The American Symphony Orchestra in partnership with East Meadow High School aims to revive symphonic music as a culturally relevant experience by integrating masterworks from ASO’s thematically-programmed concerts into the humanities curriculum, thereby increasing exposure to symphonic music among high school students in a way that is exciting and relevant to their lives.

Music Notes provides teachers with professional development workshops where ASO education staff and teaching artists work directly with teachers to develop an arts-integrated approach to curriculum planning. The workshops cover methods of initiating classroom discussion and activities on various topics through the portal of symphonic works of a certain time period––i.e. how composers’ lives were affected by world events, and how those events are reflected in their artistic output. In this way, teachers incorporate ASO’s concert themes (e.g. “The Gathering Storm” surrounding Britain’s involvement in WWII) into their lesson plans as a way of enhancing the study of humanities topics already slated for coverage in the classroom.

This partnership, now in its second year, reaches over 400 students in 16 classrooms through the arts-integrated curriculum at East Meadow High School. Students in related elective courses as well as multimedia arts and music classes also take part, bringing the total number of students reached school-wide to over 600.

Major program components include:

• professional development workshops on arts-integrated learning;
• curriculum units based around the Orchestra’s series of thematic concerts at Lincoln Center;
• in-school musicians’ visits where an ASO assistant conductor and orchestra members present lively yet informal lectures, chamber music performances, and Q&A sessions with students all in support of the curriculum units;
• complimentary tickets for students to attend ASO’s thematic concert series at Lincoln Center, as well as pre-concert talks and events held in conjunction with the Orchestra’s cultural partners.