By Stephanie Chase
Guest Columnist
New York, NY, USA
Through the auspices of the American Classical
Orchestra, I recently completed some twenty-two outreach performances for
elementary schoolchildren, mostly at public schools throughout New York City.
Our programs focused on Wolfgang Mozart and his father, Leopold, who was a
noted violinist and pedagogue. I found the number of music programs in these
schools – combined with the enthusiasm of the students and their teachers for
our presentation – gratifying, and decided that a good topic for this
Conversation would be music education in public schools.
 |
| Joseph Sherman - High School for Violin and Dance (2005) |
I first met Joseph Sherman when he was the
principal of the High School for Violin and Dance in the Bronx, which I visited
to discuss potential outreach programs by the Music of the Spheres Society, a
chamber music organization that I co-founded in 2001. (It turned out that he recognized
me through having attended one of my early New York recitals.) In touring the
school, I was impressed by the level of respect that he showed the students and
their demeanor towards him. In future visits, I played for classes, performed a
recital in its wonderful auditorium, and attended end-of-school-year concerts
performed by the students, which were always uplifting. Although he retired
from HSVD in 2008, Joe and I have remained friends ever since, and his
enthusiasm for all kinds of music remains an inspiration.
STEPHANIE CHASE: How did you first become interested in music?
JOSEPH
SHERMAN: My father and my uncle ran a
music store in Brooklyn. My uncle, Arty Kanner – who was Dad’s business partner
– was my first music teacher. He had played saxophone in swing bands during the
Great Depression. That was prime time for live music in the U.S. People loved
to go out dancing, probably as a distraction from the hard times. As a nine-year-old
kid, I was too small to handle a saxophone, so Uncle Arty started me off with
clarinet lessons.
One of Arty’s friends from his swing band days
was a top-notch sax man named Harry Terrill. Harry was the lead reedman in the
Mitchell Ayres Orchestra. They were the band for the Perry Como Show, which was
telecast live every week from a theater in Manhattan. A turning point in my
life came when Harry invited Arty to take me to see the show. We stood in the
wings just off stage. During the commercial breaks, the band performed to
entertain the audience in the theater. When I heard that band, and saw a tenor
sax man named Boomie Richman stand up and play improvised solos, it was a
revelatory moment. Instantly my boyhood fantasies of playing for the Brooklyn
Dodgers evaporated. From that point on, a jazz saxophone player is what I
wanted to be.
STEPHANIE
CHASE: Coincidentally, my father also began his career playing in a
swing band! He played piano in a small ensemble and they needed someone to make
music arrangements for the players. When I was just a toddler, my father wrote
the music for a children’s television show called Super Circus and
conducted the band while wearing a ringmaster’s costume. Later, he worked for a
nationally syndicated radio show, Don
McNeill’s Breakfast Club, and then for ABC television, all of which had
bands or orchestras. It’s too bad those days are over.
What were your music education experiences as a
New York City public school student?
JOSEPH
SHERMAN: I attended P.S. 148 in Jackson
Heights, Queens. They had one music teacher, Miss Duffy, who played piano and
gave group singing lessons to every class from kindergarten through sixth
grade, so we didn’t see that much of her. When I was in sixth grade, Harry
Horowitz, the instrumental music teacher of the local junior high school, visited
every sixth grade class in the feeder elementary schools and gave every student
a quick musical aptitude test – matching pitches, clapping rhythms. He invited
selected students to be in his beginner string class or beginner band class
when they entered junior high as seventh graders. This was the way instrumental
music programs were run in the NYC public schools in 1957. Selected students
would be in a heterogeneous instrumental music class every day in grades seven,
eight and nine. All the string instruments were taught together to a class of
about 35 kids. Like the strings, all the wind instruments, both brass and woodwinds,
were lumped together in large classes.
Mr. Horowitz discovered that I already had
clarinet skills, so I never went through the system. I was immediately
fast-tracked into the ninth grade orchestra. There were more than 70 kids in
that group and they played pretty well. There were weekly assembly days then,
when all the boys had to wear white shirts and ties. One whole grade of the
junior high would go to the auditorium for some kind of presentation. The 9th
grade orchestra would play for many of these assemblies. They also played in
the school’s traditional Spring Concert, which was an evening affair, and for
the graduation ceremony which was held in the neighborhood movie theater.
After J.H.S. 145, I went to Stuyvesant High
School. I graduated in 1962. Stuyvesant was still an all-boys school then. I
played clarinet in the concert band, and my career as a saxophonist was
launched at Stuyvesant. One of the music teachers was Moe Chusid, an excellent
jazz pianist who studied with Lennie Tristano. He pointed the way for me to
learn how to swing and how to improvise, using Frank Sinatra and Lester Young
as my role models. I was the star of the student jazz band that Mr. Chusid
directed.
