Math is from Mars, music is from Venus.That’s the popular wisdom. Math is crisp, dry discipline best reserved for professionals with pocket protectors. Music seems the antithesis of those facts and figures – an escape into a world of adagios and allegros and occasional kick-butt guitar solos. Music is Beethoven and Bono. Math is balanced checkbooks and the Big Bang Theory. Music is Mac. Math is PC.Don’t you believe it. In truth, music without math would be just so much caterwauling – an undisciplined stew of sounds. Music is math made solid. Math is music unheard.The Colorado Springs Philharmonic wants to illustrate that during this season’s Young People’s Concert, the group’s major outreach program, at the Pikes Peak Center for the Performing Arts. The concert – made up of four performances today and Nov. 6 – shows elementary-age students just how tightly knit math and music truly are to one another.The Philharmonic is expecting between 6,000 and 7,000 kids to attend the four installments of this year’s Young People’s Concert, according to program coordinator Roslyn Block. Most will be in fourth, fifth or sixth grade, though some are younger.Many are home-schooled. While the concert will, as always, give children a good classical music primer, this year’s edition was designed to give teachers a cross-purpose field trip – one that not only offers children a taste of classical music, but also one that is geared toward today’s back-to-basics, test-driven classrooms.”We’re trying to tie better into the curriculum,” Thomas Wilson, associate conductor for the Colorado Springs Philharmonic, said.To do that, members of the philharmonic will illustrate mathematical principals using their instruments. Violinists will pull their bows across strings to show that the same series of notes pops up again and again. Brass musicians, from trumpet players to tuba players, will demonstrate how size affects an instrument’s sound. Percussionists will show how different drums are pitched.Each family of instruments will take the stage by themselves at first, so children can better see where the music’s coming from, before uniting as a full orchestra. Wilson will teach the audience how to direct simple two-beat and three-beat pieces, and he’ll encourage the kids to direct along. “The first day in any beginning band program, you’re confronted with numbers and counting,” Wilson said.It’s no accident, he says, that a sheet of music looks remarkably similar to an algebra graph, or that those archaic punched computer cards could’ve seemingly been perforated by a music box spool.Educating kids for the concert actually began well before the musicians take the stage.More than 60 percent of the 54 schools attending also received, or will receive, a visit from a Philharmonic docent. Though Wilson trained the docents himself, the docents were given the freedom to tailor their talks to their own skills and comfort levels.”They take the ideas and decide best how to use them,” Wilson said.Gloria Slayton, a 17-year docent who is coordinating the docent program this year, says the docents mainly tell children “what the concert is going to be about, and what the students are going to be listening for.” They also discuss the four “families” of classical music and give a brief overview of concert etiquette.In years past, Slayton’s often given a bit of biographical information of the composers to be featured. But with seven on this year’s docket, ranging from Vivaldi to Strauss to Sousa, docents don’t have much time to delve into the composers’ personal lives.While few of these children likely have Dvorak on their iPods, classical music isn’t nearly as unfamiliar to them as you might think, Slayton and Wilson say. Kids have heard classical music in cartoons, commercials and movies from the time they were born.Wilson hopes that the concert will move this music out of the background and onto center stage.”Kids are much more open to these things than people give them credit for,” Wilson said.”We just need to tie it in for them.”

YOUNG PEOPLE’S CONCERT

When: 9:30 a.m. and 11 a.m. today and Nov. 6.Where: Pikes Peak Center, 190 S. Cascade Ave.Tickets: $3.75 for each person attending, including students, teachers, chaperones and guests.Reservations: Go to www.csphilharmonic.org/education/ypc.html and download a reservation form, or call 884-2110.

Photo by