instructor of Horn at Oregon State University. Sergio Carreno is Assistant Principal Timpani and Percussion at the Oregon Symphony.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: The pivot to video continues. In the early months of the pandemic, when performing arts organizations all around the country had to basically shut down completely, the Oregon Symphony launched Symphony Storytime. It was a series of 10 to 15 minute videos featuring readings of classic children’s stories along with music played by members of the orchestra. The videos are free and have found audiences all over the world.

Even as public life has restarted, Symphony Storytime is still going strong. The third season recently debuted. I’m joined now by two of the musicians who have taken part in these videos. Jeff Garza is the Principal French Horn in the Oregon Symphony, and an adjunct Instructor of Horn at Oregon State University. Sergio Carreno is a percussionist and Assistant Principal Timpani in the Symphony. Welcome to you both.

Sergio Carreno: Good morning.

Jeff Garza: Thanks for having us.

Miller: Sergio first; can you describe the set-up of these videos?

Sergio Carreno: Yes. We want to add elements and dynamics of creativity to children’s stories, this being kind of an offshoot of a live version we would do in public libraries all over the town. We brought them in and filmed them in a recording studio. We have the same basic parameters of a narrator, a reader, and a musician adding live music to these children’s stories.

Miller: Had you taken part in any of the in person versions of this? The pre-pandemic library versions?

Carreno: Yes, yes. Let’s see, I moved here, I think it was in 2012, and I pretty much immediately started. I believe that fall I did my first Symphony Storytime, and it was wonderful. You’re in a room full of children and parents, reading these wonderful stories and sharing some live music. The magic of being a musician, often, is seeing the eyes widen and the smiles across the face. That was just a very special aspect of being a part of this orchestra.

Miller: As a percussionist, did that mean that you were bringing a drum set into a library?

Carreno: Great question. Gosh, it could have been anything and everything. I actually go over it in a few of the Symphony Storytimes. I get asked that question: “how many instruments do you play as a percussionist?” It can be infinite, so I would get as creative as I could get. So, maybe not a drum set, but more of a set of drums you can think of, and add to that, maybe, a teacup, or a flower pot, or just everyday objects in my house. A mixing bowl from the kitchen. Something, anything, that can illustrate how in my world, in the world I live in as a percussionist, I see every object around me as a potential instrument. That’s really fun for me.

Miller: That seems like an especially good lesson for young people, that they can turn stuff in the world around them into music as well.

Carreno: Correct. That’s kind of the goal. You want to be able to expose more opportunities in the world to find beauty and find creativity, right? So that’s something that was very special, and I think percussion lends itself pretty well to that. Well, all instruments do. You find out how, and Jeff can talk to this, too, how to play a wind instrument. How to use your breath, and how to conceive of sound and all these things. So it’s really, really fun. Really fun.

Miller: Jeff Garza, why did you want to take part in this project?

Garza: Because I had seen some of the videos that have been produced in previous seasons and I just thought they were amazing. They were so well produced, so well conceived, and as a father of an 18 month old daughter, I thought ‘this is something that I could do, and show her, and share with her.’ I was really excited about that. She has not yet come to the concert hall, she’s seen a few outdoor performances, but I thought it’d be fun to have something that I could share with her and show her, so I was really excited when they asked me to participate.

Miller: So you have an 18 month old right now?

Garza: Yes.

Miller: It seems like a real blending of the personal and the professional, because I imagine that you are deep into reading picture books. It’s just in your everyday life.

Garza: Oh yes, every night at bedtime. That’s part of our wind down routine. She has her favorites now that she runs to get. It’s really a big part of our lives. Also, we have a few books that have some musical elements to them, so she’s definitely very tuned to music and, like Sergio, she sees everything as a percussion instrument. She’s banging on various things around the house. She’s definitely got some of her dad’s sort of musical inclination, so this is a really cool thing, to bring story time and music together in this way.

Miller: Let’s listen to part of the video that you did. This is from the latest season. It’s from the book All the World, which was written by Liz Garton Scanlon. The narrative we’re going to hear is Matthew Gailey, who is now the Organ Symphonies Director of Education and Community Engagement. Let’s have a listen.

Matthew Gailey: Hive. Bee wings hum. Husk, cob, corn, yum. Tomato blossom, fruit so red. All the world’s a garden bed. [french horn playing]

Miller: Jeff Garza, what is the music here?

Garza: Everything in that particular book, or that particular session, I pulled from a Mozart Horn Concerto, particularly the slow movement. I think I might have played a few experts from outside of the slow movement, but the book has kind of a melancholy or almost somber tone. I was trying to think of music that reflected that, and would go well with the flow of the narrative. It worked out well, I think, just to do a little snippets, and Matthew would read a page or two, and I would come in with a few seconds, and it developed nicely. You don’t know when you’re coming in how these things are going to work out, but luckily I think it really worked well. When they put it together, I was really happy with the result.