STEPHANIE
CHASE: Did you continue to pursue
music study in college?
JOSEPH
SHERMAN: Although I really wanted to be
a musician, when it was time for college my parents wanted me to have a real
profession, such as becoming a lawyer, so I attended Cornell. I played in Cornell’s
marching band, which was fun, and in the concert band, and was disinterested in
my academic studies. I started hanging out with the music majors who were on
the other side of town at Ithaca College. My destiny was sealed when they
invited me to attend a rehearsal at Ithaca College when Aaron Copland was
invited to conduct his own music. I decided to transfer there as a music major
and study saxophone. While at Ithaca, I studied violin as a minor.
 |
| Joseph Sherman |
STEPHANIE
CHASE: How did you get involved with public education?
JOSEPH
SHERMAN: My original intention was to
be a performing saxophonist and perhaps get a teaching job in a college music
department. In the spring of 1967, my senior year at Ithaca College, I
auditioned at The Juilliard School, on saxophone, for a master’s degree program
and was accepted with a scholarship. Unfortunately, shortly after my successful
audition, I was classified 1-A by the Draft Board and would surely have been
drafted before I ever had a chance to begin the school year at Juilliard. This
was at the height of the Vietnam War, and I wanted no part of it. Teachers were
given occupational deferments, so I got certified to become a teacher. It was
not what I had originally planned, but teaching in New York City Public Schools
turned out to be a very rewarding career for me.
My first job was outside the NYC schools, as a
string instrument teacher and orchestra director at the junior high and two of
the elementary schools in the Larchmont-Mamaroneck school district, the suburban
school district in Westchester County, just north of New York City. At my
interview, I was asked if I could teach string instruments. “Of course,” I
said. The music supervisor for the district called my bluff and hired me. Before
beginning that job, I looked for a violin teacher to take lessons with. I found
out that Oscar Ravina, a violin virtuoso who was a member of the NY Philharmonic,
lived near me in Jackson Heights. He auditioned me at his house and accepted me
as a student. He said: “You can read anything, but you can play nothing, so I
will teach you how to play.” And he did. I took lessons from him for nine
years.
STEPHANIE
CHASE: When did you become a teacher
in the New York City School System?
JOSEPH
SHERMAN: In 1969. After two years, I left
the Mamaroneck job for a higher-paying job as a music teacher and Band Director
at Manhattan Vocational-Technical High School – an all-boys school located on
96th Street and First Avenue. It was just four blocks from the apartment
building where I was living with my parents. During my three years at MVT, I
developed a fine stage band – trumpets, trombones, saxophones with bass, and
percussion. I wrote the arrangements and the band had a fine repertoire of
straight ahead jazz, Latin jazz, and funky groove numbers like “Mercy, Mercy”
and “Watermelon Man.” After three years at MVT, I looked for a job at a bigger
high school with a full music program that included band, orchestra, and
choruses.
STEPHANIE
CHASE: Where did you find such a job?
JOSEPH
SHERMAN: In 1973, I got a job as a
string instrument teacher and orchestra director at Taft High School in the
Bronx. When I started at Taft, I was one of six music teachers. It was one of
the few schools left in the Bronx that was still able to mount the traditional
band, chorus and orchestra spring concert. I remained there for twelve years.
It was during my years at Taft that I really hit my stride as a music teacher.
The 1979 Taft High School Orchestra was the finest school orchestra I ever
taught. In the Spring Concert that year, their performance of the Charles
Wodehouse arrangement of the final movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
stunned the audience. It was a highlight in my career.
STEPHANIE
CHASE: You’ve told me that in the 1970’s you were active as a
violinist in the Latin Music field. How did that come about?
JOSEPH
SHERMAN: In the 1970’s the Latin music scene
in NY was flourishing. Many of my students were from the Caribbean and were
into the whole range of Latin dance music. One of my Taft violin students, a
lad from Cuba named Joey Medina, introduced me to Mike Lopez, who was a
musician and arranger in a sub-genre called charanga. Charanga is the name
given to music played by a band that has a specific instrumentation: one flute,
two violins, two male vocalists, piano, bass, timbales, conga, and guiro. It’s
a great sound that originated in Cuba. Mike Lopez introduced me to other
musicians in the Charanga scene, and I was called in to play violin as a sub
with two of the best Charanga bands in New York – Tipica Novel and Orquesta
Broadway. When a group of Cubans in the New York area were forming a new band,
I was invited to join as one of the founding members of Charanga 76, named
after the year in which it was formed. I was active with the group for two
years, performing regularly, making three recordings (vinyl LP’s), and finally
going on a weeklong concert tour in the Dominican Republic in the winter of
1978. After that tour, I resigned from the band, because they had gotten too
successful for me keep up with while holding down the full-time teaching job at
Taft.
