The Rite of Spring Project

“I was so scared,” says Katherine, an 11th grader at the Coalition School for Social Change in Manhattan. “But once the lights turned on and everyone started singing, I wanted to stay up there and keep on performing.”

The event that both terrified and galvanized Katherine was Songs: Ritual Rhythms, part of The Rite of Spring Project, the grand finale of Carnegie Hall's Berlin in Lights festival at the United Palace Theater in Washington Heights. The Project brought over 100 public school children from Upper Manhattan together with choreographer Royston Maldoom, the Berliner Philharmoniker, one of the best orchestras in the world, and their Music Director, Sir Simon Rattle.

Katherine may have been nervous, in part, because she was performing a world premiere: Songs: Ritual Rhythms was collectively composed by the students themselves in collaboration with Berliner Philharmoniker members and educators, drawing on musical material from Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Songs: Ritual Rhythms was meant to give students the opportunity to “perform their own music, experience their own creativity in exchange with others, and to be encouraged to find their own voices” as Berliner Philharmoniker Education Director Kathy Milliken explains. The result was a combination of gospel, hip-hop, soul, and—yes—Stravinsky.

Where did the students find their inspiration? Partly, as you might expect, from their own lives. “We never really have opened up like that in school,” says Katherine, “talking about stuff that we actually like. It was interesting to see what everyone else had to say, talking about our personal problems like racism and sexism, also what we go through, like love and heartbreak.”

The students sung, spoke, and tapped these emotions, in one instance rapping themes of innocence accompanied by drums and body-percussive dancing. “It was everything a creative process is and should be,” says Neva Smalls, one of the project’s coordinators at the Coalition School. “All the students took ownership of becoming performers and creators.”

And they learned to hear Stravinsky, too. The composer’s famous score formed the second half of the evening, in a performance that included disciplined dancing by the students, accompanied by the Berliner Philharmoniker and Rattle. What they once heard as loud and crazy music, Katherine says, now carried a deeper meaning for the involved students: “It just came to life.”