New After School Guitar Club Aims to Give City Middle School Students the "Incredible Gift" of Music
Local musician Pete Mealy started the club this year.
By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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Within a few hours of publishing a Facebook post asking for donations of instruments for the after-school guitar club he hoped to establish, Peter Mealy had received 14 acoustic guitars and $1,100.
That was enough to give a guitar to every student who signed up for the new club at Walker-Grant Middle School, which started meeting in January—and it’s also enough to outfit a guitar club at James Monroe High School that Mealy hopes to start up this fall.
Mealy and his wife Laurie Rose Griffith, both guitarists, have performed regularly around Fredericksburg for decades and Mealy has also taught individual and group guitar lessons “forever,” he said.
He was inspired during a January meeting of the Walker-Grant PTO to use his skill and passion for teaching to create a new opportunity for Fredericksburg’s middle school students—and give them the gift of music.
“Music is very cathartic—it’s like a panacea,” Mealy said. “Every gig I play with my wife is like the first one ever. It’s never any less exciting. It’s an incredible gift that I don’t take for granted.”
Guitar Club met for the first time in January and membership has grown from four to about seven students. Each of them gets to take home a guitar, Mealy said.
The students came to the club with varying degrees of experience and interest.
“One of them can bang out some chords. One is a total beginner,” Mealy said. “Some of them already play in the band or orchestra. One of them will ask me about things like the diminished scale and the locrian mode. And there are kids who just want ot rock out.”
Mealy himself is a self-taught guitarist and he’s published several books on technique. He’s been working with the students on understanding scale and chord relationships.
“If you can learn four chords in order—G, D, E minor, and C—you can play hundreds of songs,” he said.
He’s also working with the students on basic music reading and accompaniment skills. With these basic skills and with practice, he said, they could “go out and get an accompanist gig in six weeks.”
For an upcoming meeting of the club, he’s asked students to come with a song they want to learn.
“We’ll use those songs as a vehicle for learning concepts,” Mealy said.
Walker-Grant’s after-school clubs meet twice a month on Fridays. There was a gap of about a month between two of the sessions, and Mealy said he could tell the students had been practicing during that gap.
Parents have also sent him videos of their children sitting in their rooms, playing songs and singing.
“I encourage the students to also teach themselves,” he said. “They can go out and get the information—it’s all there. If you want to play, go play!”
In addition to maintaining the club at the middle school and expanding it to the high school next year, Mealy said he would also like to offer guitar as an elective, like band and orchestra.
He said it can be easier for students to keep up with the guitar after graduating from high school than it is to keep up with the trombone, for example.
For Mealy, the guitar has been “an incredible gift that I don’t take for granted,” and he’s looking forward to sharing that gift and making it accessible to Fredericksburg’s public school students coming years.
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