Walnut Creek High School Musicians Get to Learn How the Pros Do It

Black hoodies. Check. Skinny black jeans. Check. Black metal band t-shirts. Cellos, violas, contrabass and violins? Check.

“Don’t forget your bow!” One black-clad musician calls to the others.

Looking much like teen musicians of the rock and roll variety, these 15 Las Lomas High School students are in fact accomplished classical musicians. And on this particular day, last Friday, Feb. 11, they are hefting their stringed musical instruments – some almost as tall as they are - and toting them clear across campus from the music room over to the high school’s performing arts theater.

This day is no ordinary day for the Las Lomas Symphonic String Ensemble. Today the world-renowned Alexander String Quartet is coming to this very theater in this Walnut Creek public high school to spend the afternoon tutoring the teen musicians  on the nuances of this precise and demanding type of music.

This day will culminate in an evening performance with the Alexander String Quartet onstage live at Las Lomas. The performance is a benefit for the Las Lomas Performing Arts Foundation. The students will play with the professional musicians for the first and last pieces in the concert--pieces they are about to rehearse with the prestigious musicians who are based at San Francisco State University's Morrison Center for the Advanced Study of Chamber Music.

Despite the unflappable cool of their goth metal band attire, the student musicians are excited about their upcoming interaction with the Alexander String Quartet.

“This is very cool,” said student cellist Aryan Pakkhoo, who wore a t-shirt promoting the band Rotten Season.  “Of course, we’re all a little nervous.  The pieces we will be playing with them are hard pieces.”

That would be the Prelude and Fugue in C Major, Opus 87 by Shostakovich and Caprice from An English Suite by Sir Hubert Parry.

You might think Shostakovich does not have much in common with Rotten Season. But the students see a clear connection.

“A lot of metal music has a very clear classical influence,” explained contrabass player Nathan Jaureque. “I’ve always played guitar and now I like classical music, too.”

Soon the students are seated on the stage platform. The Alexander String Quartet members, four middle-aged men who seem like they could very well have kids the same ages as these kids, sit dispersed among the students.

“Why do we make a shift between B and C here?”  rhetorically asks the Alexander String Quartet’s cellist and founding member Sandy Walsh-Wilson. With his accomplished air, clipped English accent and sophisticated salt-and-pepper beard, he has the kids’ rapt attention. “So the intervals are as sharp as we can possibly make them.”

Beaming from the podium as he conducts the group is Las Lomas Music Director John Schroder.  He’s the one who orchestrated the event.  Literally. A cellist himself, his father Donn Schroder played viola with the Oakland Symphony for many years and has composed works performed by the Alexander String Quartet.

“As a cellist, I occasionally play music socially with members of the Alexander String Quartet,” Schroder said. “When I told Sandy Walsh-Wilson, cellist and founding member of the group, that I was building a string program at Las Lomas High School, he volunteered to bring the Quartet to work with my students and perform with them as a benefit for the Las Lomas Performing Arts Foundation.”

A few short hours later, the black hoodies, t-shirts and jeans have been replaced by black tuxes. The students are seated and ready with their musician mentors for what Schroder announces as the second strings-only concert at Las Lomas in 30 years.  Then he takes his seat with his own cello as part of the musicians.

Alexander String Quartet cellist Wilson tells the audience, “We have had a really wonderful afternoon working with these terrific young people.  And I mean work. We misunderstand the verb here. When we talk about playing music it really is work.”

Wilson explained how learning to listen and collaborate are important life skills that kids get from playing music.  “And at the end of the day, you get to accomplish something that is greater than the sum of its parts.”