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AthFest: Beyond the Festival
Offering Education and Community Outreach Year-Round
AthFest approaches, many of our readers will
already be familiar with our massive city
wide celebration of rock and roll and its many
varied stylistic cousins. What may not be so well known is
AthFest's infrastructure as a nonprofit whose year-round flurry
of activity stays plenty frenetic long before and after the stage
scaffolding stands on Washington Street. In this issue and the
next, Flagpole will take a look at what AthFest, Inc. is up to
the other 360 days of the year.
More than 30 years after those epochal early dance par
ties, Athens remains a perfect storm of—as Pylon so succinctly
put it—cool. Music's cultural cachet within our tiny burg
outshines that of cities many times our size. But how? How
does Athens, uniformly dwarfed by other arts-centric metropo
lises, continue to populate itself with both longtime
residents and newly arrived neophytes dedicated to
contributing to the local legacy? The short answer is
the corny answer, because sometimes corny is true:
people here actually care about music. Lacking the
"someone important might be watching" mentality of
a Los Angeles or New York, Athens' allegiance to art
for its own sake is a truly key component to its local
community. If the value of music's enriching, literally
priceless place in our larger culture seems ingrained
from a young age around here, maybe it is. The
AthFest Educates! program puts a far finer point on it,
and one can safely suspect that Athens will reap the
benefits in years to come.
Launched in 2008 as the AthFest Education
Committee, AthFest Educates! now represents the
lion's share of what AthFest does year-round as a non
profit. "Our mission is to educate people about arts
and music, specifically Athens arts and music, but arts
and music in general, too," says Jared Bailey, director
of AthFest. Beyond the sonic eye-openings audiences
gain from the festival itself—walking from venue to venue,
sampling music beyond their typical spheres of experience—in
this instance, when Bailey talks about education as a mission,
he's talking about it on a literal level. AthFest Educates! inter
acts directly with the local and regional public school programs
in a variety of ways. "We have been doing year-round music
education in local schools," says Bailey. "There's other ways
that we contribute to music and arts education as well, but the
school thing is probably the one that's easiest to define."
The first aspect of the program Bailey mentions is beneficial
for both young students and musicians alike: "We get local
musicians to come into schools and perform for kids and to
talk to them about how they make their music, how they record
their music, how they tour, how they promote themselves. So,
they're learning a little bit about the music business but also
hearing music they wouldn't ordinarily get to hear—and we
pay the performers to come in and do it."
In addition to smaller classroom performances, AthFest
Educates! has also staged school-wide lunchtime performances
for every grade level to get in on. (Imagine how you'd feel
as a, 10-year-old whose perfunctory PB&J snack was suddenly
soundtracked by Don Chambers + GOAT.) "The kids love it," says
Clarke County school psychologist Janine Sheedy, the education
chair of AthFest's steering committee. "They're a really great
audience—it inspires conversations. They'd be like, Tve never
been to a concert before!' They were just giggly and ecstatic...
It's really increased an appreciation for the joy of music. It's
been really cool; I do get a little teary-eyed talking about it
sometimes because it's just that heartwarming."
The attendant kids have been treated to performances from
acts like Ken Will Morton, Nanny Island's Shauna Greeson, and
Hardy Morris and John Watkins of Dead Confederate, among
others. Morris got an opportunity to participate in one music
class' curriculum. "We described to the kids the difference
between major and minor, just the simplicity of 'one sounds
happy, one sounds sad,'" says Morris. "They can hear the differ
ence. It was cool to be a part of that and watch them decipher
things... obviously they've heard it, but music's weird in that
way: you hear it, but when you start figuring out the science
of it, it starts making a little more sense."
Therein lies another important, implicit aspect of the
AthFest Educates! program. These in-school performances
aren't limited to Clarke County students; overall, the 16
elementary schools and four middle schools AE! has worked
with have included both Oconee and Oglethorpe counties as
well. These kids get a chance to interact with rockers from the
nearby town, furthering the perpetuation of Athens' rightly
earned status as a haven for hard-working, creative musi
cians. It helps Athens' reputation to sprawl beyond our county
line, likely making a significant impression on kids who may
begin to feel they might have it in them to step onto a stage
themselves.
Another aspect of AthFest Educates! takes the next logical
step after introducing students to music: putting instruments
into their hands as part of a sub-program called
Keys for Kids. "What we work to do is provide instru
ments to kids who want to learn to play them, but
don't have access to them," says Sheedy. "We worked
with the UGA String Project, which is part of the
UGA orchestra education school. They run a program
[pairing college students] with kids in second to
fifth grade. We were able to buy them 14 instruments
total—violins, violas and cellos—so they could start
to establish a lending library for students who wanted
to participate but couldn't rent the instruments."
Beyond that interaction with the university, Keys
for Kids is attempting to work with aspiring music
students on a case-by-case basis. "We take donations
of instruments to refurbish to give to kids; if there is
a specific need that someone has, they can ask us on
their website," Sheedy says. She also noted that next
year, AthFest Educates! hopes to expand its scholastic
outreach to include visual arts as well.
As our national conversation continues to put the
education system on trial and budget crises are in
no short supply, how our kids learn about music is, to say the
least, a very up-in-the-air scenario. As it is in so many differ
ent ways, Athens remains an oasis in that regard. The music
business and education professionals who keep the wheels
turning at AthFest Educates! hope to increasingly interact
with the community around them. At their website you can
find a few different ways to help them out (with donations or
musical contributions) or be helped out in turn (getting instru
ments into the hands of young students or enriching your son
or daughter's music class). In both cases, you'd be helping to
keep Athens cool—and that is, after all, what an oasis does.
Jeff Tobias
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JUNE 15, 2011 FLAGPOLE.COM 15
