Music & Poetry Synchronized (MAPS)

MAPS is a 16-year old arts and education program dedicated to bringing poetry students together with music students in a year-long program to write completed, polished, professionally-produced poems and songs. In the case of Manhattan’s Urban Assembly School for Green Careers (UAGC), the poetry students work throughout the first semester learning and creating college-level poetry and writing poems of their own; these poems are “life stories,” derived from the students’ real and often difficult life experiences. They are heartfelt expressions of the joys, miseries, and mysteries of life in the inner city. After the first semester, poems are sent from the UAGC students to the music students at South Hadley, Massachusetts’s Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public School (PVPA), where the poems are transformed into songs complete with melody, instrumentation, and full arrangements. The semester is filled with the challenge of writing compelling melodies and music that captures the essence of the poems. At the end of the spring semester, there is a concert, which is not only attended by students and families from the hosting school, but also by the general public allowing for a large audience. Depending on the year, the concert venue switches from one school to the other. At the performance, the poetry students come on stage, one-by-one, and read their individual poems, which are immediately followed by the PVPA students’ musical interpretation. During the year there is a second visit to the school that isn’t hosting the concert at which time students share in the writing process, spend time developing relationships with the partner school’s students, and start building a shared community. The fusing of these two starkly different communities of urban and rural students dispels stereotypes, fears, and prejudices, and creates improbable friendships and long-lasting bonds.