Raised by a single mother along with two siblings in the big city of Chicago, the UCF Symphony Orchestra director began going down a dead-end path in high school. Life at home was chaotic, and he didn’t like school.

“I felt aimless,” he says. “My compass wasn’t focused in the right direction.”

That was until his music instructors helped guide him back on track.

Park is now an associate professor of music, director of string music education and director of symphony and chamber orchestras in the College of Arts and Humanities. But beyond his day job, he’s also the education coordinator of A Gift For Music, a local program under the umbrella of A Gift For Teaching, founded on the idea that all children should have access to the life-changing benefits of a quality music education regardless of their socioeconomic status.

All the kids that A Gift For Music serves attend an Orange County Title I elementary, middle or high school or qualify for free or reduced lunch.

For Park, this program is personal.

“I know the power of music,” he says. “It can keep kids in school who may otherwise fall off the map.”

Over the past four years, he’s spent most of his Saturdays conducting free orchestra practice for about 100 students. Behind the scenes, though, he’s orchestrated much more; he’s also created a seamless pipeline from UCF to A Gift For Music.

He teaches college students and then places them in instructor roles in the program, where students learn how to play string instruments. It’s a win-win; students earn pay and real-world experience, and the organization has an endless pipeline of eager instructors who help expose the younger students to college – something that children from underserved communities don’t always have.

“The chance to learn from Chung and give back to A Gift For Music is one of the reasons I’m going to UCF for graduate school in the fall.” — Cesar Olmeda

“The chance to learn from Chung and give back to A Gift For Music is one of the reasons I’m going to UCF for graduate school in the fall,” says Cesar Olmeda, a bass player, who got involved with A Gift For Music when he was in third grade at Ventura Elementary School. “Without A Gift For Music, I wouldn’t be where I am right now as a musician.”

Olmeda entered A Gift For Music as a violin player. He was introduced to bass as he progressed from the free after-school weekday music lessons to the Saturday orchestra practices. He is just one of hundreds of students that A Gift For Music has seen go on to college.

About 90 percent of graduates of A Gift For Music go to college, says Park, even though students from Title I schools — where at least 40 percent of students are from low-income families — are less likely to advance beyond high school. In 2016, about 20 percent of dependent undergraduate students in the United States were from low-income families, according to the Pew Research Center.

“A Gift For Music provides a sense of security for these kids. It’s a place where they can talk about ambitions, good grades and can be around like-minded people,” Park says.

During Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month this May — and every month — Park recognizes the importance of representation.

“Life is sometimes easier when you come from certain backgrounds. It’s so important that there are people of color in prominent roles because if we don’t exist then people who come after us don’t think they can do it,” Park says. “I get chills just thinking about it.”

As T.S. Eliot states with such melancholy in his poem Ash Wednesday  — “Because these wings are no longer wings to fly / But merely vans to beat the air…” and as historian and writer David Fleming points out in his remarkable Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It, Culture has essentially become “merely decorative rather than structural.” Too many of us see Culture as something external to human beings, “merely decorative,” without any end other than entertainment.

Although our society conflates the two, entertainment and Culture are two distinct things. Music, theatre, poetry, literature are all part of the Culture, but they are not its totality. Without a context in Culture, art becomes mere entertainment.

Music, theatre, poetry, literature are all part of the Culture, but they are not its totality.

Writer and agrarian philosopher Wendell Berry, the man I consider to be the conscience of America, describes culture this way:

“…a communal order of memory, insight, value, work, conviviality, reverence, aspiration. It reveals the human necessities and the human limits. It clarifies our inescapable bonds to the earth and to each other. It assures that the necessary restraints are observed, the necessary work is done, and that it is done well.”

The first sentence states the obvious — however poetically. The next reminds us of something the marketers want us to deny. The final two ground us and remind us of our responsibilities. From my perspective, a culture like the one Berry describes can only happen effectively at a local level. In a society obsessed with scaling this may seem a radical notion, but familiarity can only emerge within a small circle. Genuine trust that acting in your own interest does not necessarily come at the expense of your neighbors can thrive only in the presence of familiarity. In a world of ever-diminishing natural resources, cooperation remains infinitely plentiful and necessary if we intend to help one another flourish.

The primary means of conveying Berry’s culture also opposes our societal understanding of how we inherit and absorb it. Storytelling and physical modeling transmit the vast majority of cultural memory. In other words, Culture is primarily passed down through generations “by rote,” a phrase that has taken on some negative connotations.

I often pose the following scenario to my students through a story. I ask them to imagine a young child asking his grandfather how he came to America. I ask them which they would prefer: being pulled onto his lap and told about the weeks it took to travel in the third-class cabin of a ship across the Pacific, with vivid descriptions of smells, sounds and hunger, a sly grin spreading across his face as he recounts smuggling heirloom seeds sewn into a jacket lining. Or the other option I give them is: “I self-published a book about it. Get it on Amazon.”

Although a book on Amazon might provide the same information efficiently and satisfy an immediate answer to the child’s question, it is hasty. Transmitting a culture by telling a story shouldn’t be hasty. It takes time, and it is these stories that entrance us. Bespoke and tailored to the ones the storytellers love, stories give a sense of belonging, of purpose and place, and greater meaning.

The written word alone cannot adequately convey Culture. The way Grandpa’s tempo races while recounting a moment of danger, the agogic ponderousness when he names his hometown, the improvised onomatopoeia when he recalls seeing San Francisco’s bright lights for the first time…These things simply cannot be conveyed through written words, at least not with the degree of specificity that immerses someone in a culture.

