Dinner Music Club Brings Harmony to Murray Mealtimes

by Syl Morrone

(November 1, 2007) Imagine having the Beatles entertaining your family with Rubber Soul while enjoying filet of sole. Or Patsy Cline joining you with some real country singin’ while you’re serving some real country cookin’. Perhaps Bob Marley could sing some reggae while you’re cooking your ragu.

The good news is that these artists and a host of others are already packaged and prepared for you to take home and enjoy at dinner. Which is exactly the way that Joe Brady, Murray Avenue School music teacher, planned it. It was his idea to create the unique Murray Dinner Music Club.

Murray Avenue School music teacher Joe Brady displays some of the selections from the Dinner Music Club designed to bring families together for dinner and broaden children’s exposure to different kinds of music.

“I did it for two very important reasons,” he stated. “First, I love music and the power it can have on people. Second, I wanted that power to bring families together, even if it was only for dinner for a night.”

With studies showing that fewer and fewer families sit down regularly for meals, Mr. Brady is hoping that his Dinner Music Club will help to reverse that disturbing trend. “Everybody loves some kind of music, so why not package a whole range of styles and genres and let families listen to them while they’re having dinner? And when they’re finished, they can discus their thoughts about what they heard,” he explained.

The way the Dinner Music Club works is somewhat like a book group: 20 families from the Murray Avenue School sign up for a three-week period. During that time, each family agrees to listen to seven CDs featuring artists such as those mentioned above, plus Stevie Wonder, Billie Holiday, Claude Debussy, Miles Davis and Aaron Copeland. Then they share their comments and impressions with one another via an online chat group. After 21 days, the CDs are returned to the school, where another group of 20 Murray families will receive the same CDs.

Funded through a grant from the Mamaroneck Schools Foundation, the Murray Dinner Music Club seems to be having precisely the kind of response that Mr. Brady was hoping for.

According to Pam Friedman and her family, listening to the CDs “was a nice change from Z100, and sparked some nice conversations that started me reliving moments from the past that I hadn’t thought of in a long, long time.”

The Ballard family discussed Patsy Cline and the way her sad songs “made her voice sound almost like she was crying, and how the country beat made you feel like you could be horseback riding.”

For the Bokert family, there was great enjoyment in listening to Claude Debussy and picking out the various instruments they heard. They also noticed that the music made them think of movies like Star Wars, Snow White and other Disney movies.

As a result, Mr. Brady is very optimistic, saying that more and more families are expressing an interest in the Dinner Music Club and stopping by to register. All of which seems to prove that while music hath charms that soothe the savage breast; more importantly it hath the power to unite today’s scattered suburban families.

Indeed, as one mother stated, “An unintended (or perhaps intended) benefit of the Music Club is that it made me realize how seldom the whole family sits down all together to share a meal.”

The Mamaroneck Schools Foundation is a volunteer, non-profit community organization that provides public schools in Larchmont and Mamaroneck with funds for innovative programs, materials and enhanced facilities and equipment beyond the scope of the regular school budget. The Foundation can be reached at (914) 698-9079, or visit its website at www.MamaroneckSchoolsFoundation.com

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