There is something that cannot always be predicted before a school concert: how the public will respond. And when that audience is about 200 preschool, primary and secondary students, the uncertainty is even greater. Last Friday, Fundación Música que Humaniza arrived at the Nourish College with the Krosch Corps Quartet and Fernando Guajardo's artistic mediation, and what he found was something worth documenting: a room full of genuine attention.
The agenda The quartet and the secret of music He led the students through works by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Vivaldi, Pachelbel and Strauss. But more than a tour of the classic repertoire, the concert was a conversation. Fernando Guajardo presented composers not as figures of another time, but as people with stories, peculiarities and music that still lives centuries later. The students knew the parts of the string instruments, the names of those who invented or perfected them, and the contexts behind the pieces they heard.
Singing together has something that words hardly explain. When Fernando invited the students to join the quartet with Martinillo's melody, the hall was transformed: one voice began, then another one pursued it, and suddenly two hundred voices were weaving without knowing one of the oldest musical forms in history. The canon ceased to be a concept of the textbook to become something the students had done with their own voice. Applause, laughter and more than a couple of feet that couldn't stand still completed the moment.
What came at the end, however, was perhaps the most revealing. At the end of the program, Fernando asked the public questions about what they had heard: composers, instruments, works. The answers came with a security and precision that surprised even those who know these concerts well. The students remembered names, data and anecdotes. And among all the answers, there was one that no one expected: several students correctly remembered the name of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik — in German, as it sounds, as they had heard that morning.
It's hard to ask more than that for a school concert. It is not about children becoming experts, but about something left: an image, a name, a melody that they will one day recognize in another context and that will make them feel, for a moment, that classical music also belongs to them. At Nourish College, that thing was left in many.
