Music

Barenaked Ladies' Ed Robertson and astronaut Chris Hadfield present MusiCounts instrument to Toronto School

by Anne T. Donahue

Toronto’s Hawthorne II Bilingual Alternative School was one of the 85 benefactors of MusiCounts’ Band Aid Grants today, receiving $10,000 towards instruments for their music program, and seeing Barenaked Ladies‘ frontman Ed Robertson and Canadian Space Agency Astronaut Chris Hadfield present them with their first new instrument.

“For me it’s about the fact that the arts make you better at whatever you decide to do,” Robertson explains. “And [the trend] over the past couple of decades in Canadian education has been to strip out some of the extra-curricular stuff in schools. And I know personally that’s the only stuff I cared about in school.”

“As we strip away music programs and extra-curricular activities, we’re giving kids less to be attached to, and we’re reducing the enrichment of their learning process and their engagement in it,” he continues. “So they don’t learn as well and they’re not as happy. To me, the three R’s of writing, reading and arithmetic really need to be the four R’s and add ‘rhythm’.”

Associated with The Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, MusiCounts also announced that it had awarded a total of $600 000 this year through 69 grants (in both $5000 and $10 000 incriments0, which will impact over 18 000 Canadian students in elementary, secondary and separate schools. Needless to say, Astronaut Chris Hadfield’s enthusiasm comes as no surprise.

“I’m no real musician, but it’s still very important to me,” Hadfield admits. “There are lots of musicians that are astronauts – or the other way around. And now to spend six months on the space station, I would be lost without the opportunity to play some music – it’s an important part of my life.”

“Just because people are wearing space suits doesn’t mean that they don’t really love the creation and the depth of music,” he adds. “The earliest age that you can give people better tools, the more they’ll be able to accomplish, so I really think what MusiCounts is doing is filling a niche that is always underfilled. So I’m very pleased to be a part of this, and of course to put it all together: to do it with Ed and to recognize, to demonstrate the fact that there’s a link between all of it – it’s just the perfect fit.”

Grants are determined by economic need, inventory and condition of instruments, number of students, dedication of school staff and the all-encompassing impact that the grant would ensure. For a full list of schools awarded, please click here, or visit the MusiCounts official website for more information.