Wenatchee Valley Youth Symphony helps music students strike a new chord

There is a particular sound that lives inside an orchestra rehearsal before the music begins.

Not the music itself, but the unsettled architecture of it. Bows brush strings in fragments. Brass players warm up with uncertain notes. A pencil taps against a music stand. Teenagers carrying instrument cases larger than their torsos filter into the room.

On Wednesday evenings at Eastmont Junior High School, that sound gathers again in the Wenatchee Valley Youth Symphony Orchestra.

It had disappeared for a while.

Like many performing arts programs, the valley's youth orchestra shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic. Programs stalled, students drifted away from ensemble playing and wind musicians rehearsed inside improvised plastic pods.

"We all had pictures of what music was going to look like moving forward," said Michelle Vaughn, director of the Wenatchee Valley Youth Symphony Orchestra and concertmaster of the Wenatchee Symphony Orchestra. "And then COVID hit and scrambled all of it."

A violinist by training, Vaughn studied violin performance, pedagogy and music education at Central Washington University. While there, she discovered she enjoyed teaching young musicians as much as performing.

"I thought, ‘Oh, I'm for sure going to teach high school,' because that's what everyone says," Vaughn said. "Then I sat in on a beginning strings class of third-, fourth- and fifth-graders, and I totally loved it."

After moving to Wenatchee with her husband and starting a family, Vaughn taught beginning strings in local schools while performing with the symphony. When the Icicle Creek Youth Symphony did not return after the pandemic shutdowns, students began asking questions.

"Where's the youth orchestra?" they asked. "We want to join."

Eventually, Vaughn and fellow educator Mika Armaly stopped waiting for someone else to rebuild it.

"We just jumped in and wanted to make it happen," Vaughn said.

The orchestra started modestly as a strings-only program operating largely on registration fees. Vaughn and Armaly handled rehearsals and administration during the first year while hoping enough students enrolled to cover expenses.

Four years later, the youth symphony serves about 100 students throughout the school year, with roughly 60 musicians participating in each concert cycle. Students range from late elementary school through high school and come from across the valley.

The orchestra operates in 12-week sessions that conclude with a Saturday performance. Students can participate around sports schedules and other activities, then return the next session without penalty.

The music itself is carefully chosen.

One piece develops technique. Another introduces students to the classical canon - the repertoire they may encounter again years later as musicians. Then there is the fun piece, the one that lets students hear themselves inside music they recognize.

"The teaching is happening all the time," Vaughn said. "We'll say, ‘OK, we just got done doing pirates with this heavy bow that you need for pirates. But now let's change it and use this bow for the classical song we're playing.' It's all very intentional."

She remembers learning Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro" as a ninth grader in youth orchestra. Decades later, during a Wenatchee Symphony rehearsal, the overture suddenly appeared on her stand only days before a concert.

"I played it through with minimal mistakes," Vaughn said. "Because my body remembered it way back when."

As students settle in for rehearsal, violist Salvador Garcia Zavala adjusts his instrument and talks quietly about why he joined the program. Last year, the sophomore at Eastmont High School says he lost motivation to play.

"After the first semester, I kind of lost my motivation to play viola," Garcia Zavala said. "Then after a few months, I decided I wanted to pick it back up."

He joined the youth symphony this year because he wanted to become "a better musician."

He joined the youth symphony this year because he wanted to become "a better musician."

What he found was more than practice time. Students from different schools rehearse together, building friendships that continue at regional festivals and honor ensembles.

"I like having all the different people from different towns," Garcia Zavala said. "You get to know different musicians and network with them. It's nice recognizing them when you go to festivals and stuff."

His favorite recent piece was "March of the Trolls," which he described as having "kind of a mysterious vibe." He said he was especially looking forward to performing "Folk Tune and Fiddler's Fury" during the orchestra's concert.

"It's cool," he said. "It's got some little fiddling parts and some double stops. I don't get that as a violist most of the time."

The orchestra's reconstruction has something distinctly regional, the way it has been pieced together through school classrooms, borrowed rehearsal spaces, nonprofit support and community sponsorships.

The program now operates under the umbrella of the Wenatchee Symphony Orchestra and receives support from local sponsors. Scholarships are available to help keep participation affordable.

"There's no barriers to get people involved if you're creative," Vaughn said. "If your kid is in love with an instrument, let's get them playing and figure it out. There's always somebody with an extra instrument in a closet or someone that wants to drive them over or a scholarship waiting."

Perhaps the most meaningful shift, Vaughn said, has been seeing families with no prior connection to classical music become invested in it.

"We've spent so many years working in the public schools trying to decrease the mystery of classical music," she said. "There's so much etiquette with orchestra, as with any specialized art field. We're trying to get those barriers down."

Parents now tell her their children are considering careers in music. Adults tell her they once wanted to learn violin themselves. Some are beginning now.

"It all makes me very happy," Vaughn said.

The Wenatchee Valley Youth Symphony concluded its third session of the school year with a concert Saturday. The orchestra will resume rehearsals at the start of the next school year, when, on rehearsal nights, the sounds continue assembling themselves inside the building; scales, laughter, tuning notes, fragments of movie scores and Mozart suspended together in the same air, until eventually the room settles, bows rise in unison and the music begins again.

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