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Carver music program gets boost with gift of 100 strings

NEWPORT NEWS — Carver Elementary School's bucket band chorus was a resounding hit Thursday.

With only two months of rehearsals, the first-graders upstaged the professional musicians from the Virginia Symphony at the school's first Soundscapes winter concert.

But for the students, the big treat of the afternoon was the surprise delivery of 100 small violins and cellos donated to the program by Music and Arts, a Maryland-based music company. The budding musicians will begin working with the new instruments, worth more than $58,000, in the spring.

Next year, they will begin lessons in earnest, said program founder Reynaldo "Rey" Ramirez.

"We have big goals. We want to get musical instruments into all of these hands," he said.

Ramirez, former director of education for the Virginia and Baltimore symphony orchestras, founded the program and based it on those created by the Baltimore orchestra and Venezuela's El Sistema youth orchestral training program. Both used music instruction to help build character, citizenship and critical thinking skills.

"Before anything, this is a social change program. Music is the hook," Ramirez said.

The skills students learn in music are the same ones they need to be productive citizens and make decisions later in life: discipline, cooperation, analysis, communication and responsibility.