Music Center’s ‘Bravo’ Goes to a Multi-Tasking Maestro

Music, they say, can transport you.

On Monday evening, it took Mike Short, an Orange choir teacher, from a cramped high school classroom where he has taught for 20 years to the glow of the spotlight.

Short, 45, is this year’s winner of the Bravo Award for outstanding arts teacher, presented by the Music Center of Los Angeles County.

The 20-year-old award was created to promote arts education in Southern California’s private and public schools.

Judges select winners in three categories: exceptional school, arts teacher and general-subjects teacher who incorporates the arts into the academic curriculum.

Short, who teaches at Orange High School, pushes to bring music classes to children of all experience and ability levels, even pitching in to teach an early morning band class for no extra pay.

Other winners were Arcadia High School in Los Angeles County as exceptional school, and Laura Hamlett, 32, a second-grade teacher at Eagle Rock Elementary School in Los Angeles as general-subjects teacher.

For Short, chosen from 30 nominated arts teachers, the award means recognition--plus $2,000.

“You know how people say a few people do all the work? Well, Mike is one of the few,” said Orange High Principal Robert Lewis, who nominated Short and accompanied him to the awards ceremony, along with Short’s family and school district officials. “The guy goes a thousand miles an hour.”

Last year, when the school lost its band teacher, Short stepped in to save the program by volunteering to come in early and teach the class, Lewis said.

The district plans to hire a new band teacher.

Several years ago, Short and a middle-school teacher proposed reintroducing arts education to elementary schools.

They worked on curricula, giving the district board several spending options. Trustees agreed to spend $750,000 a year on the program.

Short’s energy was evident one recent morning during a concert choir class at the high school.

Young voices spilled from the classroom. Inside, 35 boys and 53 girls formed a semicircle around Short, who, dressed in jeans and cowboy boots, was warming up the students’ vocal cords.

“Louder, louder,” Short urged as his aide, Caryl Smith, accompanied on piano.

The room was crammed with computer and music equipment, file cabinets, boxes of sheet music and 20 years of memories, including a 1999 theatrical poster for a Russian production of the musical “Hair.” The show starred one of his students. “He didn’t even speak Russian,” Short said. Along the walls were pictures of his graduating classes, each a little larger, each a little more ethnically diverse, chronicling the changing demographics of the working-class community surrounding the school.

The day’s repertoire included an African song and Robert Ray’s “Lord Have Mercy,” a gospel score.

“Last year we did Vivaldi’s ‘Gloria,’” Short said. “I want them to explore lots of different styles, from medieval to contemporary. Notice I said ‘contemporary,’ not ‘pop.’ They get enough of that on their own time.”

From football players to band members, the students follow his hand gestures and coaching advice.

During a section of “Lord Have Mercy,” the tenors struggled with a tone change. Short had them try various tricks; none worked until he told them to imagine they were sticking their heads out the window of a car and singing into the wind.

Giggles filled the room, but in perfect unison, heads bobbed to the side as the students traveled in the imaginary car and hit the note. More giggles.

“Did that work?” Short asked the class. Heads bobbed.

Short doesn’t want his students to mimic sounds, he said. “My job is to help them create. Music is about creating.”

It is also about exploring. Not just musical horizons, but geographic landscapes.

Short helps his students expand beyond their world by sponsoring singing trips abroad every four years, and to other parts of the country every two years. His students have performed at Notre Dame cathedral in Paris and in Belgium and London.

His students pay what they can, and the rest comes from fund-raisers that Short coordinates. This year, the class is going to New York.

Every student who works hard in his class and volunteers in fund-raising efforts, such as selling tickets for their performances, wins a spot on the trip.

“I’ll guarantee you, you will go,” Short told students. “And I haven’t been made a liar yet.”

The Ardmore, Okla., native fell in love with choral music at 14, he said, when he visited the First Southern Baptist Church in Bakersfield, where he was living at the time.

That led to a degree in vocal music education from Orange’s Chapman University in 1979.

Music fills his life. His wife, Vicki Sue, plays the piano, flute and violin. His 11-year-old son, Matthew, plays violin and piano. His daughter, Katherine, 14, is in Orange High’s choir, band and dance class.

Short also directs Orange’s Community Choir, which performs at city’s events, and the choir at his church, the First United Methodist Church of Orange.

“Multi-tasking, that’s my life,” Short said. “I don’t know how it all fits together, but it does.”