STEPHANIE
CHASE: Did you ever bring your
experience in Latin music into your teaching?
JOSEPH
SHERMAN: My crowning achievement at
Taft came after the Principal, Lillian Popp, supported my request to teach a
Latin Band class. My students had been pleading with me to start a Latin band,
and fortunately, my department chairman George Hall and Ms. Popp supported the
idea. It was put in the school budget as part of my teaching assignment and was
scheduled right in the middle of the day, making it available to both early and
late session students to take as a music elective. The band that came together
in that class called itself Los Salseros de Taft. The class was visited by Felipe
Luciano, a prominent Latino TV news reporter, and later by legendary bandleader
Charlie Palmieri. They both gave the students an enthusiastic thumbs-up seal of
approval. Charlie also gave me a batch of his arrangements for my students to
play. As you might imagine, Los Salseros de Taft created a sensation whenever
they performed in concerts or at any school function. They were an
honest-to-goodness, genuine, typical salsa band, and were a focal point for an
aroused cultural identity and pride for an ethnic group that constituted about
half of the Taft student population. They sang and made announcements to the
audiences in Spanish. I don’t know if Los Salseros were unique in the NYC
Public Schools, but if there was another authentic salsa band in any other
school in NY, I never heard about it.
STEPHANIE
CHASE: How did you transition from
being a music teacher to being a school principal?
JOSEPH
SHERMAN: It was a long process. In
1977, after five years of taking evening classes, I got a Master’s Degree in
School Supervision and Administration from CCNY. With that came a NYC Board of
Education Supervisory license. I didn’t use that license until 20 years later,
in 1997. There were some serious bumps in the road. Taft H.S. imploded in the
1980’s. The double-session school that was bursting at the seams in the early 1970’s,
became a single session, under-populated school after the epidemic of arson
burned out large swaths of apartment buildings in the area. The music program
all but collapsed. Taft’s music faculty shrank to two, a vocal teacher and me.
The Board of Ed had a critical shortage of math and science teachers. They
offered free courses at CUNY schools for any teachers who wanted to be
recertified. I jumped on the offer, and from 1985 until 1997, I was a math
teacher. I started with one year at Bronx H.S. of Science, then eleven years at
Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, and then back in the Bronx for
one year at DeWitt Clinton H.S.
During the 1990’s, arts education enjoyed a bit
of a revival in the NYC schools. There was a big foundation grant that went to
something called Project Arts. The funds were used to restore arts teaching
jobs in schools that had eliminated them. At least one credit each of music and
art became a high school graduation requirement. I saw my opportunity to escape
from my exile from music education. I didn’t even have to look for a job. I
could have been an Assistant Principal in the school where I was working. The
principal at DeWitt Clinton asked me if I would like to head the revival of the
arts department in the school. At that same time, in 1997, I was the President
of the Board of Directors of the Bronx Symphony Orchestra. I had been a
violinist in the orchestra since 1981. As Board President, I took the lead role
in lining up venues all over the borough for the orchestra’s concerts. One of
the concerts I arranged in 1997 was in the Morris High School Auditorium. When
the concert took place, one of Morris’s AP’s, Bob Adler, who had been a
teaching colleague of mine at Taft recognized me. After the concert, he urged
me to interview for the position of Arts AP at Morris. I did and it became my
first administrative job in the NYC School System.
 |
| Auditorium of the High School for Violin and Dance |
STEPHANIE
CHASE: How did the High School for
Violin and Dance begin?
JOSEPH
SHERMAN: Well, Morris High School had
one of the poorest performances of any New York City School. For example, in
1997, we had a freshman class of 583 students. Guess how many graduated in 2001?
STEPHANIE
CHASE: I don’t know, one fifth?
JOSEPH
SHERMAN: Lower – just 79. Out of 583.
STEPHANIE
CHASE: I thought I was really low-balling the number – that is
terrible.