Miller: So it’s up to you, as a musician for these individual stories, to come up with the accompaniment? It could be anything you want?

Garza: In my case, it certainly was that. I don’t know, Sergio can speak to how it’s been done in the past, but basically they give us the books a few weeks ahead of time and it’s our job to think what would go well with it. I think some musicians like to improvise. Some musicians, maybe, have some different ways of approaching it. I had a conversation with Matthew, the reader, and we talked about whether or not we should be playing and talking at the same time. We quickly realized that probably is going to be kind of hard to focus on one or the other. We decided we’re going to just trade off and have the listener, the viewer, just be able to focus on one thing at a time and get in the flow of both the music and the story.

Miller: Sergio, you are a veteran of this project now. You’ve done eight different books. What are the different ways in which the music has fit together with the words, in the different ones you’ve worked on? Both as a reader, as a narrator, and as a percussionist.

Carreno: Part of the really special element of the Symphony Storytime online version that we’ve done is, for the first time, I was a narrator as well as a musician. When we did it live, I was always bringing in some instruments to play along with, but I was asked to come in and do some Spanish books.

At that time, just like Jeff mentioned, at the beginning of the pandemic, I had a one year old daughter. Interestingly, my music chops felt rusty because we weren’t playing every day anymore, but my reading chops felt on point. You know what, normally I don’t know if I would agree to publicly being a narrator, but in this case, I feel more in shape there than playing. So let’s do this.

To what Jeff was saying, there’s a process of coordination that happens between the musician and the narrator, the reader, and you find your groove, as it were. There is this element of, maybe the dynamic doesn’t work too well if the music and reading is going on at the same time, and then other times it works really, really well. Let’s see, out of the eight episodes I’m a part of, I believe I performed music in three of them, and then I narrated the rest. Either way, I was coordinating as a musician with the person that would be reading, and we’d find our way. Does it work where I’m playing underneath the reading the whole time, or do I come in and out? All those things. It is a process. There is a little bit of rehearsal involved, but at the end of the day, it’s super fun. It’s just so much fun to bring life to these books.

For me personally, as a percussionist, as a drummer, I love finding the groove of the words. Oftentimes these children’s books are so musically written; the words, the phrases, the sentences, the structure of the composition of the books are very musical and rhythmical. There’s cadence. There’s line, even, whether it’s asking questions, answering the questions, your voice can go up and down. There’s a lot of lyricism in these stories as written. It’s really fun, as a musician, to find the music in the words and it’s a really great process.

Miller: Well, let’s listen to an example of that, in one of the videos that you took part in as a percussionist. This is from the book Me Llamo Celia, A Bilingual Biography of Celia Cruz, written by Monica Brown, narrated by the amazing Portland singer, Edna Vazquez, who was on this show a millennium ago, maybe six years ago, seven years ago. Let’s have a listen to part of this video.

Edna Vazquez: ¡Nueva York! Mi nuevo hogar, con todas sus luces y su gente. Con una mezcla de tantas culturas y tradiciones. Desde mi ventana veía las luces y escuchaba la música; y yo era la luz, y la música. [conga drums playing]

Miller: What were you playing there?

Carreno: Oh wow. That was a really fun one for me. I was playing a series of hand drums. I think in that passage, specifically, you’re hearing the congas, a very famous instrument from the Salsa genre, the Afro-Caribbean genre of music that you hear in Latin music all the time. I’m originally from Miami, my family is South American. I’m Colombian, and I grew up in that space, in that music. It was cool for me, as a symphony musician, to get an opportunity to bring out a little bit of my cultural upbringing, musically, that goes beyond Mozart and Beethoven.

I remember being very animated about doing this particular book, because at the time I was also reading it to Bella, my daughter. I really wanted to bring a little life to it, in that sense. To bring in all my congas and djembe and hand drums, and be able to jam, play some salsa rhythm, some mambo, some wawanco, all these fun elements that I don’t necessarily bring to the symphony table every day. This was a fun way to highlight that a little bit. It was great, great fun.

Edna, as you said, is amazing. She was wonderful. She played guitar in a story that I read, and then we actually played a little duet together in one of the videos. She’s the best. We had great fun with those.

Miller: She should record more children’s stories as well, or just stories in general.

Carreno: Yes.

Miller: The way these stories work is, there’s a brief introduction, the story happens with music interspersed with it, and at the end, the musicians talk a little bit about music, and often about their instruments. I want to play an excerpt from one of the videos that Kenji Bunch, a violist and composer, took part in. Let’s have a listen.

