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When in doubt, take things
into your own hands. Who can you trust more than yourself?
Terry and Richard Grosvenor, Newport parents and artists, have
followed that dictum in their effort to provide their own children and others
with healthy, educational entertainment. Against the backdrop of mass
popular culture and mass media-driven imagery and definitions, the Grosvenors
are carving their own little world of music which has a strong cultural base
and an open-ended learning theme.
"Fun Songs for Tadpoles and Frogs," Terry's second album, has
just been released this summer and is enjoying a healthy local response.
Filled with songs inspired by poetry that is accessible to children, she
and her husband Rick, who co-produced the album under their Grosvenor Publishing
label, hope it will help restore a traditional sense of entertainment among
kids.
"We're not trying to turn back the clock exactly," says Terry.
"We are using older verse with the perspective of changing values and
times. The whole idea is to give kids positive experiences that tap
into their interests. "The whole point of setting the songs to poems
by Lewis Carroll, James Whitcomb Riley and other poets is to expose the kids
to real poetry. You hope that they will come back to it when they're
older. If they reject it, that's the way it is. But we have to
try to expose them to it."
Terry has been doing a lot of children's music and a lot of
work with children in local schools. She's also been active in a musical
way with the Girl Scouts of Rhode Island, issuing an album last year in
conjunction with them, the proceeds of which went to fund Girl Scout troop
and camp programs in 45 communities in Rhode Island and southeastern New
England.
The genesis of the recent album dates back at least three years
to the Grosvenors' experiences with their own four children. Concerned
about media influences that surround kids from MTV to violent cartoons to
video games and the constant lure of passive television, they have tried
to activate their kids by emphasizing reading and participation in the
arts.
"We're very concerned about this for our children and all children,
really," says Rick. "Terry's music reaches kids in a way that is attractive
to them, but it is culturally based and traditional. It has modern
sounds, but it all comes from a sound cultural base. There's a message
under it that encourages kids to dance, to read, to want to learn more, and
above all to participate."
Terry says she hopes the current "media brainwashing" will
burn itself out, but even if kids were to begin to resist the television
lure, she thinks artists need to present positive material in their own
communities for children. "Every artist goes through a phase where
you hope to be successful in a big way, with national |
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recognition and all that," she says.
"But I think that what we've realized is that what's important and lasting
for artists is to do something in your own community that helps build it
and strengthen it."
As an example, Terry has worked quite a bit with children at
Newport's Cranston-Calvert School, which her children attended. Last
year, the kids worked with her on a rap song about anger, and she also did
some of her poetry songs with them too. "The kids really got into it,"
she says. "They learned four pages of poetry so they could sing the song.
The interest is there. It just has to be piqued."
"We're convinced that communities need artists to lead.
We really have to get away from this idea in our culture that artists have
little value unless they are stars. There's still a sense that you're
either a star or nothing. We've lost the value of doing, of participating,
and we need to restore that."
So, the message the Grosvenors give their children at home
and other children in the community is that you have to be involved in life,
that you won't enjoy it as much if you merely sit and watch it on TV.
They worry that kids today are losing their imaginations as they sit in front
of the television watching music videos or programs that flash sound and
vision bites in front of them.
"Music is a very strong medium, as we know," Rick says. "It
can engage kids in many ways. The trouble with a lot of it today is
that it's filled with negative imagery and ideas, and isn't based on sound
values or positive cultural traditions. But the worst part is that
it makes passive receptors out of kids rather than activating them in any
positive way."
Terry says she got a great taste of kids who want to be active
participants last summer with the World Scholar-Athlete Games, for whom she
wrote a theme song that was performed at the Providence Civic Center by a
chorus of over 100 young people from the United States and dozens of other
countries.
"It was a great experience for us," she says. "Those
kids were terrific, and it was thrilling to have the song performed in front
of 8,000 people at the Civic Center."
She's also involved in some radio programming for children,
"Listen To You," which airs on Sunday afternoons on WADK-AM in Newport.
Those programs, she says, are beginning to catch on, and they have the added
attraction for kids of involving them in the programs themselves.
The Grosvenors practice what they preach about family
involvement. Terry brought her daughter Amanda into the album with
her on two songs, including one that Amanda sings solo. Terry's mother, Anne
StiIlman, sings the album's final number. "My mother always read to me when
I was a child, and those memories are very vivid," Terry says. "I try to
keep up that kind of tradition with my children." Rick, a graphic artist
and painter, comes from an artistic family. His father, Richard |
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Grosvenor, is one of Newport's best-known
artists. "It's interesting when you realize that most artists have
to find a way to support themselves outside of their art, "Rick notes.
"Terry and I built a real estate business here, which I enjoy, but I still
think of myself as an artist. One of the things we're trying to do
with all our projects is emphasize that everyone can be an artist and that
you don't have to think of success as having to do just with being rich and
famous."
With an international background that stretches back to periods
in the early 70s when she lived in Brazil and in London, Terry can bring
a broad vision to local kids. Before those stints overseas she spent
summers in Tokyo from 1963-65. She spent part of the decade of the
60s working in New York in the advertising, public relations and recording
industries. And she has stayed musically active for three decades,
with a diverse background that has included recording sessions in New York,
several stints with local bands in Newport, collaborations with children's
dance and theatre groups and composing and producing music for a public
television program and for a miniseries on the Civil War produced by one
of Ted Turner's networks.
For most of the 80s, in between raising four children with
Rick, she continued to compose music of various kinds, but today finds herself
driven to do more writing for children. "My primary aim with this new
album is to expose young children to verse, especially old poetry," she
says. "I also wanted to do it because some of this work is not being
republished.
"But the thing you find is that the kids, because of the music,
learn the poetry without even realizing it. It's' something that makes
an impression on them, a memory that will never leave them, and it's a very
positive memory."
Terry Grosvenor's album, "Fun Songs for Frogs and Tadpoles,"
has plenty of appeal for kids from preschool to perhaps pre-teen. It's lively,
clever, intelligent and very danceable. "I found with my own kids that
they play the songs over and over again," she says.
Cassette tapes are available in Newport at: Papers, Harvest
Natural Foods, The Preservation Society Shop on Bannister's
Wharf, The Breakers' gift shop and the Newport Art Museum; in
Middletown at Island Books; in Portsmouth at The Little Red Lighthouse; in
Tiverton at Little Purls; in Wickford at The Toy Cellar; in East Greenwich
at Juggles; and in Cranston at Borders Books. |
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