Academics

Arts

While every Falmouth Academy student is introduced to the fine arts through the arts-in-humanities program and to music through our developing music-in-the-humanities program, students may engage in a year-long study of fine arts, photography, woodworking and music through FA’s 80-minute, once-a-week elective courses. In the studio arts students may choose from drawing, painting, ceramics and sculpture. A range of courses allows students from beginner to advanced levels to find a rewarding challenge.

As with other aspects of the core curriculum, arts teachers ensure that students develop a fundamental base of knowledge and skills in their chosen medium. In woodworking, students are encouraged to design their own project and then bring it to reality with the close coaching of their woodworking instructors. Here, finished projects may be as finely-wrought as an inlaid chess board or as elegant as a writing desk. Painting students study light, dark, and shades of gray long before they uncap their colored paints. Photography and painting classes take field trips to the Knob, the Punch Bowl, and other locales near the school. Ceramics projects range from small pinch pots to graceful hand-thrown vases and raku-fired masks.

Our commitment to exercising the creative minds of our students allows them to live and study surrounded by art. Their work is on display in the Falmouth Academy Gallery in a series of rotating exhibitions featuring particular class projects or works from several classes. The Spring Art Show includes senior retrospectives as well as work from students in all grades, in all art, photography, and woodworking courses.

In 1991, Falmouth Academy founded the Small Independent Schools Art League (SISAL) which holds an annual juried show of student work from some twenty-two independent schools in the Boston-Providence-Worcester area.

Four concerts a year plus a variety of off-campus performances give our students a chance to share their love of music with the community. Membership in our ensembles (Chamber Orchestra, Instrumental Ensemble, Brass Choir, or Jazz Ensembles) is by audition. The vocal ensemble welcomes students of all levels of experience and performs a wide array of music, including folk and classical music from other countries and many eras.

The ensembles also entertain our elderly neighbors at the JML Care Center, Heritage or Woodbriar. Falmouth Academy takes part in the annual Children Helping Children Concert produced by a coalition of the independent and Catholic schools on the Cape. Proceeds from the concert benefit programs such as Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Cape Cod and the Islands. Our Chamber Orchestra has performed with the Hölderlin Gymnasium Kammerorchester both in Heidelberg and here in Falmouth. The Cool Nights Jazz Band tours White Mountains resorts every summer. FA student groups frequently are invited to perform at local events such as art openings, annual dinners, holiday festivals and other social occasions.

Students often are asked to take dramatic roles in their English and history classes. Students also have opportunities in the drama electives to study both the basics and the finer points of acting and theater design, which students put to use in four annual productions. In the fall and winter, they present one-acts by playwrights such as A. R. Gurney, Shakespeare, Susan Glaspell or Jean Anouilh. A second mid-winter performance features lower-school students. Recent full-length spring productions have included Metamorphoses (Zimmerman), The Mousetrap (Christie), The Tempest (Shakespeare), and our first full-length musical, Pippin.

Each production has, in addition to the student actors, students assistant directors, who work with the technical staff to design the sets, lighting and sound. Because Falmouth Academy encourages students to stretch beyond their level of comfort, these productions often reveal ewly discovered talents and set students on new paths they may choose to pursue and FA and beyond