JOSEPH
SHERMAN: The Board of Education – the
most entrenched bureaucracy you can imagine – was phased out. The headquarters
at 110 Livingston Street in Brooklyn was shut down. It was replaced by the
Department of Education with offices in the old Tweed Courthouse on Chambers
Street, right next to City Hall. The decision was soon made to replace the large
high schools with smaller ones with a focus, such as on the arts or math, and create
a better environment for the students. My colleagues and I were very excited
about the possibilities and we all worked on proposals to submit. These
included a mission statement and curriculum. My team had a dance teacher who
wanted dance to be part of the school’s mission. Originally, I wanted music in
a more general sense, partly because I wanted a school orchestra, but in
consulting with Roberta Guaspari [whose dedication to teaching violin to public
school students in East Harlem led to the film Music from the Heart starring Meryl Streep], she insisted that it
should be only violin. She added that you can make an orchestra of just violins
and that the parents wouldn’t miss the other instruments.
STEPHANIE
CHASE: So was she and her work an
inspiration?
JOSEPH
SHERMAN: Absolutely! I attended her
concerts, and to see the kids with their beautiful left hand position and how
they played with such precision was amazing. She had an excellent point; to try
to teach bass, cello and viola along with the violin would dilute the quality
of the instruction, because cello and bass technique is so different from
violin. She’s also a huge Suzuki violin school enthusiast and used his
materials extensively. As is typically the case in
the Suzuki method, Roberta’s students play by ear, learning through repetition. [Shinichi Suzuki, b. 1898, d. 1998, was a Japanese educator who devised a system of educating young children, in part derived from his frustration in trying to learn to speak German as a young adult who had left Japan to study violin at the Conservatory of Music in Berlin in the 1920’s.]
STEPHANIE CHASE: Why is reading music delayed?
JOSEPH
SHERMAN: The act of reading music while
playing is much more complicated neurologically; in fact, Oliver Sacks did
research on what happens within the brain when a musician is playing while
reading the score, and it shows the entire brain lighting up with activity.
Imagine what happens when you’re in an orchestra – you’re reading the music,
playing, following the conductor and listening to what’s around you!
Suzuki decided to simplify the process by
delaying learning how to read the symbols, that is, the notes, for the music.
STEPHANIE
CHASE: My mother, who taught violin
mostly to children, always complained that the Suzuki students tended to be
weak readers, but I understand the rationale and desirability of making a
direct connection between the ear and the process of playing.
What are some of the other courses that HSVD
offered?
JOSEPH
SHERMAN: We had to start out with just
a freshman class, and we offered science, math, and a humanities class that
combined English, social studies and art. We had a prerequisite for admittance,
which was that we required a parent to come in with the student so that we
could get across the mandatory requirement of taking dance and violin classes
and get their commitment in return, even with just a nod. The second year we
added another freshman class, and filled the school in four years.
STEPHANIE
CHASE: What were some of the
challenges facing the students who attended?
JOSEPH
SHERMAN: You name it. Most of them were
from single parent households. There were substance abuse issues in some
families, some of them were in homeless shelters, and the neighborhood was a
threatening environment.
STEPHANIE
CHASE: Among the elementary schools
where I did outreach programs was one in midtown, where a number of children
were living in shelters. I can’t imagine the difficulties that they face,
including just doing their homework.
Did learning to dance and play the violin help
the students academically and socially?
JOSEPH
SHERMAN: It really helped their
self-esteem. This, in turn, was helpful in other ways. However, if I had to do
this all over again I’d want to work with young kids, not high schoolers – I
think it would serve them even better.
STEPHANIE
CHASE: I remember, at one of your
HSVD concerts, a Vivaldi concerto with four violinists, who did a very good
job. I was astonished to learn that two of them had been playing for only about
eight months, and they treated Vivaldi like it was the greatest rock music.
They had a terrific swagger in the way they took the stage.
JOSEPH
SHERMAN: I’ve had parents in tears
because they were so proud to see their kids playing their violins and showing
great discipline in their presentation. One mother exclaimed to me that she had
never seen her daughter stand still before.
STEPHANIE
CHASE: You retired from HSVD about
ten years ago, and yet you remained active in education.
JOSEPH
SHERMAN: The reason for my retirement
was that my mother was terminally ill and my wife developed a progressive
illness, but the Department of Education also did something that had a negative
impact on our and other schools like ours. They mechanized the application
process and had incoming prospective students list twelve different schools
that they might want to attend. In an almost arbitrary manner, through a
computerized system these students were assigned to schools, like a lottery,
which meant that many of them had no real interest in studying the violin or
dance. Often, our school was chosen because it sounded like a safe environment
for the students, not because they wanted to pursue music and dance. This has
unfortunately led to a downgrading of the school. It’s also a problem across
American culture in that reading and language skills are declining, partly
because everyone’s looking at their cell phone and people no longer communicate
well. Learning to make music is a key to brain health, including the use of
language.
