The San Antonio Symphony holds dozens of free concerts yearly for upwards of 40,000 area students. This year with COVID-19, there was a hitch. The symphony's Jeremy Brimhall explained.
"We were really heartbroken when our last series of young people’s concerts for the season were canceled in the spring, and so we've been looking for all sorts of things to continue to interact with students, particularly through symphonic music, and all those who are schooling from home right now," he said.
They developed a young people’s art contest to link symphonic music to visual arts. The art contest was actually an outgrowth of one of the spring concerts.
"We centered the contest on Camille Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals,” Brimhall said. “It has 14 short movements, each representing a different animal or group of animals. Then they were asked to read a short piece about their chosen movement from our recent teacher guide, choose their materials, make their work of art, take a photo of it and submit it along with a parental admission form.”
You didn't have to be a San Antonian to enter.
"We decided to open it up worldwide and, interestingly, had entries from five different states and then also from Israel," he said.
Two hundred and forty-five entries were sent in and then judged, and now its winners have been revealed.
"We had a committee of members of our symphony league and then also our associate conductor, Noam Aviel. A three-member panel chose winners for each of the 14 music selections and then created some other categories,” he said. “So we ended up with about 75 winners in all."
As to the young people’s concerts from which the contest grew, they normally begin each autumn. This year, the concerts have been moved to January.
"And of course, those are still tentative. And we're going to be following all the guidelines from the CDC and all the state and local authorities as well," he said.
We will keep you posted.
Jack Morgan can be reached at Jack@TPR.org and on Twitter at @JackMorganii.
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