the future of music

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat (from left) Panelists Dan Buckley, a music critic, Robin Horn, a studio musician, and LeeAnn Savage, a local performer speak at the Grammies in the Schools in the Music Building yesterday morning.

with more than half of the seats at Centennial Hall filled with high school students from across southern Arizona yesterday, the University of Arizona Electronic Percussion Ensemble played a variety of electronic instruments which sounded like how the music of the future might have been imagined at a 1950s theme park.

While the Percussion Ensemble represented an eclectic niche in the immense music industry, their performance segued nicely into one of the major themes of the 1999 Grammy in the Schools.

"This program is designed to acquaint you with the wide variety of professions in the music industry," explained Dr. Robert Cutietta, "both in front of and behind the scenes."

Cutietta is both the associate director of the University of Arizona School of Music and Dance and the site director for this year's Grammy in the Schools.

"Grammy in the Schools travels to 15 cities. Tucson is the smallest city, but the largest program," said Cutietta. "About half of the students are from Tucson and half are from Phoenix."

Students from Ajo, Thatcher, Casa Grande, Rio Rico and Nogales were also in attendance, having been recruited from high school classes related to music performance, including band, orchestra and chorus.

Grammy in the Schools is sponsored by NARAS, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, a non-profit program known best for awarding the Grammy awards to big musicians. It represents an outreach to the smaller musicians hoping to make it big one day.

Yesterday morning was structured into "Super Panels" and workshops and the afternoon presented an opportunity to observe dress rehearsals of Pete Escovedo, Luis Torres and the Tucson Latin Jazz orchestra.

Super Panels were structured like a talk show, with five panelists from a variety of areas of the music industry who fielded questions from the high school audience.

Panelists included Dan Buckley, music critic for the Tucson Citizen and Stereophile Magazine, LeeAnn Savage, a local pop musician, Ed Friedland and Ed Ulman, both freelance musicians in Tucson, and Troy Olson, a musician and songwriter who just landed his first record deal.

"Being a professional [musician] is being able to do a great job, even if it's not your favorite thing to do," explained Friedland to the attentive crowd. "I consider myself a craftsman."

"The telltale sign of a musician is someone like this guy here," said Olson, pointing towards a teenager in the front row with headphones positioned suspiciously close to his ears. "He never goes anywhere without his tunes."

Olson's comment illuminated the striking number of students bearing Walkmans or the like. Two young women were symbiotically linked by a pair of headphones, one phone in one of each of their ears.

Generally, the importance of goal setting, perseverance and education were stressed by the panelists.

The subsequent workshops went on to address aspects of the music industry more specifically, from the perspective of both locally and nationally renowned figures in the music industry.

The audience had mixed reactions to Grammy in the Schools.

Andrew Record, an eighth grade student at Pusch Ridge middle school, felt that the panel discussion "was interesting" and contained "a lot of good information."

"I might want to be a classical pianist," said Record. "These workshops might show me what I need to do to get into the business."

For Zinnia Bueno, a sophomore at Camelback Middle School in Phoenix, Grammy in the Schools presented a great opportunity "to get out of school."

"I think [Grammy in the Schools] wakes an awareness" said Ed Moore, a teacher at Palo Verde High School who brought a select vocal ensemble of twenty kids. "It raises questions kids didn't even know existed. A lot of kids know they want to be musicians, but they don't know where to get their start."