Orchestra
The Drew Charter School Junior and Senior Academy Orchestra is in its third year of development.
During the past 2 years the program has grown from 18 to 77 string musicians. The Director is Mrs. Natalie Colbert. The orchestra has already in its young existence earned Straight Superior Ratings for 3 years at the Georgia Music Educators Association (GMEA) Large Group Performance Evaluation. There are orchestra classes offered in grades 6-10. Students can learn to play the violin, viola, cello and doublebass. Joining the school orchestra has many benefits for our students. The most important being that students are playing instruments that were perfected in the 1600’s without the benefit of electricity,
internet and other technology commonly used today. We have not found a way to make a better stringed instrument. What this means is that the string musician is following a long line of intellectuals and very creative minds that made these fabulous instruments by hand from the wood of the earth.
This is the type of class that fits very neatly into a STEAM curriculum. The technology and engineering used hundreds of years ago, the mathematical equations that were used, and the scientific formulas that were created lead the student to have many Driving Questions.
It was during the Baroque period, considered the first "classical" music period of Western Europe and the modern world and dating its start to 1660 that the violin really began to soar. Antionio Vivaldi, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Georg Philipp Telemann were the three greatest Baroque period violin music composers. The luthier artistry of Antonio Stradivari, Giuseppe Guarneri, and Jacob Stainer began creating magnificent-sounding violins during this period and on into the subsequent Classical period. It was during the Romantic period of the 19th century with the emergence of performers like Niccolo Paganini that the now-famous violin virtuoso emerged, with the works of Classical composers like Mozart and Beethoven having paved the way for
them to rise.
Today, of course, the ability to play stringed instrument well is considered a mark of good breeding or a sophisticated education.
