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K Eids Is there something special you want to do by the time you’re a certain age? 2010 SUMMER BOOK CLUB She just can’t wait to grow up
“Finally,” by Wendy Mass Published by Scholastic Press 304 pages Recommended for age 9 and older
R
ory Swensen has a very impor- tant list: things she wants to do once she turns 12. And by the way, she has been waiting her whole life to turn 12, so there’s a lot riding on this particular birthday. After marking her first dozen years of life, for example, she will be able to get a cellphone, go to the mall without her parents, get her ears pierced and ride in the front seat in the car. The problem is (and you probably know this), things don’t always work out the way you planned, especially when you really get your expectations up. And that’s pretty much what hap- pens throughout this funny book, start- ing off with Rory getting stuck in a drainpipe. Over and over, it just seems like Rory can’t get one of her grand plans to work out the way she imagined it. But rather than being a sad tale of disappointment, it’s nice to read about a likable, realistic character who experi- ences the kinds of normal disappoint- ments we all do and still keeps her per- spective. Life isn’t a fairy tale, but that’s what makes it fun and interesting. And even if things don’t
go as
planned for Rory’s big year, things work out in a “big picture” kind of way, which is comforting. Sometimes it takes not getting something that you really want- ed to realize that you didn’t really want it after all. Right? — Margaret Webb Pressler
You might also like . . .
“Clementine,” by Sara Pennypacker. The clever third-grader who stars in this book will make you laugh on one page and want to cover your eyes on the next as she gets into all kinds of mischief. Age 7 and older. “Just Grace,” by Charise Mericle Harper. Grace Stewart is another third-grader with an outsize personality. She also has a sensitive streak, and the book has other fun, well-developed characters and cute illustrations. Age 7 and older.
KLMNO FRAZZ
WEDNESDAY, JULY 28, 2010 JEF MALLETT
TODAY:Mostly sunny
HIGH LOW 90 76
ILLUSTRATION BY MATTHEW GARLAND, 8, EDGEWATER
TODAY’S NEWS
LAUREN JONES
Praise Carson, left, and Tierra Holloway in Costa Rica.
Costa Rican trip teaches about science, culture
Join the club! Coming next week
“The Talent Show,” by Dan Gutman. One of the most reliably funny authors for children is back with a story of kids who try to raise money to rebuild their town after a tornado strikes. Age 7 and older.
There are only three weeks left, but it’s not too late to sign up for the KidsPost Summer Book Club. Have a parent or guardian e-mail your name, age, address and phone number to
kidspost@washpost.com. Please put “summer book club” in the subject field. You can also mail the information to KidsPost, The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071. We will send you a bookmark and publish your name in a special edition of KidsPost at the end of the summer. If your parents don’t want your name printed in the paper, they need to tell us that. The book club is open to children ages 6 to 13.
Twenty D.C. middle school stu- dents took the trip of a lifetime this month to Costa Rica, thanks to an educational travel program offered by Global Explorers, a nonprofit group, and the Travel Channel. The students from KIPP DC: AIM Academy, a public charter school for grades 5 to 8, spent the last semester of the school year studying Costa Rica. On the trip, the kids learned about the local culture, science and how to be a good global citizen. They met stu- dents in Costa Rica and learned about the Central American country’s rain forest, plants and animals. For all of them, it was the first trip out of the country; as part of the project, they’ll also do community service at home. “I have learned that others live
differently than we do in D.C.,” said Johnice Patterson, 13, about her trip. “We need to go places to see and experience how they live.”
Video games, more than a blip on orchestras’ landscape by Anne Midgette
Rob Garner really, really wants a set of timpani.
Garner doesn’t play the drums him-
self. He’s a graduate student at the Uni- versity of Maryland, getting a degree in library science, and his instrument is the trumpet. But Garner is also the president of the GSO, a student-founded, student- run 100-member orchestra that’s been performing several times a year since 2005. GSO, by the way, stands for Gamer Symphony Orchestra. This group is de- voted exclusively to the music of video games. And timpani could really come in handy when performing some of the themes from the popular game Halo. These days, a lot of people in the classi- cal music world are worried that kids aren’t connecting with orchestral music. But the music of video games is emerg- ing as one way orchestras may actually be reaching new audiences. It’s certainly proliferating. On Friday at Wolf Trap, the National Symphony Orchestra is pre- senting “Distant Worlds,” a concert de- voted to the music of the Final Fantasy video-game series, which marks its 20th anniversary this year (tickets are still available). On Aug. 7, WETA will broad- cast “Video Games Live,” another video- game concert that has come to a number of American orchestras (including the NSO) in recent years; the show will come to Strathmore in February.
Video games have evolved rapidly since the release of Pong, the simple ten- nis game with its hypnotic blips of sound, in 1972. Today, games feature cin- ematic animation and story lines, and scores are recorded in a studio with full orchestra. It’s a long way from “the drea- ry three electronic sounds” that Nobuo Uematsu, the composer of most of the Fi- nal Fantasy music, had at his disposal 20 years ago. “Nowadays,” he says through a translator in an e-mail exchange, “video game became just like a movie.” It’s a movie-size business, too. The Entertain- ment Software Association estimated 2008 sales at nearly $12 billion. Video-game concerts are becoming big business as well. The first ones were held in Japan, where many games were origi- nally produced; but in recent years, they’ve proliferated in the United States and Europe. “Distant Worlds” originated in 2007; “Play! A Video Game Sympho- ny” started touring in 2006; and “Video Games Live,” which aspires to be a kind of Cirque du Soleil of the field, started at the Hollywood Bowl in 2005. These concerts vary from straight or- chestral performances (“Distant
SCOTT SUCHMAN PLAYING FOR THE (GAME) PLAYERS:The NSO presented “Video Games Live” last summer at Wolf Trap.
