Score!

It was definitely not your grandma’s field trip: a fortunate few felt positively beamed up into “another world” (as junior Peyton Chesley described it) when they were invited to sit right behind the conductor during a recording session for a new feature film, The Last Airbender. The highly acclaimed James Newton Howard CdeP 1969—father of Jackson ’12 and composer of countless original scores, among them Defiance, The Dark Knight, King Kong, The Fugitive, and Michael Clayton—issued the “Come on down!” to Thacher’s Music Director Greg Haggard and a few of his music students, so off they went to Culver City’s Sony Studios —sophomores Emily Jordon, Paule Voevodsky, Bea Taylor, Bridget Park, Jackson Howard, and Jin Yeo Jung; Peyton;and seniors Sam Meyer, Laura Ammons, and Trudy Park (as well as Greg’s wife and chief organizer Tami)—first, for a pre-session tour of the recording studio, from the mixing console room to the sound stage, and then to meet the conductor, as well as the film’s director, M. Night Shamalyan, who has worked with Mr. Howard on six feature length films. “This is,” Shamalyan said before the session started, “the best music James has ever written for my films.” And it would be recorded on a stage “considered to be one of the two top in the world,” said Greg—the other being Abbey Road Studios in England. Countless classics have been recorded in this space, including The Wizard of Oz.

It was the genial Mr. Howard himself who took the students on the tour around the facility and the orchestra, talking all the way along about the art of scoring and recording, answering questions, and prompting the students’ unqualified positive response to the whole experience.

“There is nothing,” Peyton said, “like being in the same room as an extraordinarily talented 100+ piece orchestra. It was as if I had entered another world—one defined solely through music. The feeling was indescribable. Beautiful. Moving. I will remember [it] for the rest of my life.” Trudy also struggled for words to express what it was like “observing [the] orchestra's magnificence. I was awe-struck at their ability to bring out the mood of the movie. And Mr. Howard's music—it was simply beautiful.”

Sam agreed. “The trip . . . was probably the most amazing thing I've done this year. Mr. Howard was so nice and welcomed us onto the sound stage with open arms. The music itself was incredible and emotionally overwhelming; I absolutely cannot wait to see the film so that I can hear the entire score and whisper to the person sitting next to me that I was there when it was recorded. [The trip] was yet another reaffirmation that I want to go into the music industry. I feel so fortunate to have had such an incredible opportunity!” Jack Sligh marveled at “the way they'd do a take, review it, and then actually change it pretty significantly for the next take. It was amazing, especially since no matter which version they used, it all sounded so natural and beautiful.”

On another school trip to the greater LA area, Latin teacher Claire Kendrick CdeP 1999 ushered her Level I students into the wonders of the Getty Villa a couple of months ago—the portion of the larger museum that holds their antiquities and was built as a recreation of a first century AD villa.  Exciting value-added synchronicity: an entire room was dedicated to The Odyssey (which the 9^th graders were reading at the time) and The Illiad.

On the horizon: as part of a decade-long tradition, the entire Class of 2013 will take the class day this week to get up close and personal with The Bard at A Noise Within Theatre in Glendale, where they’ll see Much Ado About Nothing—the Shakespeare play they are studying this month.

And in the next couple of weeks, Kristen Finch, DVM will truck the Veterinary Medicine class to visit the Humphrey, Giacopuzzi, and Associates Equine Hospital where they’ll translate their book-learning to the real deal, hock, sinew, and croup.