NEWPORT BEACH : Teens Give Music, Art a Closer Look

Art and music always baffled 17-year-old Brent Durna.

On Friday, while at the Newport Harbor Art Museum with 59 other Loara High School students, those complex subjects became a little less intimidating, he said.

The museum treated the Loara teen-agers and a couple of Sunny Hills High School English classes to a gallery tour of “Both Art and Life: Gemini at 25” and a music lesson by members of the Orange County Philharmonic Society as part of its annual education program.

Contemporary musicians Jennifer Hall and Alan Palmer played familiar but diverse tunes including Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita,” George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” on saxophone, flute, piccolo and a computerized synthesizer to demonstrate the relationship between music and print art.

“La Isla Bonita is very rhythmic,” Hall told the students. “It’s built with 25 layers of rhythm.

“The textures and layers of music are similar to the textures and layers of art. Used differently, they create different moods and feelings,” Hall said.

After the music demonstration, the high school students learned what it takes to make a print, a real print -- not a photocopy of the real thing.

Thomas Stubbs, an art instructor at the Art Institute of Southern California and master printmaker, explained to the students about the arduous task of making a lithograph, serigraph, stencil and intaglio. That type of art was on display in the museum, and the students were given a tour by the docents.

“I didn’t know what printing was,” Durna said. “It’s interesting to see how and why (artists) do it. The end product is really eye-pleasing and it’s inexplicable, definitely.”

His sentiments were echoed by his classmates, who said their exposure to the prints and the music has opened their minds.

“I want to be a writer someday,” Jennifer Lee, 14, said. “This helps me in a way to expand my imagination.”

For most of the Anaheim students, the visit was their first to any museum.

Each year, the museum focuses on a different theme that shows the relationship between music and art, said Karin Schnell, the museum’s associate director of education.

“A lot of these students are at a point when they’re deciding what to do with the rest of their lives,” she said. “Everybody can be creative and art and music helps even if they decide to become mathematicians.”

“I understand now that I don’t know that much about art,” said Steve Leeman, a ninth-grader. “I had no idea art and music could be so deep.”

For 16-year-old Kathy Jung, the program was inspiring. “This enhances learning. I dream of becoming an artist or musician and seeing the different art professionals create makes me think I can do it too.”