Symphony orchestras throughout the United States have education programs that reach out to children to encourage music literacy and appreciation. Traditionally, these programs have offered special performances for children, informal lectures, holiday concerts, instrument “petting zoos,” and other live events.

The Web has enabled orchestras to extend their education missions beyond the local level and to adopt interactive media to teach basic musical concepts to children and adults. Many symphony orchestras now offer Web sites rich with instructional materials and activities, and a few of them stand out for their quality and originality.

FIG. 1: The San Francisco Symphony Kids’ Web site, a product of the symphony’s education department, is easy to navigate and offers a wealth of instruction.

SAN FRANCISCO SYMPHONY KIDS
www.sfskids.org
Design firm 415, Inc. and composer Ed Bogas created SFSKids.org for the San Francisco Symphony's education department (see Fig. 1). This site won the Web Marketing Association's 2002 Best of Industry WebAward and does a great job of providing schools and families with quality music-education resources that are free of charge and always available. The site speaks the language of children and playfully teaches the fundamentals of music.

As I write this, I'm listening to the SFS Kids' Radio, a boom-box-style virtual radio with six preset buttons and a dial. I can choose channels and listen to dozens of excerpts from the best of classical-music literature, and I can read short descriptions of the works. The Instruments of the Orchestra page introduces the instrument families through text, animation, sound, and photos of real instruments. The Music Lab provides highly interactive music composition and learning experiences about basic note reading, tempo, rhythm, pitch, harmony, symbols, and instrumentation. Students can play tunes by typing numbers in the Performalator. The Composerizer lets students drag seven one-bar music clips into any sequence to create original compositions.

It's all great fun, and children will learn by doing. I highly recommend that you check out this site.

FIG. 2: At the Dallas Symphony Orchestra Kids Web site, students can learn to build instruments, learn about composers and musical periods, select audio clips from a Listening Library, and learn useful practice tips.

DALLAS SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA KIDS
www.dsokids.com
The DSO Kids site (see Fig. 2) is also great fun and quite comprehensive, offering resources for students and teachers alike. The students' section of the site presents a virtual music classroom that houses an Instrument Encyclopedia, Orchestra Seating Charts for major historical periods, a radio that plays selections by great composers from a virtual Listening Library, games, and a number of text files that have tips for practicing, instructions on how to build instruments, and more fun and educational activities.

Of the ten available games (which include Beethoven's Baseball, Composer's Keyboard, and more), I especially like the Time Machine, which spits out composers and asks students to help the composers find their way back to their eras using a provided timeline. The Music Match is a fun memory game that will appeal to many kids.

The teachers' section of the DSO Kids site is set in a virtual Teacher's Lounge. It includes a Resources section that is filled with links to resources that teachers can use in the classroom. Included are links that lead to books, audio CDs, videos, sources of classroom materials, and other educational Web sites. It also includes suggestions for activities, historical information about musical instruments and composers, blank sheet music, and more.

FIG. 3: The New York Philharmonic Kidzone invites students to explore elements of music starting from within a virtual orchestra hall.

NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC KIDZONE
www.nyphilkids.org
The New York Philharmonic Kidzone (see Fig. 3) uses an animated orchestra hall as a launching pad for exploring the elements of music. The hall leads to a Game Room, Musicians' Lounge, Composers Gallery, Composition Workshop, Instrument Storage Room, Instrument Laboratory, Dressing Rooms, and a Newsstand.

The Instrument Storage Room depicts a young boy walking through a locker room full of orchestral instruments. In the Dressing Rooms section, a young girl knocks on doors to meet the Philharmonic's conductors and soloists. The Newsstand presents music-history lessons in the form of newspaper articles. The Composers Gallery takes children through a museum that is filled with portraits of famous composers. Some of the activities on the Composition Workshop page are not particularly useful because they link to a now-outdated site called Creating Music that doesn't work well with today's browsers.

Of the two original activities on the Composition Workshop page, the fun Minuet Mixer allows students to compose an original minuet using 1-measure segments from existing Mozart minuets. The Game Room offers an Orchestration Station where kids can choose instruments to play a three-part arrangement of “The Old Castle” from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. They can then compare their orchestration to Ravel's. Very nice.

MORE ONLINE
Many symphony orchestras offer online educational resources for students and teachers. For additional links and resources, see www.stevenestrella.com/mused/websitings.html. Also, please contact me with your suggestions. If you know a great site for music education, please write to me at steve@stevenestrella.com.

Steven Estrella owns StevenEstrella.com and Shearspire, Inc., creating interactive media for business and education. Dr. Estrella served for ten years on the music-education faculty at Temple University and is on the National Board of Advisors and Board of Directors for the Technology Institute for Music Educators.