There's something particular about an afternoon concert. The Monterrey sun still hits hard when the evening shift of the José María Morelos Primary School begins its day, and yet on Wednesday, about ninety students received the Music Foundation that Humanizes with a attention and energy that the heat could not opacate.
The program guided the students by the works of Mozart, Beethoven, Pachelbel, Vivaldi, Brahms and Strauss, but the music was just the starting point. Fernando Guajardo was building a new vocabulary with the group: the parts of the string instruments, the names of the composers, the musical forms that structure what we hear without always knowing. The students paid attention with a concentration that, those who know these concerts know, is not always guaranteed.
What was guaranteed was the movement. The quartet is not a set that is heard sitting and silent — at least not in the hands of Fernando Guajardo. On the occasion of four notes from the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven, the students discovered the body percussion: their own body as an instrument. With Martinillo, they sang in canon next to the quartet, chasing each other in one of the oldest musical forms in history. And with the Polka Tritsch- Tratsch of Strauss, they danced — Because with that piece it's hard not to.
But the moment no one in the school yard expected came with Mozart. While Fernando presented Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and led the group to the translation of the title, a student raised her hand and said it in Spanish before anyone else could try: "A little music at night." Right, precise, without hesitation. At all the concerts of this program, it had never happened. A small detail, perhaps, but it says all about what can happen when classical music is presented as something worth understanding.
That's, deep down, what you're looking for. The Quartet and the Secret of Music: that the secret will no longer be. May Mozart, Beethoven and Vivaldi be names with history and not just with fame. On Wednesday afternoon, at José María Morelos, a student showed that they had done so.
