Giving Kids the Keys to the Natural Kingdom

At Being:Art, Sean Murphy and Anne Froning create musical instruments designed for young people to experience outdoors.

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Tucked into an easy-to-miss corner off a busy intersection on the outskirts of Memphis is the ultimate urban farmstead, nearly an acre in size, dotted with flowers, small vegetable plots, and shade trees. You might never guess that a brisk, artist-led business was thriving here, offering performances, workshops, handcrafted instruments, music and dance classes, and residencies.

“This was my maternal grandparents’ place. They moved in when my mom was still a child, and my grandma lived here until she died,” says Sean Murphy, the sousaphone-swinging, high-stepping leader of the Mighty Souls Brass Band, as he shows me around his family’s longtime property near Bartlett. We come to one of the largest sheds. “My aunts and uncles would come out here and play school. You can see remnants of that here.”

Chalk marks on the wall spell out “Reynolds School,” the meaning of the name lost to time, the haphazardly scrawled letters relics of Murphy’s aunts’ and uncles’ youthful enthusiasm. “Billy X, Terry XX” reads another chalk scribble. A tally of kisses?

As a kid, Murphy also played here. “When I was growing up, this was where all the deep freezers were. And there were a bunch of them!” he laughs, recalling an era when growing food and putting it up for the winter was still second nature to many. “I was outside all the time as a kid,” says Murphy of those earlier days. So was his wife, Anne Froning, growing up in the countryside of Kentucky’s Pewee Valley.

Today, the two artists/entrepreneurs recognize that such experiences — playing, roaming, and exploring outside — are rare among today’s device-fixated young people. Now, working closely with the Nebraska-based company Nature Explore, they aim to make the great outdoors more fun for kids via their mom-and-pop business — run from the very acreage where Murphy once played.

“I rented the place from my family for a few years and eventually we bought it,” Murphy explains. While he and Froning once lived here, it’s now used solely for their business, Being:Art, one focus of which is supplying the unlikely niche of durable outdoor musical instruments for parks and playgrounds.

The woody notes of marimbas and xylophones ring out through the trees while Murphy talks, as Being:Art’s employees test the products they’re assembling in an adjacent workshop.

Over the past two decades, Froning and Murphy have worked as part of a growing movement that seeks to reverse the “nature deficit disorder” in today’s children, whereby, as numerous studies have shown, a lack of exposure to the outdoors inhibits learning, creativity, and other aspects of mental health. In the late ’90s, research by the Dimensions Educational Research Foundation (from which Nature Explore grew) revealed that one way to unlock kids’ connection to the natural world is with literal keys. But not the keys that open doors; rather, the note-keys that ring out when you strike any marimba or xylophone you happen to encounter. Froning and Murphy are all about making such encounters happen, under the open sky.

Murphy holds up one of the keys, a polished rectangle of Brazilian Ipe wood with a concave arc cut from one side, making it thinner in the center. When strung or supported by its thick ends on a frame and hit with a mallet, the wooden block sounds like a bell. Arranged in rows on the frames that the studio also builds, the keys are the musical heart of Being:Art products featured in Nature Explore’s catalog and designs, which also include akambiras, derived from an African xylophone and tuned differently from the South American-derived marimba.

Because such instruments tend to resonate with kids and their parents, they play an important role in Nature Explore’s outdoor classroom designs. “We draw a Being:Art instrument into every single one of our plans,” says Heather Fox of Dimensions. “And we have more than 500 certified Nature Explorer classrooms in every state across the country.” She emphasizes that the marimbas are not mere diversions, but provide substantial educational value.

“The thing that makes these marimbas and akambiras so special is that they’re musically created,” she says. “A lot of times folks will introduce a music area to their preschool or elementary school and it’ll be more of a ‘pots and pans, make noise’ experience. With Being:Art, we were able to put instruments into the outdoor space that were sturdy, high quality, beautiful, and that supported learning music along the way, because they’re tuned as musical instruments.”

Creating well-tuned instruments is a challenge. The amount of wood removed from the middle of each key determines how flat or sharp it will be; if you saw out too much, the note may be lower than desired. And if you’re too flat, you have to start over with a fresh piece of Ipe. It’s a painstaking process.

Knowing what it takes to accurately tune a marimba in this manner, Murphy proudly points to the “C4” etched into the end of one key, destined to line up with a dozen others on one of Being:Art’s various instruments. “Here’s a key tuned to C4, or middle C,” he says. “At first I just chiseled out the cavity in each key. Eventually I learned to use a bandsaw to cut that shape out, then sand it down to tune it. Then I would write the pitch and the number on there with a Sharpie.”

He shakes his head in wonder at the hours spent perfecting such cuts, then turns to a large, computer-controlled router sitting just under where “Reynolds School” is scrawled on the wall. “But a year and a half ago, we got the CNC [Computer Numerical Control] router and I learned how to program it.” He sets some Ipe blocks on it, turns it on, and the self-guided blade shaves a precise amount of wood from each block and engraves the note’s name on top, four keys at a time.

