CNY Grants for Arts in Education - art$TART

Nottingham High School and NYS Baroque

We perceived a need for students to become more knowledgeable about history and how the past is relevant to the present. We therefore sought to help students appreciate what life was like in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through music and related arts, thereby fostering new enthusiasm for the literature, music, art, politics, and events of the time.

In each of the three sessions with the core group the students were stimulated to think about what life was like in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in a different way.

Theater specialist Andrew Walkling invited students to try out stock gestures used by actors.

A period fencing specialist talked about the social mores of self defense while NYS Baroque performed military music.

Students were invited to have a go.

Period costume specialist Lauren Cowdery introduced students to the street dress of the times, and how the way you dressed showed you how to comport yourself, for which NYS Baroque played minuets and other appropriate music for social interaction.

Nottingham High School sent a bus load of some of the students and teachers to NYS Baroque’s final concert of the seasion in May. The featured work was J. S. Bach’s Coffee Cantata, a mini-opera that presents a prime example of eighteenth-century teenage rebellion and how a parent might be imagined to have dealt with it.

Student Comments:
 “I like the music. What I found interesting was all the clothing that the women had to wear underneath their dresses.”

 “I like learning about Shakespeare’s time, & what was different in the theater from now. The music was cool, & I especially like the music from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, because we’re reading it in English.”