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"The most exciting thing going on in children's programming!"

- Gwendolyn Freed, National Arts Journalism Program Journal of Columbia University

RIME launches Musicorps

RIME is delighted to announce the launch of Musicorps, a program for helping injured soldiers in their rehabilitation. The program will be piloted at the Fisher House at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital. Injured soldiers participating in Musicorps will use a specially assembled workstation, collaborate with visiting artists and recording experts, and compose and record their own music.

Musicorps is expected not only to improve the injured soldiers' quality of life during lengthy and difficult recoveries, but also to stimulate healing, especially from TBI (traumatic brain injury). Concussive blasts from IEDs and other explosions cause TBI, and it has been called the signature injury of the Iraq war. Learning, creating, and performing music involves so many aspects of brain function that it is believed to recruit uninjured parts of the brain to compensate for parts that have been injured, and to help those parts that are injured recover.

RIME prepares training program for Concert Curriculum

With the success of “An Orchestra's Guide To The Universe," and a grant from the DANA Foundation, RIME is developing a training program for the Concert Curriculum. The training program will enable orchestras and schools around the country to produce both the educational and performance aspects of this innovative music partnership program. Training will be provided for both “An Orchestra's Guide To The Young Person” and “An Orchestra's Guide To The Universe.”

"An Orchestra's Guide To The Universe" to Premiere in 2006

“An Orchestra’s Guide To The Universe” will be presented at 10:30 AM on April 29, 2006, “Maryland Day,” in the Dekelbaum Concert Hall of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland in College Park. James Ross will conduct the University of Maryland Orchestra and the entire 5th and 6th grade classes from Berwyn Heights Elementary School in Prince George’s County.

As part of Maryland Day festivities at the campus, the event is free and open to the public.

“An Orchestra’s Guide To The Universe” to launch in 2005

RIME’s astronomical concert curriculum will launch in 2005, with our pilot program culminating in what we anticipate will be spectacular performances during Maryland Day, April 29th, 2006 at College Park, Maryland.

Students from Prince George’s County participating in our pilot program will work with established musicians and NASA scientists throughout the school year in preparation for their culminating performances with the University of Maryland Orchestra. Performances will feature a musical journey through the universe commandeered by a kid who has fallen asleep during an orchestra concert and taken control. The journey emerges from within the concert, and careens through the universe, from constellations and distant stars, to black holes and the big bang, and through a variety of musical styles, from hip-hop and jazz, to gospel and classical.

While the performance will be a fantastic multimedia event, it is the pinnacle of a rigorous educational program that brings extraordinary resources and experiences to the participating students, musicians, and community.

Students Compose in RIME Workshops

RIME founder Arthur Bloom and RIME Advisor Scott Freiman visit schools throughout New York helping classrooms of students compose their own songs. Contemplating visits to distant galaxies, and working with images from the Hubble Heritage Project website, students in upstate New York composed and recorded such celestial songs as “Space Party,” “Ann Dan Jan in the Black Hole,” “80s Obsessed Astronaut,” and “Candy Aliens.” Students in Westchester County composed and performed songs a little closer to their experience on Earth, with titles such as “Recess,” “Homework,” and “Talkin Bout Lunch.”

RIME realizes that kids bring a whole lot of musical skills to the table, skills that are often overlooked. Bloom and Freiman’s workshops tap into those skills, and enable students to compose remarkable and delightful music.

RIME receives IDEAS grant from NASA

RIME has received an IDEAS grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute at NASA (i.e. the Hubble people) to develop a science version of our Concert Curriculum. Culminating performances will be called “An Orchestra’s Guide To The Universe,” and feature a plot in which a young person’s imagined voyage through the universe will interrupt an otherwise normal concert. Modeled after the original Concert Curriculum, imagination sequences will be filled with material and performances students have prepared through interdisciplinary curricular units in science and music.

The unprecedented collaboration will include RIME Founder and Director Arthur Bloom, Dr. Ilana Harrus, an astronomer at Goddard Space Flight Center/NASA, science educators and writers David S. Wood, a recipient of the National Presidential Award for Excellence in Science Teaching, and Margaret T. Pennock, and Professor Hiro Yoshikawa, a nationally-recognized expert in program evaluation.

RIME adds a Board of Special Advisors

RIME has added a Board of Special Advisors, members of which will assist in special projects in their areas of expertise. Initial members include David Stern, Dr. Anne Marie White, and Dr. Suhnne Ahn. David Stern is the Founder and President of Stern Consulting (www.sternconsulting.com), providing specialty analytic and consulting services for the healthcare industry. He earned his MBA from the Yale School of Management and BA in economics from Yale College. Dr. Anne Marie White, a Congressional Science and Technology Fellow of the Society for Research in Child Development, has worked in the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Children and Families, earned her doctorate in Human Development and Psychology at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education, and is an expert in the evaluation of arts-based school programs. Dr. Suhnne Ahn serves both as Musicology Faculty at the Peabody Conservatory of The Johns Hopkins University and as the Dean of Harnwell College House at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her B.A. from Yale College and her A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.

