Ahman Green joins GBSO team for youth project
Friday, October 12, 2012
Greenbay Press Gazette
The Green Bay Symphony Orchestra has tapped former Green Bay
Packers running backAhman Green to help carry the ball for its
expanding, youth-minded Music for a Great City program.
Green may find himself with baton in hand at a coming pops concert.
“Just like I always told my coaches, ‘Tell me exactly what I need to do,
and I’ll try to get it done,’” he said Thursday at an event to make the
announcement at the Weidner Center. “It’ll be fun. I like to learn new
things.”
Last year, approximately 1,400 Green Bay sixth-graders participated
in Music for a Great City. Music-based activities included visits by
music director Donato Cabrera and GBSO musicians, as they do again
this year.
About 900 students and their parents attended a GBSO concert last
year, “many for the first time,” said Michael Stefiuk, executive
director.
Green will be part of a public relations campaign, Stefiuk said. “He’s
going to be involved in our concerts. Hopefully, we’ll get him into the
schools to talk about the correlation between being healthy physically
and healthy mentally, and how that comes about with the
participation in music and/or sports.”
Green spoke of his four children as “brainy” and active in sports. Two
daughters are in dance and 15-year-old Ahmani plays the clarinet —
at age 2 she appeared in the powerhouse musical “Ragtime” at the
Weidner. He spoke of his father, from the musical city of New Orleans,
getting him interested in guitar for two years.
Green played for the Packers from 2000 to 2006 and in 2009 and is
the team’s all-time leading rusher. He is co-owner of the Green Bay
Blizzard and D1 Green Bay sports training venture. He is co-host of
“Locker Room” and “Green & Gold,” Packers-related TV shows on
WFRV, Channel 5, and statewide.
“Like Donato said, just like football practice you’ve got to practice and
put all the hours in to get the play right,” Green said. “And the same
goes for a pianist or a guitarist, to get the timing right.”
Already this school year, Music for a Great City has involved about
100 fifth-grade students at Martin and Wequiock elementary schools
in a project interpreting music as visual art. The art was shown and
about a dozen students were part of Thursday’s announcement event.
The program has expanded into the Howard-Suamico School District,
and a goal is to reach students “from preschool all the way up to
seniors,” Stiefiuk said.
On the heels of participating in Music for a Great City last year,
Franklin Middle School band director Christy Delany reported an
increase of 85 students in the band and orchestra program this year.
“This is a program that essentially has become our capital campaign,”
Stefiuk said. “It’s easy for us to go out and talk about this program.”
The project is funded by corporate and individual sponsorships, and
no government money is involved, Stefiuk said.
Green will participate in the orchestra’s “A Night at the Movies” pops
concert Nov. 10 at the Weidner Center.
Music for a Great City is “completely related to what we do in San
Francisco,” said Cabrera, who is the San Francisco Symphony’s
resident conductor.
“I do four weeks of educational concerts in San Francisco, and that’s
two concerts a day five days a week for four weeks,” he said. “It’s
quite a big undertaking over there. But I love it, it’s one of the things I
love to do the most.”
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