It's a 'snare guitar,' " one little girl says quite matter-of-factly. Four girls from Julianne Eng's fourth- and fifth-grade class explain the ins and outs of their newest creation, pointing out main features of the design on their drawing, "It's got a button for turning on the snare drum at the top and an amp built in at the bottom - and it's solar-powered." Eng puts on a CD and Saint-Saëns' Algerian Suite thumps mildly in the background amid the chatter of young voices. While the girls continue embellishing the neck of their snare guitar with flames that would make Ted Nugent proud, the other kids in the comfortably cluttered room at Argonne Alternative Elementary in the Richmond District of San Francisco are working on their own fascinating menagerie of instruments - a "viano," a "clarolin," "drymbals" and other exotic inventions, which they describe with varying degrees of technical detail. One pair of girls is carefully copyrighting their instrument's description, and they casually, but deftly, turn the paper over when I come closer to have a look.
As the kids themselves are quick to explain, it's all part of the San Francisco Symphony's Adventures in Music, one of the most ambitious music education outreach programs in the nation, and one that aims to integrate music into the lives of every first- through fifth-grade kid in the San Francisco Unified School District.
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