Many WSHU listeners are familiar with the name Lauren Rico, our afternoon and evening classical music host.
What they may not know is that, in addition to being a talented radio personality, Rico is also an accomplished author, and she has written the script for this weekend's New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concert. Tickets are still available here.
WSHU’s Molly Ingram sat down with Rico to hear about the process and why it’s been so meaningful.
WSHU: Hi, Lauren, tell me about the show. What can people expect?
LR: Well, this is one of those young people's concerts. Folks of a certain generation may recall that Leonard Bernstein used to do these on TV. They were very popular back in the day, and it was pretty much him talking about each piece and interacting with kids in the audience. Well, they've carried on this tradition with the New York Philharmonic. The Young People's Concerts are kind of a living, breathing thing still, except as audiences have changed, so has the organization, and I'd say the production value of what they do for these concerts, it's not just the conductor on the stage anymore. There's a huge IMAX screen over the orchestra. They have video. They hire puppeteers. They go out and shoot film. It's kind of crazy. The kids do crafts in the lobby beforehand, and they just find really creative ways to present the music to the kids. I'd say the audience is mainly between six and 10 year olds, but certainly the range is, you know, wider, and we try to do it in a way that also appeals to the adults at the same time. So it's, it's that kind of a thing.
Now, this is not your normal formal kind of classical music concert where you're expected to be quiet and only applaud at certain times. You know, they even make an announcement at the top of the concert telling kids that if they if they want to dance in the aisles, if they feel like they need to leave, they have chill spots in the lobby where they can go and just have a little space, they're welcome to conduct and, you know, sing along and things like that, and get interactive. And they really try very hard to engage the kids from the stage. It's not that they sit down and play a whole piece from beginning to end, because kids get a little squirmy -- adults get a little squirmy too. So they play different excerpts of the piece, maybe anywhere from teeny, tiny, little bits a few seconds, to probably about four to five minutes long, are the longest excerpts. And then all this time, like interacting with whoever the host is, or perhaps the conductor will be talking to the kids from the stage and soliciting, like talk back, sort of crowdsourcing answers, and then all kinds of fun things up on the screen. And they even get a program with all kinds of information that's kid-friendly, kind of a layout, maybe puzzles and things in it to kind of be educational games. So it's a lot of fun. I venture to say it's more fun than a lot of classical music concerts for adults, too.
WSHU: Was there anything you found particularly surprising or challenging about the writing process?
LR: Yeah, the mind of a six to 10-year-old. I have no children myself, so figuring out, like, what would be appropriate content for them. And I think perhaps I underestimated them a lot, too. I kept, you know, referring to colleagues who have kids, or who have worked with kids, and were able to tell me, ‘Oh, yeah, no, they'll get this. They won't get that.’ Or ‘it's too much chatter. This is too much talking. You need to engage them, you know, in between this paragraph and that paragraph,’ and, you know, word choices and things like that. So that was all new for me, and very challenging.
Also, the script format. I mean, I can write a 90,000-word novel in my sleep. But write an 11-page script? And, you know, for somebody to be on stage acting it out and figuring out stage directions, that was totally out of my wheelhouse. So this was working different muscles for me, and I leaned on the New York Philharmonic Young People's Concerts a lot to help me get it right.
To kind of see it all play out on stage was just so exciting. Like, oh, wow, I did that. I did part of that. They bring it to life, though it's tremendous. Also realizing what kind of, I didn't know what kind of resources were at my disposal, as far as, like, shooting video and the whole craft thing. And they brought in an actor from Los Angeles to play the part of the secret agent who's at the center of this story. So all of that was just everything was new to me, but the kid piece of it was especially challenging for me, a little bit of insight. But boy, kids are a lot smarter than I was at that age, that's for sure.
WSHU: Why do you think it's important to make classical music available for young people?
LR: I think it's important to make classical music accessible as early as possible, so it's not this foreign thing that kids grow up with. Many of us grew up in an age where classical music was part and parcel of the curriculum from a very young age, like with the recorder in the third grade or something, and these days, so many programs have been cut. You know, finances are so tight for school resources that they don't necessarily get it in school, or they get limited in school. So, exposing them to it early on, I think, they process it better. They feel comfortable with it. It's not this foreign thing. And maybe they like it, maybe they don't. Maybe they grow up to support it, maybe they don't. But at least they've been exposed to it early on when they're little sponges and they can absorb it, and some of them go on to play instruments and things. That's the hope, anyway, because, you know, like I said, the schools used to funnel us all into classical music, I think, and that's just not the case anymore, especially because our playlists are so curated these days and influenced by our peers and what we're hearing and seeing so kind of getting them interested in it at a young age helps to at least give them the option to fall in love with it over the course of a lifetime.
That's the hope, anyway. And also to show that classical music is not this thing, this dusty thing on a pedestal. It's, you know, it's for everybody, and you don't have to know anything about it to love it. It just hopefully speaks to you, no matter what age you are. So that's what I think anyway.
WSHU: Thank you so much for your time. And congratulations, this is really exciting.
LR: Thank you so much.
