Twelve years ago Sir Charles Tupper secondary didn’t even have a music program. Now one Grade 12 student has won scholarships to study jazz at the University of Toronto and another has been accepted into the opera program at UBC.
Noah Franche-Nolan started studying music at age five, but the jazz pianist who’s won $6,000 from the U of T’s school of music, another $2,000 from the U of T and $4,000 to buy Yamaha instruments says Tupper has allowed him to pursue his dreams.
"Tupper is this very free and kind school that lets you do what you want if you show initiative and hard work," Franche-Nolan said.
He studies jazz and classical piano privately but says Tupper’s guitar teacher, Tanya Baron, has taught him music composition since Grade 10, whetting his appetite to learn more.
Grade 12 student Chloe Mackay, who started solo singing lessons when she was a child, joined Tupper’s concert choir in Grade 9 and the chamber choir in Grade 10.
“I loved the fact that I was in a group of people that just wanted to sing and just come together and I made so many great friends,” Mackay said. “Music is a really great thing because it really does bring people together.”
Rewind a dozen years and Mackay wouldn’t have had that opportunity.
Baron, who came to Tupper in 2004, isn’t sure why the music died that year. She believes it had something to do with provincial Liberal government cuts to education and staff turnover.
Music teacher Mike Cavaletto says former principal Jennifer Palmer thought a high school without a music program was “ridiculous.” She hired Baron, who built a guitar program and established a concert band.
When Cavaletto covered Baron’s first maternity leave in 2008, he started a choir club. It was so popular it became choir class the following year. Now Tupper resounds with three concert bands, a jazz band, two choirs and three blocks of guitar classes.
“It really was nothing to something,” Cavaletto said.
Tupper music students weren’t going to be able to play at their school’s graduation ceremony at the Chan Centre in 2012, due to job action by teachers. So parents banded together to make sure the show went on.
Cavaletto says it was one of the “kicks in the butt” that galvanized parents to back the music program.
“Lots of music programs have a parents auxiliary, specifically band programs, because there are a lot of extra costs associated, and there’s not always a lot of funding kicking around the district to get new things,” he said.
Parents formed and registered the Tupper Music Parents Association as a non-profit and fundraised to replace 30-year-old instruments and sponsor field trips.
“We still have a slew of aged instruments, much like other schools in the district, that just aren’t really that good a quality and so that continues and every year we can tick a little bit more off and do more fundraising,” Cavaletto said.
Baron says music teachers need at least couple of years to get established at a school before they can turn to parents for support. She had been corralling parents before she went on maternity leave but fundraising wasn’t easy with so many single and immigrant parents who earned less than she did.
A swift shift in the school’s demographics means more parents have the means to help out.
“That’s what we keep saying at Tupper, the west is moving east,” Baron said.
Sixty-seven Tupper music students returned from a trip to San Francisco and San Jose, Tuesday, where they performed and participated in music clinics.
Baron knows such forays can change lives. A mother of a trumpeter told Baron she noticed a change in her son after music students’ first big trip, to Portland, two years ago.
“He’d come back more confident, more settled, and she was just so delighted,” Baron said.
“I really hate that music is called an elective, [that] all electives are called electives, like they’re somehow optional,” Cavaletto said. “These are the things that keep kids in school, that give them a sense of belonging, a sense of feeling that someone cares about them, they have a place to be, which with lots of students, that’s not happening at home.”
He believes the school’s code of conduct, Respect, Ownership, Attitude, Responsibility and Safety, or ROARS, established by Palmer in response to the bad rap the school got when one of its students was killed by another teen in 2003, has fortified school community, including the music program.
“We’re by no means one of the largest [music] programs in the district. There are huge programs,” Cavaletto said. “But we have really strong sense of community within the program that flows out of the school’s code of conduct, which is one of the things that sets this school apart from any other that I’ve worked at.”
The jazz band rehearsed for the school’s May 25 concert, after school Wednesday. They busted out an energetic “Chattanooga Choo” and a resounding “Happy.”
All of Tupper’s music groups will perform in the school’s auditorium at 419 East 24th Avenue starting at 7 p.m. Admission is by donation.
