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| This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen Magazine #107 (August / September 2003). the magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription. |
He never expected to be doing this. There was no master plan. Nonetheless, Paul Reisler now finds himself at the helm of a growing phenomenon that has been gaining momentum across the United States. Kid Pan AlleyJ began humbly as a community outreach project of the Ki Theatre, a nonprofit arts center in Reisler's home, rural Rappahannock County, Virginia. “I'd like to say that all of this was planned out, but it was just a series of things that opened up for me, beginning with the residency,” he said. “Making Waves,” organized by dancer/choreographer Sharon Wyrrick, was an interdisciplinary project with artist Rose Marie Prins, Wyrrick, and Reisler, assisted by Diane Bardwell. The idea: Send an accomplished musician/songwriter-in-residence into the elementary classrooms and, in a 45-minute period, write a song with each class. The children would supply the poetry, inspiration, and musical preferences; he would write the music.
“It wasn't as much a decision as a calling. I didn't really go in and say, 'This is what I want to do with my life now,' ” said Reisler, who already had a successful music career. An acclaimed songwriter and performer, as well as co-founder and leader of the eclectic group Trapezoid, Reisler had worked with the Ki Theatre as composer and performer since 1988. He is considered a master on hammered dulcimer and acoustic guitar. “I really went in because it was my own community. Once I went in and started working with the kids, and I saw what it did for them, I realized that probably the highest calling of what I could be doing right now was that.” Although he had collaborated with such talented artists as Tom Paxton, John McCutcheon, and Angela Kaset, to name a few, he soon found “there's not one of them who's better than writing with a bunch of kids.”
Reisler wrote about 50 songs with more than 600 children at Rappahannock County Elementary School and Hearthstone School. “It was totally different from what I expected,” he said. “We wrote a fabulous song in 45 minutes. I was writing three or four songs a day, and by the end of the day, I was totally brain dead.” But the quality of the outcome made it all worthwhile. “It's hard to be any better than the kids,” he said. “I have a lot of skill, and I've written thousands of songs...But in terms of just raw creativity, you can't beat the kids.”
The experience also appealed to the crusader in him. “My thing is a 'Take Back the Music' campaign. It's been stolen from us. Let's get back to where we create music in our own communities.” The approach, he said, “goes against the trend to train children to be consumers. All of a sudden, I said to them, 'You can be creators. Let's create a song.' Kids are tremendously creative — we all start out that way, and then gradually it's beaten out of us in various ways. My job is to get them thinking in that original, fresh, creative way.
“Of course,” he added, “the downside of that is, you've got a bunch of kids screaming out the first thing that comes into their mind. You want that. Creativity comes from a random, nonlinear way of thinking...everything swirling around, pulling things out of a primordial creativity.” Soon, they start to hear that the “words are in the music, and the music is in the words. I let them try everything.”
The residency ended with a concert, but for Reisler, the songs and the experience lingered over the next six months. “Then I got this idea, 'My gosh, there's all these fabulous musicians here, and they all are so different. What if I gave each of them a song and asked them to record it in their own style?' ”
This is an excerpt from an article in Dirty Linen #107 (Aug/Sept '03). Read the full text in the magazine, available via subscription or on newsstands and in bookstores.
