In her Intro to Music class at UTC, one of the very first questions Dr. Nikolasa Tejero asks her students is, “How many of you guys have music experience?”
No matter the class, most of the students think Tejero, associate professor of music theory and applied clarinet, is asking if they’ve played an instrument or sung in a choir. Even after clarifying that she really just wants to know who feels like they have experienced music by attending a concert or festival, very few raise their hands.
Nikolasa Tejero, clarinet, and Susan Hadden, piano, perform for Symphonic Tales on Friday, Feb. 22, 2018 at Hardy Elementary School. (Contributed Photo by Angela Lewis Foster)Rather than being disgruntled, she decided she would do something.
“The problem was that I didn’t think it was good that college students hadn’t had a significant music experience. But that wasn’t a problem that I could actually fix,” Tejero says. “I could remedy the symptom. I could put on a concert and force them to attend.”
Instead, Tejero teamed up with the Chattanooga Public Library and devised something that got to the root of the problem: introducing music to students while they’re still young. They call it Symphonic Tales.