Culture’s exceeding fragility becomes undeniable when one that took hundreds or thousands of years to build disappears in the flash of an historical eye. Each generation acts as a cultural bridge to the next, and an entire culture can vanish when one generation’s stories remain untold.

The market economy tells us that culture is bought in a store, not made by ourselves and our neighbors. We need to push back, if ever so gently, on that notion.

In fact, our UCF students do create things with their hands, voices and feet. My faculty colleagues do pass on a culture through the stories we tell. After months of quarantine, we clearly need conversation and each other’s examples, not merely the written word. The UCF Symphony Orchestra is grateful to our administration for understanding this, supporting it, and taking the extraordinary step of allowing us to hold safe rehearsals in the Pegasus Grand Ballroom.

These rehearsals have granted us a drink of cold water after a trek in the desert. Desperate to continue drinking from the spring, we rehearse like our lives depend on it, already familiar with the sting of being removed from each others’ presence and ever mindful that it may be taken away from us again.

We refuse to take these fleeting moments for granted this year, and I hope that the preciousness of our time together remains imprinted upon the core culture of the orchestra throughout my time here.

Chung Park is the director of the UCF Symphony and Chamber Orchestras, head of string music education, and an assistant professor in the Department of Music. He can be reached at Chung.Park@ucf.edu.

The UCF Forum is a weekly series of opinion columns from faculty, staff and students who serve on a panel for a year. A new column is posted each Wednesday on UCF Today and then broadcast on WUCF-FM (89.9) between 7:50 and 8 a.m. Sunday. Opinions expressed are those of the columnists, and are not necessarily shared by the şŁ˝ÇÖ±˛Ą.

A collaboration with the UCF Music Department, Symphony stands as one of the Office of Student Involvement’s longest-standing traditions. Set to the theme of “Spring,” Chung Park, director for Orchestras and String Music Education, treated audience members to classics by Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Verdi and Sleeper. This year’s orchestra included students, Orlando community members, faculty and alumni.

“I am so proud of all the work that went into this incredible event,” said Lucy Sanchez, senior Biomedical Sciences student and CAB Fine Arts director. “Having the opportunity to bring campus and the Orlando community for such a beautiful evening is truly an honor.”

Symphony Under the Stars occurs every year on the third Thursday in April.

The multimedia performance, The Warped Side of the Universe, will feature composer and multi-Grammy winner Hans Zimmer, theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, and visual-effects artist and multi-Academy Award winner Paul Franklin as they weave phenomena into their show from space and time, such as supernova explosions and recently discovered gravitational waves that reach Earth. The evening will be experienced through music, video simulations, poetry and prose.

Joining in the performance at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts will be the musicians now on tour with Zimmer in Europe and a UCF string quartet. This is the first time Zimmer, Thorne and Franklin have come together to present this production.

“Many artists are motivated by science,” said Costas Efthimiou, a UCF associate professor of physics who knows Thorne and was instrumental in asking him to be a part of the April 8-16 festival. “I tried to think of a topic that would allow us to create an event in which both sides – scientist and artists – could be part of.”

Thorne, science advisor for Interstellar, is a professor emeritus at California Institute of Technology, and is known for his contributions in gravitational physics and astrophysics. The UCF performance is built on his friendship with Zimmer and Franklin, and their collaboration on director Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Michael Caine.

“I hope that the movie Interstellar inspires viewers to appreciate the beauty and power of science, and stimulates them to go learn more about this marvelous universe in which we live,” said Thorne, who hopes one day to view Earth from space.

Zimmer, who will conduct the music for The Warped Side of the Universe, is one of the most successful film composers of all time. He has also created the music for more than 150 films, including The Lion King, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, Gladiator, Rain Main, The Last Emperor, Inception, The Dark Knight Trilogy, and Driving Miss Daisy.

Zimmer, who used to visit the planetarium as a child to watch the stars and listen to music, has assembled a touring band that shares his love of science and discovery, such as songwriter and guitarist Michael Einziger of the band Incubus, who studied the history of science at Harvard, and violinist Ann Marie Simpson, who has taught college conceptual physics and chemistry and has performed with Mick Jagger, Pharrell Williams and Ringo Starr.

Franklin, who has created visual effects for more 30 films – including Inception and Interstellar, both of which brought him Academy Awards – will help bridge science and music at the UCF Celebrates the Arts performance.

Also on stage will be a quartet comprised of one UCF graduate student and three faculty members, including Chung Park, UCF director of orchestras.

Park said UCF is just the place to present this kind of exploratory performance combining STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and the arts.

“This is exactly the kind of place it could work well. If it’s going to work anywhere, it’s going to work here,” he said. “Everyone is so STEM, STEM, STEM these days, but at UCF we know we need to add some art to that.”

Park will play viola for the evening, along with faculty members Ayako Yonetani on violin and Laurel Stanton on cello, and graduate student Iryna Usova on second violin.

The Warped Side of the Universe will be presented at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 9, as one of the many events presented at UCF Celebrates the Arts, which is all free and open to the public. Tickets are required for all performances, but no more advance tickets are available for this show. Anyone hoping to obtain tickets for this performance should register for a hall pass and wait in line before the performance. Seats not claimed by ticketholders 10 minutes before the show may become available at the discretion of the floor manager.

More than 1,000 university students, 100 faculty members and some collaborative programs with outside partners will showcase theatre, dance, orchestra, choirs, big band, chamber music, cabaret, concert bands, opera, visual arts, studio art, gaming, animation, photography and film.

This is part of a series of stories about the April 8-16 events at UCF Celebrates the Arts 2016. All events are free, but tickets are required for performances and entrance into the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, 445 S. Magnolia Ave., Orlando. Ticketing and full schedule details are posted at .