Sudbury Symphony Orchestra partners with library to bring books to life

Members of the Sudbury Symphony Orchestra are partnering with the Greater Sudbury Public Library to bring books to life with musical performances.

From Saturday, Sept. 16 to Wednesday, April 10 the orchestra will host eight events at a number of library locations across the city.

Joey Salvalaggio, the Sudbury Symphony Orchestra's education director and principal oboist, said they received a grant from the Trillium Foundation to bring the partnership to life.

The first performance on Saturday, at the main library branch at 11 a.m., will feature  Salvalaggio and two of his colleagues putting music to a book called Song in the City.

"It's about a young blind girl who experiences the sounds of the city that she's in as music," Salvalaggio said.

"And her grandmother just hears it as noise until the end of the book, where the little girl covers her grandmother's eyes and she just listens. And then she kind of gets it."

The book features onomatopoeias – words like "pow" that resemble the sound they make – which the musicians will express with their instruments.

Salvalaggio said partnerships like that one expose children to classical music and can spark a sense of creativity in them.

In another project Salvalaggio said he worked with the Rainbow District School Board where he used examples of classical music to inspire children to write original stories.

"And watching a child react to their original content or their spoken vocal part in the story, watching them respond to that, is mind blowing," he said.