The David Stern who joins our Board of Special Advisors to assist in organization and management is a different David Stern who is a conductor and sits on our Board of Advisors. Both David Sterns have known each other for years and, to the best of our knowledge, neither is commissioner of the NBA.

RIME + NASA: A Stellar Collaboration

Working with astronomers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, we are developing interrelated educational components in science and music that will become part of RIME's Concert Curriculum. With its modular, collaborative structure, the Concert Curriculum provides the means for developing materials we anticipate will enhance student learning and interest in both fields.

One focus of the collaboration involves images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Images will be used in science classes to help students learn about the stars, their properties, and their respective position in the sky. The images will then be superimposed onto music paper in order to generate unique "stellar melodies" that will help students learn about notation and composition in music classes. Stellar melodies will then be incorporated into the Concert Curriculum's culminating performances as part of dream sequences that will include contextual dialogue and a projection of the images.

We will present our budding collaboration at the Conference on Communicating Astronomy to the Public, October 1-3, 2003, at the Keck Center of the National Academies.

RIME Goes To Baltimore

RIME is working with the Concert Artists of Baltimore, a professional orchestra and chorus conducted by Edward Polochick, the Baltimore City School System, and a Baltimore Advisory Board, to bring the Concert Curriculum to Baltimore. Work has already begun for an initial program in 2003-2004, and the list of participants is growing, including a few unexpected and delightful surprises (stay tuned!).

RIME Recieves Grant From The Second Act Foundation

RIME is delighted to announce that it has received a grant from the Second Act Foundation that will enhance our capacity to implement and support programs.

Gil Shaham, Navah Perlman, Micki M. Chen, Join Board of Advisors

Gil Shaham

We are delighted to announce that Gil Shaham will be joining our Board of Advisors. Violinist Gil Shaham is internationally recognized as one of today's most virtuosic and engaging classical artists, and has collaborated with many of the world's greatest conductors including Claudio Abbado, Mariss Jansons, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Seiji Ozawa, Wolfgang Sawallisch and David Zinman. An exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist, Mr. Shaham has recorded much of the violin repertoire, and won a Grammy Award in 1999 for his recital album, American Scenes, with keyboard collaborator André Previn. Mr. Shaham was awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1990, and has attended the Horace Mann School in New York City , Columbia University, and Juilliard.

Navah Perlman

It is with great pleasure to announce that Navah Perlman will be joining our Board of Advisors. Perlman has established herself as one of the most poetic and admired pianists of her generation, performing to critical acclaim in major concert venues throughout North America, Europe and Asia. She has performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic and the Pittsburgh Symphony, among other orchestras, and collaborates with cellist Zuill Bailey and violinist Giora Schmidt in one of chamber music’s most exciting young ensembles. She attended Juilliard, where she worked with Herbert Stessin, and Brown University, where she graduated with honors. In addition to her career as a performer, she is Co-Program Director of the legendary Bargemusic in New York City.

Micki M. Chen

We are delighted to announce that Micki M. Chen will be joining our Board of Advisors. As the lead attorney for Verizon Long Distance, her time is worth considerably more than 7¢ a minute, 5¢ on evenings and weekends. She was awarded a Henry Crown Fellowship by the Aspen Institute in 2002, a prestigious program that honors young, community-spirited business leaders. She has served as Senior Assistant General Counsel and Special Counsel to the General Counsel for the U.S. General Services Administration, where she received the Vice President's "Hammer Award" and the "Commendable Service Award." She studied piano at the Manhattan School of Music, and earned her J.D. in 1990 from Harvard Law School where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Kevin Clark – RIME’s first summer intern.

Following Executive Director Arthur Bloom’s presentation at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, composition student Kevin Clark was so enthusiastic, nothing short of a summer internship would satisfy his desire to contribute. With Peabody endorsing the internship through credits that Kevin will receive, our summer internship program was born. An accomplished composer in his own right, and with a variety of skills that comes from growing up in the “sort of family that shims bookcases in an afternoon,” our alpha-intern may very well be our über-intern, setting the standard for those who follow.

RIME goes online with CTSG

To say that CTSG (www.ctsg.com) is a web design company, or that RIME is fortunate to have established a relationship with CTSG, are huge understatements. CTSG helps corporations in the public interest achieve their objectives through a variety of innovative tools and strategies, with experience that spans from Presidential campaigns to grassroots activism. At the same time, their award-winning web services for clients such as the World Wildlife Fund, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and Amnesty International, have established their preeminence in the field.

With project direction by Greg Nelson, project management by Kaya Andoque, graphic design by Mike Wooster, and computer programming by Sekhar Putcha, the architects of www.rimemusic.org represent a multitude of talents, and an effort that spans from coast to coast. With CTSG and RIME working closely on this and future projects, our evolving relationship is a critical component of RIME’s strategic development.

The Concert Curriculum In The News

The unprecedented spectacle of the performance that culminates the Concert Curriculum has attracted local and national, print and broadcast, media. Read what others are saying about it.   In The News >>