Kenji Bunch: Do you remember what I play for the Oregon symphony? That’s right. I play the Ukulele! [ukulele playing] Wait a sec, I guess I don’t play this … Yes, of course, I play the kazoo! [kazoo playing] Oh no, I don’t play the kazoo in the symphony … Oh yeah, this thing. [brief note] No, I don’t use that thing. Oh yeah, this thing. [odd chiming] Um, maybe I don’t do that? I know! It’s this! [bouncy sound] Okay. Yes. Now I know what I do. I play the viola right? You remember Mortimer the Viola! [viola playing] He says “Hi everybody!” Mortimer, what do you want to tell everybody out here about our little room here? [viola playing] This is our music room. Yeah, this is where I write music, and I practice, and I mess around with other fun instruments just because music should be fun! It helps me to get my work done when I feel like I’m playing.

Miller: Jeff Garza, what did you want to tell young people about music in general, and the french horn in particular?

Garza: People are always fascinated by the way the horn looks. People think it’s kind of a mysterious looking instrument. It’s got so many different curves and weird shapes and just looks like it’s kind of like a bowl of spaghetti, all crumpled up. I tried to think about what was the age group that I would probably be talking to based on the books that I had. It seems more young-ish, but not too young, like maybe nine or ten years old, so I wanted to talk about how the mechanics of the instrument works; I thought that that might be a cool thing. Definitely Kenji has a great approach there, which is just to make the kids laugh, and draw them in, so I thought it would just be fun to show how you buzz the mouthpiece, how you put it on the horn, and then how using the valves to change the way that the air moves through the instrument to get different notes.

You have to think about who your audience is; if you’re talking to a room full of adults, you might explain it one way. For talking to tiny, tiny kids, you definitely are going to approach it a different way.

Miller: And Sergio, what about you? It seems like one of the explicit, or implicit, ideas behind this series is to get young people to care about classical music and these instruments. There are plenty of places where kids can see stories being read, videos of that, but having musicians play music and talk about them is a different dimension. What do you most hope kids will take away?

Carreno: That it goes beyond just exposing classical music, really. It’s just the idea of living in a world that’s full of possibility, of creativity, of art. Oftentimes, if you’re just exposed to that at an early age, who knows where that leads.

For example, if I have my own journey to use as a reference here. I’m a classical musician. I’m a professional classical musician. I went to a conservatory, I did all this, but my start with music was actually heavy metal, in terms of being really lured in. As I referenced even earlier, growing up dancing in my mom’s arms during late night holiday parties to Salsa, or Vicente Fernandez, or what have you. I grew up dancing and moving and hearing music, and that led me, personally, to be a classical musician. My hope, personally, is just the exposure of the idea that music is everywhere, and if you listen hard enough, whether it’s the songbird, whether it’s the traffic light, anything that creates rhythm, pattern, sound, sonic colors, can lead to opening up the world to be a richer place for you. It’s just a positive experience, to know that you live in a rich, rich world and you have a rich, rich life, and so that is, to me, the goal. Just opening up ears, opening up eyes, opening up hearts, and maybe we’ll get a few classical fans as well out of it, I’m sure, but it’s bigger than that. Art is everything, art is life, so expand all that.

Miller: Do you remember, both of you, when your daughters saw these videos for the first time?

Carreno: Yeah! My daughter Bella, I’ll never forget, she was so confused. [laughter] She looked up on the screen and I put it on, I was so eager to show her, and she just looked at it and her eyes just kind of opened. She looked at me, sitting next to her on the couch, and looked back at the screen. It was just like, jaw open, like ‘what are you doing up on that screen?’ She was super confused, super mesmerized, loved it. Fast forward a couple of years, I’m not the cool guy anymore, it’s just in the mix of her favorite clips to watch here and there with music, but that initial reaction was priceless. There was so much confusion, and then joy, of course, but I just remember that shocked face, like what are you doing up there.

Miller: Jeff, what about you?

Garza: It was really fun to show this to her, because her face lit up as soon as it came on. She heard the music, and the funny thing was I thought she would just be pointing and saying Dada, Dada, but she actually was really engrossed in the story and the sounds. I was like, ‘that’s your Dada!’, and she just kind of didn’t care. She was just really into the story.

Miller: Don’t interrupt the story!

Garza: Yes! I thought that was kind of unexpected, which is good. It means that the presentation was such that she was just completely engrossed, even though she probably didn’t quite understand the words. Just the visuals and the sound, the way it’s put together, was really exciting for her.

Miller: Sergio, what kind of feedback have you gotten from all of these videos?

Carreno: Oh, pure positivity. So much gratitude. People were so grateful to have content, especially during Covid, like early Covid where we were all just in our homes. You could tell it was very special to a lot of people. It was a moment of pride as a musician, as an artist, to even in times like the ones that we’re just emerging from, really, to be able to contribute and put out positivity into the world. To get that feedback was very special. It sounds like a lot of people are really enjoying these and they’re finding them useful, so I’m just proud to be a part of it.

Miller: Sergio and Jeff, thanks very much for joining us.

Carreno: Thank you.

Garza: Thank you.

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