On October 12 the TSO Percussion Ensemble will kick off the 2024-25 Just for Kids free concert series with a unique show created by Trevor Barroero, TSO principal percussion. Ahead of the concert we sat down with Trevor to talk about his inspiration and process for building a Just for Kids program and what he hopes the kids audience will take away from the show.
Inspiration and Process
The title of this year’s show is Captain Crunch Cooks His Lunch. We follow the journey of Captain Crunch as he cooks up some beats with his friends while they jam out on a variety of kitchen sounds. We’ll be making music with everything from cheese graters to pepper grinders to saltshakers to water glasses to pots and pans and more! I basically walked around my kitchen, opened drawers, and asked, “can I make music with this?” The heart of the show is a three-movement work I composed entitled The Ingredients of Percussion. I am now the proud owner of over 9 pepper grinders, since I kept searching to find some that actually made a decent sound! I spent a lot of time at thrift stores flicking glasses and scraping kitchen utensils until I found some that I liked.
I remember growing up in Tucson and attending the Just 4 Kids concerts when I was a kid, so these shows have a really special importance in my heart as a tenured member of the TSO nowadays. The past couple of years, as leader of the group, I’ve poured countless hours into writing original compositions and arrangements to make the J4K programs as captivating and as exciting as possible. We practice just as hard (if not harder) for these programs since the music I write is not easy! This is an opportunity for TSO audience members (and their kiddos) to see us up-front and center playing dozens of different percussion instruments.
Takeaways
The entire concept behind this show is to increase the accessibility of music making. The world of percussion is such a special way to introduce young children to music because literally anything can be a percussion instrument. By having the percussion quartet perform pieces on regular household objects, my hope is that the kids in our audience will learn that they too can be musicians and make music just like us! You don’t need expensive instruments in order to express your creativity and create musical sounds.
The show will include all four regular members of our percussion quartet: myself, Fred Morgan (2nd Percussionist), Chris Herman (3rd Percussionist), and Alana Wiesing (Principal Timpanist). Fred will be making his return as a pirate for the third year in a row. We’ve seen him on his pirate ship, and we’ve seen him blast off to space. But this year, Captain Morgan is taking on a new role as Captain Crunch! It started as an inside joke with our quartet to have the pirate return for every single kids’ show, but Fred’s pirate voice is too brilliant to ignore. The kids start giggling as soon as he starts shouting his pirate nonsense!!
Free tickets for Captain Crunch Cooks His Lunch are available now.