STEPHANIE
CHASE: I’m in total agreement, and
this is partly why my niece has her children enrolled at the Steiner School in
New York, which does not permit the younger students to have cell phones or
computers and generally shuns media in the home environment. I think they view
a lot of media as providing a passive experience and potentially weakening
creativity unless one is disciplined in its use.
What are your views on alternative educational
systems such as Waldorf and Montessori?
JOSEPH
SHERMAN: I don’t know enough about them
to be able to answer.
STEPHANIE
CHASE: What are some of the things
you have done since leaving HSVD?
JOSEPH
SHERMAN: As you know, I am an avid chamber
musician and bicyclist, and I’ve been playing violin in the Riverside Symphony
for six years.
 |
| Joseph Sherman and Araceli Leal - Riverside Orchestra (2014) |
For eight years, beginning in 2008, I volunteered
to do sing-alongs and read-alouds for kindergarten, 1st and 2nd
grade classes at two Bronx elementary schools – P.S. 5 and P.S 66.
I must mention a highlight of my career that
occurred as a result of my volunteer work at P.S. 66 on Jennings Street. Liban Gomez,
came to the Bronx from the Dominican Republic when he was 15. In his senior
year at Alfred E. Smith H.S., Liban enrolled in a Saturday violin class for
Bronx H.S. students that I taught at Hostos Community College. Liban went on to
get a degree from CCNY and he became a 2nd grade teacher at P.S. 66.
For several years after I retired as a Principal, I visited Liban’s class weekly
for a sing-along and read-aloud session. By far the most popular children’s
book I ever read to Liban’s class was The
Judge by Harvey and Margot Zemach. I wound up setting the whole book to
music and Liban’s class performed it as an opera before the entire school complete
with sets and costumes that they made themselves.
Another outlet for me opened up when the Bronx
Library Center opened in 2006. Every year since then, I have organized and led
small orchestra, chamber music and jazz concerts that are part of the weekly
community events that the librarian Jean Harripersaud presents in the library’s
auditorium. Some of those concerts gave me the chance to show myself and the
audiences that I’ve still got it as a saxophone player.
Along with two talented partners, singer
Glendalys Sosa and pianist John Austria, I’ve developed a cabaret act for the
Senior Circuit. Since 2012, we’ve performed at Senior Citizen residences in the
metropolitan area. The median age in these homes is about 90. Some of them were
bobby-soxers who screamed for Frank Sinatra 75 years ago. They are transported
by our performances of the songs from that era. Those are also the songs best
suited to my style of saxophone playing so we’re all having a wonderful time.
 |
| Joseph Sherman conducting UpBeat NYC 2014 |
From 2010 to 2016, I was a violin teacher for
the Upbeat NYC music education program in the South Bronx, and we even had a
tour to Venezuela, which was a great highlight. Upbeat NYC is inspired by El
Sistema, which promotes music as an agent of social change – they have the
viewpoint that immersive musical study and experience greatly enhance individuals'
personal and social development.
STEPHANIE
CHASE: I recall the time you invited
me to attend a dress rehearsal at Carnegie Hall of the El Sistema orchestra
conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. I thought they’d be good, but I was wrong – they
were astonishing. First of all, I’ve never seen a larger orchestra onstage, and
they played Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony stunningly, with great dynamics and a
vibrant interpretation. They also used very unusual bowings, which worked beautifully.
What is your best advice for someone embarking
on a career in music education? Incidentally, I know
someone who quit her job teaching an English class to high school freshmen
after only two weeks because she could not control the class.
JOSEPH
SHERMAN: They need to follow the Mister Roger’s Neighborhood model. Every
show had the same format – he always started with the same greeting, put on his
sweater, and talked directly to the kids. I never had trouble controlling a
class of students because I followed a similar pattern; for instance, in
teaching an orchestra or band class I had the students line up outside the
classroom. When they came in, it was in a neat file and they would go directly
to their assigned chair and put their jackets on its back. They would then go to
the instrument closet in a set order to collect their instruments and then
return to their chair, get the instrument out of the case, place the case
directly under the chair, and then assume a “ready” position. Once when I had
to miss a class, someone voiced concern over how the substitute would do. I
said that the kids would do it themselves all the substitute teacher had to do
was watch. Sure enough, that’s what happened.
STEPHANIE
CHASE: For those teachers who face
unruly students, this is very helpful! Thank you, Joe, for your decades of
devotion to music and education.
(Photos and videos courtesy of Joseph Sherman's Private Collection)
Links:
________________________________________________
 |
| Stephanie Chase |