On the first day of every month, the sound of string music emanates from the cafeteria at Thurgood Marshall Elementary School in Newark, Del.

Second-graders sit at the tables and on the floor in front of four UD students and watch as they play their instruments. Cheering when they recognize a song, the children snap their fingers and wave their arms to the beat of Row, Row, Row Your Boat and Scotland’s Burning.

The four music majors who make up the Blue Hen Quartet visit the school each month as part of Project MUSIC (Music Uniting Students Inspiring Communities), a program that began last summer with Suzanne Burton, assistant professor of music.

Burton says she came up with the idea of bringing classical music into local schools after seeing several presentations at music education conferences. Burton, who teaches music at Thurgood Marshall in a partnership between the school and the University, took the idea to the education committee of the Delaware Symphony Orchestra, whose members agreed to support it.

Brittany Snyder, AS ’08, the project’s coordinator, says she was looking for a service-learning project in the music department that would complement her music management major when she came across Project MUSIC. “I found it really interesting to link together two performing groups to a program giving children the chance to experience live classical music,” Snyder says.

The members of the Blue Hen Quartet are Erin Flynn, AS ’07, and Janice Nieves, AS ’08, on violin, violist Sam Peters, AS’08, and cellist Denisa Shahu, AS’07.

Snyder hired Gracin Dorsey, AS ’07, to arrange music for the quartet, which meets with all six of the second-grade classes over a three-hour period.

“The quartet is not just performing,” Burton says. “They’re actually going in and teaching the students musical concepts and skills. That’s what really makes this program unique.”

—Julia Parmley, AS ’07