Worlds”) to a more razzle-dazzle, Vegas- style entertainment experience (“Video Games Live”). They include vocal and in- strumental soloists, full choruses and, of course, video clips. They also include a symphony orches-
tra. It’s striking that video games, the ul- timate pop medium, continue to rely on orchestral sound. “It brings a touch of class to what we do,” says Tommy Tallar- ico, the creator of “Video Games Live.” These shows, therefore, are presented in tandem with local orchestras — some- times very good local orchestras. “Dis- tant Worlds” will have been performed with the San Francisco Symphony and the Houston Symphony by the time it gets to the NSO on the show’s current tour. For many in the audience, it may be
the first exposure to a live orchestral per- formance. Tallarico, who has Donny Os- mond-like clean-cut good looks and a re- lentlessly upbeat, on-message delivery to match, often mentions getting letters from parents whose children want to take up instruments after attending “Video Games Live.” Tallarico’s own introduction to classi- cal music followed a similar path. After growing up listening to rock music, in- cluding his cousin Steven Tyler of Aero- smith, he went to see “Star Wars” at age 10. “It was the first time I’d listened to or- chestral music,” Tallarico says. “It hit me: Wow, what is that? I started reading
about this guy named John Williams. He said Mozart and Beethoven were influ- ential. When I heard Beethoven, I was 11 years old, and it changed my whole life. My goal changed from wanting to be a rock star to wanting to be a composer.” He adds, “Here we are, 30 years later, and video games are having the same effect on a whole generation.” It’s a rosy vision. Classical crossover
has never been very successful at win- ning fans for straight orchestra concerts. One reason may be that in a lot of this music, composers use the orchestra to get a certain kind of sound. Though more and more classically trained composers are turning to video-game scoring, a lot of game composers, including Uematsu and Tallarico, are self-taught and — like commercial composers in every field — rely heavily on the services of orchestra- tors. Nonetheless, these concerts offer or-
chestras a shot at a new, excited audi- ence, aged about 17 to 35, ready to be pas- sionate about the music. The atmosphere at concerts is a hybrid of pop and classi- cal tradition, says Arnie Roth, the “Dis- tant Worlds” conductor. “When the piece is over there’s great cheering and ova- tions,” he says. “But the flip side is they’re such great, attentive and respectful lis- teners, which is unusual during pop con- certs, meaning you can hear a pin drop during the orchestral performances.”
Orchestras, clearly, have lost a lot of their fear about watering down their brands. In an era when summertime fare routinely includes everything from “Sing-a-Long Sound of Music” to live per- formances of film soundtracks, few or- chestras turn up their noses at an avid new public. Some have even participated in recordings: the Royal Stockholm Phil- harmonic has made a CD of “Distant Worlds.” “The whole reason we’re doing [this job] is to put out this live art,” says Paul DeNola, a bass player with the NSO. When the orchestra plays a symphony and the audience is “snoozing, that’s not as fun. With the video-game music,” he says, “the crowd is totally loving it.” There’s one significant difference be-
tween gamers and other crossover crowds. Video games are participatory. Aficionados of the games, who spend hours hearing the music as they play, are used to being able to affect what they’re hearing; a soundtrack may alter depend- ing on a player’s action. “Sometimes the player is like the conductor,” Tallarico says. “They’re controlling the perform- ance.”
So while many audiences are passive listeners, for gamers, it may be only natu- ral to start making the music themselves. In 2005, Michelle Eng, a student at the University of Maryland who was playing
viola in an orchestra of non-music-ma- jors, “had a kind of epiphany,” says Gar- ner, one of the GSO’s founding members. She thought, “Hey, I really like video games and I like video-game music; there should be an orchestra that does this.” At the end of one rehearsal, she stood up and asked if anybody else was interested in her idea; she got six players, and the GSO was born. Today, the GSO’s size is limited only by the number of chairs it can fit into what- ever rehearsal space it manages to find, and its instrumentation only by what- ever instruments its members actually own. The orchestra’s members include cellists, violinists and flutists from across the academic spectrum who have taken up instruments that some of them hadn’t touched since elementary school, to make the music they love. They’re con- necting with audiences, too. The GSO’s last couple of performances have filled the Clarice Smith Center’s 1,100-seat De- kelboum Hall. Like most video-game shows — even some professional ones — the group does all of its own arrangements. They aren’t alone. Students at Magruder High School in Montgomery County have also started a student-run gamer orchestra. And in Boston, the Video Games Orchestra was created in 2008 by students and alumni of the Berklee College of Music and other Boston-area conservatories and colleges. The VGO is a semiprofessional group;
it’s issuing its first CD this summer. Maryland’s GSO has no such aspirations. “Frankly, we’re amateurs,” Garner says. “You won’t come to a GSO concert and not hear a problem. But all the people who are playing this music are very passionate about it. You get to feed off the energy.” In speaking about the GSO, Garner talks a lot about community, and about teaching people to love music through the music of video games. It takes a mo- ment to realize that he isn’t talking about audiences. He’s talking about the mem- bers of the orchestra. The GSO even has its own social director, who arranges ac- tivities and outings for the group. Mem- bers of the GSO attended “Video Games Live” when the NSO presented it a couple of years ago.
But the GSO won’t be attending “Dis-
tant Worlds.” The NSO may be reaching out to young audiences with these con- certs, but it hasn’t yet gotten hip enough to find out where else that young audi- ence may want to go. July 30 happens to be the first night of the Otakon conven- tion in Baltimore, a celebration of Asian popular culture that draws gamers from around the country. So while Final Fan- tasy fans descend on Wolf Trap, many GSO members, a little wistfully, will be in Baltimore, instead.
midgettea@washpost.com
9-D ark
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