‘The music has arrived!’: back to school in the Polígono sur

It’s 10 o’clock in the morning and I’m crouched on a mat patterned with zoo animals and dusty shoe-prints, surrounded by kids volleying Spanish at me. The only English in the room comes from the young girl sitting next to me, who is singing ‘Happy birthday to you’ on repeat (the only English she knows). I’m here at the invitation of Seville’s Fundación Barenboim-Said, whom I contacted in my quest to learn more about the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, founded and directed by one of the world’s most famous conductors, Maestro Daniel Barenboim, and his friend and ally, philosopher Edward Said.

Earlier this morning, Joseph Thapa, Coordinator of Music Education Projects for the Fundación, met me at my hotel and walked me to get coffee before we taxied to Asociación Entre Amigos for our 9.30 meeting. Joseph tells me that from my hotel to the other side of the railway tracks is really another world: the Polígono Sur, Seville’s most disadvantaged area, into which the gitanos (Romani) were pushed during gentrification of the city centre, and which is now also home to many migrant communities. 

Entre Amigos runs out of a small, bright office in the heart of Polígono Sur. At 9.30am there are already two women in the waiting area, here for any one of a number of services offered: family support, job support, health advice, education. The Director greets me in the way I learn pretty fast is standard for Seville - this is a two-kiss country, important to know - and even though I don’t speak Spanish, I feel welcome.
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Together, we walk across to the school. Even within this short distance, I can see both the area’s difficulties, evident in the piles of rubbish, broken glass in the gutters, and dilapidated apartments blocks, as well as the work locals are doing to raise their community’s reputation, reflected in the vibrant street art encouraging recycling, the trees in blossom from the dusty verges, the high school’s rainbow facade.

The school’s already buzzing with kids of all ages, just wrapping up their morning meeting about this year’s theme for summer camp - health. Music pumps from outdoor speakers and kids young and old dance off their morning energy before the high schoolers pile into buses for an excursion, and the little kids scatter into classrooms. Throughout all, teams of young volunteers and teachers in forest green T-shirts keep up both the energy and the control.

I meet Vicente López Romero, the music teacher provided by  the Fundación Barenboim-Said. He’s a tall, slightly frazzled-looking man who transforms into a bundle of mischievous energy when faced with a handful of small kids. His English is better than my Spanish but it’s clear I’ll mostly be learning by mime and absorption. 

I do have enough Spanish to understand that we’ll be covering three classes each day: three, four, and five-year-olds. This is way younger than I’ve ever worked with (I’m used to starting around eight). Each class has 6-8 kids and an Entre Amigos teacher, who works with them all day. The kids also get breakfast and lunch, and a dinner pack to take home to their families.

The first class is the four-year-olds. I’m fascinated by Vicente’s teaching method. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. He’s Dalcrose-trained, but despite his little green book of over eighty self-composed children’s songs, most of what he does in class is in direct response to something the kids say or do. The class rolls out like a theme and variations: a melody becomes a dance, then a game with percussion, into musical hide-and-seek, all centred on the kids learning to identify different musical patterns — rhythms, melodies, cadences, timbres. I pretend to be a kid and learn along with them.

I’m particularly impressed when Vicente revises a simple tune with the students, then sets out four chairs. I expect one kid per chair, but no! One child is selected to sit in the first chair, moving up one space each time Vicente plays the song’s next phrase. By the end of the exercise, Vicente can jumble up the order of phrases - one of which sounds very similar to the preceding phrase, being a descending sequence (same melody, starting a step lower) - and the kid is flying across the chairs, trying to get her bum on the right seat according to the musical patterns she is hearing. (Vicente is also the only person I’ve met who can play tin whistle with one hand and keyboard with the other, although Joseph later tells me the one-handed tin whistle is a Seville specialty.)

Vicente gives me a look as we swap classes to the three-year-olds. Language barriers notwithstanding, we understand each other well enough for me to wish him luck. The class is entirely little boys; some seem troubled. One in particular is clingy, quiet and prone to tears, which the Entre Amigos teacher handles with love. In fact, all these young women show great joy and care in their work, tying up shoe laces, wiping snotty noses, and assisting without pause in the structured mayhem. 

Vicente teaches the small boys with sensitivity. In one exercise, he brings each child up to the keyboard, playing with them one-by-one to establish a tempo and rhythm. Then we all play together, trying to copy Vicente’s rhythms and dynamics, marked by dramatic changes in his endless supply of facial expressions. 

Vicente and I walk away confident that at least one message got through - the kids had a perfect grasp of ‘forte’ (loud)! Yet the moment that remained with me was Vicente taking out a tiny sopranino recorder and piping a brief tune, just a few seconds long, creating a moment of total quiet and focus among the normally rambunctious kids.

The last class is the five-year-olds. We walk in to a poster declaring brightly, if a little unsteadily, ‘The music has arrived!’ Each child has contributed their name and a separate drawing, including one fetching study of Vicente entirely in green and red pencil.

This class is immediately more focussed, the kids following the rhythm and dynamics of Vicente’s keyboard playing, before he moves on to a more complicated version of the chair exercise. This time, four different percussion instruments represent each phrase. Each child has a turn tapping out the tune’s rhythm on the four instruments, changing instruments each phrase. When one child struggles to remember which instrument to hit next, Vicente instructs us to assist by hiding the instruments behind our backs until it is their turn to be played, immediately involving both ‘soloist’ and ‘audience’. And the tiny kid’s face lighting up as instruments pop out from behind our backs for her to whack is worth the plane fare from Australia.

Above all, the intense concentration and fascination a few of the kids show towards music deeply affects me. Even aged three, the rhythmic abilities and listening skills of some kids in each class show they are not just captivated, but capable. I don’t know anything about these kids, but I’ve worked across enough areas and countries to know that love of music and musical ability does not see class or situation - even if, in most circumstances, musical education depends on both those factors, often heavily. Where will all these capable, curious, but so very under-resourced kids end up?