Pictured: 10-month-old Matilda Cunningham investigates a maraca at the “Instrument Petting Zoo” in Sitka on April 4.
It’s quiet in the library, when I sit down to interview Rick Trostel, a trumpet player in the Juneau Symphony. He’s also a longtime music teacher at Juneau Montessori School.
He’s getting ready to raise the volume with a hands-on music class of sorts – an “Instrument Petting Zoo.” On the counter behind him is a stack of several 36 inch PVC pipes.
“Those are my didgeridoos. So people will get a chance to do some buzzing on that,” Trostel says. “Maybe screeching, and all the kinds of things that you can do with a didgeridoo.”
He says he’s had success with the PVC pipes– they’re a good entry point to the horn section, like vuvuzelas or stadium horns.
“It was just a plastic tube with a bell on the end. And as a young child, I was blowing in that, and I think that’s one reason that trumpet was so attractive to me, because I could actually play it,” Trostel says. “I could make a sound right away on it. Not everybody can, so that’s a good way to start.”
Trostel also has his trumpet at the ready, and sterilizing equipment in case participants want to have a go. He’s hoping curious children and adults alike will get their hands on the instruments today.
“It’s just the only way to really…you have to learn. You are not born with a sense of what a high note and a low note is,” Trostel says. “Try to explain to somebody who has no idea what high and low is. It’s, it’s just really hard. You just have to have that experience.”
Slowly, musicians and participants start to trickle in, violins are removed from their cases, and the library’s multipurpose room begins to fill with sound.
In the corner, Trostel is demonstrating how to use the didgeridoos, beside Sitka violinist Debby LeVeck, who is matching people with right-sized violins before they try a hand at playing a few notes. Across the room, a young girl strums an upright bass three times her size, and a toddler sits on the floor, examining a maraca.
It’s a joyful cacophony in a place where many might mistakenly think “pin drop silence” is the ultimate goal. But the noise doesn’t bother youth services librarian Maite Lorente.
“We cannot protect libraries if we think about libraries as a monolithic institution,” Lorente says. “So, yeah, I mean, I’m all for noise at the library, if you have to happen like this, good noise, bad noise, whatever.”
She says libraries all around are evolving into institutions where this type of tactile learning is encouraged.
“We have kind of tried to bring all the symbolic, invisible walls down so that life can come into the library, and we just reach out and bring in anything that can represent what life nowadays means for all of our community members,” Lorente says. “I think that libraries all around try to do the same.”
For Trostel, the event is providing important exposure for children and adults, but early childhood is a critical time to surround children with the arts – they’re able to absorb it, unselfconsciously.
“I think people think you are either musical or not. People think that about visual art as well,” Trostel says. “But I think children who don’t have a sense that there is such a thing as innate ability in arts, they don’t have any inhibition, and they just do it and it’s beautiful.”
