The massive Sherwood Hall won’t know what hit it, with students from 41 schools and home school groups from throughout Monterey County descending this Thursday and Friday. Since the 6,000 students can’t fit in the hall at once, they’ll arrive in waves over the course of four performances.

Many of the students come from Salinas, but some are trekking to the show from as far off as Aromas, Big Sur or San Juan Bautista. These kids are in for a creative fusion of performance and narration that illuminates basic musical concepts called “The Art and Science of Music.” Monterey Symphony’s principal tuba player and educational specialist Forrest Byram will weave the series of pieces into an informative story, using paintings, poems, and scientific truths as analogies for understanding music.

The show draws the students in with two pieces they will most likely recognize, an excerpt from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and an arrangement of “America the Beautiful.” Byram will use the patriotic piece to illustrate how music can express a relatively fixed meaning; Gabriel Fauré’s Sicilienne from Pelléas and Mélisande will follow it to show how music can sometimes also have purely subjective meaning.

The concert will also reveal how a complete work is constructed from small building blocks, by way of short sound bites interspersed with narration that slowly build up to a piece in its entirety. As the orchestra plays the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Byram will compare it to a Lego creation.

As he makes the transition into “El Niño Perdido” – a popular Mexican tune played here in a fusion Mariachi and Banda style – Byram will use a haiku about a frog landing in a pond to illustrate the idea of sound waves: Just as the frog sends out visible waves through the water, so it sends out invisible sound waves through the air. The orchestra will then play “El Niño Perdido” in various different octaves to reveal how pitch alters tone color. This makes for a good transition into Ravel’s “Boléro,” a piece which is essentially an experiment in tone color, with different instruments taking turns playing the same repeated melodic pattern.

In keeping with the goal of creating points of access, the Monterey Symphony is bringing in guest conductor Ben Wallfish, who has done the orchestration for the films Nanny McFee and Pride and Prejudice, all the way from London, England. Wallfish does have a connection to the Monterey Peninsula, as he is the son of regular Bach Festival violinist Elizabeth Wallfish, but he’s certainly expanded far beyond his roots, conducting the orchestras of several other films as well as the London Symphony Orchestra, the English Chamber Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

The students being bussed in to Sherwood Hall to see this talent at work have received free tickets through their schools, along with educational packets to help teachers prepare their students for the concert. Tickets are no longer available, but according to educational coordinator Diane Cadei, the students receiving this gift are in for a treat.

“[Byram] has the kids in the palm of his hand the whole time,” she says.

THE ART AND SCIENCE OF MUSIC plays 9:30am and 10:45am May 27 and 28, at Sherwood Hall, Salinas Community Center, 940 N. Main St., Salinas. 645-1124.