Then he takes them to a tabletop sander, relying on his ears and technology as he taps each key into a tuner’s microphone, checks for a precise pitch, then sands down the center a bit more until it’s a perfect C, D, E, F, G, A, or B — the so-called natural tones of the Western scale. It ensures that kids are learning and hearing traditional music in Nature Explore’s outdoor classrooms.

It’s a far cry from how Froning and Murphy began, and a mark of just how much their business, which began more conceptually, has grown. In the early days, neither Murphy nor Froning had developed any woodworking skills. Froning studied landscape architecture, dance, and fine arts at the University of Kentucky, where her diverse interests were sometimes at odd. “I got into big trouble a couple of times because I preferred to perform rather than stay stuck in the studio all night,” she recalls. “Still, it was good — they informed one another. But I spent many years trying to figure out how to mesh these two interests.”

Froning parlayed her landscape architecture degree into a thriving career in the Bluff City. “I practiced for years in Memphis and did a lot of playground design in the early ’90s, she says.” Meanwhile, she kept dancing, which was how she ended up meeting a certain sousaphone player.

Yet Murphy’s time at the University of Memphis was centered as much on the music of different cultures as on performance. “My background is in ethnomusicology,” he says. “I had done a lot of research, but I had no hands-on experience building things.”

Meanwhile, he was not only a respected professional musician with his own budding New Orleans-style brass band, he was also exploring the more ambient, impressionistic possibilities of brass and wind instruments. “I played music for dance classes at the U of M right after I graduated. And then I helped Ondine Geary start a weekly improv group. We just called it ‘Improv.’ There was no structure to the class; we would just show up and it would be a happening. That’s how I met Anne. She was there pretty much from the beginning. That was 22 years ago, and the group still meets every Wednesday.”

It was a subtle kind of meet-cute moment, as Murphy recounts it. “The first few months of us knowing each other, nearly no words were exchanged,” he says. “Our communication was mostly through me improvising music and Anne improvising dance. Eventually we started doing teaching artist work together in schools as well as in public improv performances. After a couple years we realized that we wanted to start an umbrella business to promote the multidisciplinary arts we were creating.”

Those included visual arts, music, dance, landscape architecture, nature-based art, teaching arts, and more. “‘Being:Art’ just made sense to us,” he says, “partly as a reflection of how we met, but also because we were living our lives in the American South as full-time artists — not an easy thing to do. The instrument-making is only a part of what we do, but it does have the most wide-ranging societal impact and is the most lucrative.”

The two were kindred spirits in more ways than one. Froning has a passion for making tinctures from fresh herbs (with her ArtPhFarm product line), while Murphy has a passion for cocktail mixology with herbal infusions. But beyond their shared taste for natural products, they both felt a calling to promote the use of music and movement for personal growth.

Froning worked with the Memphis Arts Council’s Aesthetic Education Institute, an eight-day summer teacher training program led by teaching artists from Lincoln Center and Memphis. That in turn led the Dimensions Educational Research Foundation in Lincoln, Nebraska, to hire her as a consultant.

This era, starting in the late ’90s, was when the “nature deficit” in children was first coming into focus nationally. The Dimensions Foundation grew from research based at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln that investigated visual-spatial learning in preschool and elementary-aged children, with an emphasis on attention deficit disorders. That research found that more time spent outdoors in nature-filled settings inspired calmer, more focused behavior in kids, not to mention increased skill development in all areas. And, as Dimensions’ Heather Fox notes, “Anne was part of that original research, looking at teachers’ observations and coming to conclusions about how to design an outdoor space.”

“I was the movement consultant at the time,” says Froning, adding that “they also wanted to have the artistic component, so I brought Sean in as the music consultant.” This was when the Dimensions was making its first steps to put its research into practice with a program called Nature Explore.

“In 2004, Nature Explore decided that they were going to build an outdoor classroom at the Arbor Day Farm in Nebraska City, and that’s how I got brought in as music consultant,” notes Murphy. “They wanted a musical instrument that would be pleasing and harmonious, not too loud, but that would draw people to want to play, and that anyone could play successfully without any pre-knowledge. So they asked me, the consultant, what I would recommend, and I was like, ‘A marimba would be perfect!’ And their response was, ‘That sounds like a great idea. Can you build one?’”

Murphy and Froning both laugh at this memory. “We’re poor artists!” says Murphy. “We’re not going to say no to work. So we said, ‘Sure, we can do it!’ With no working experience whatsoever.”

And that marked the real beginning of Being:Art, as the couple threw themselves into the task. “I don’t do playground design anymore,” says Froning, “but I [understand] the rules and logic of how to put things together and get it in the ground. So it was kind of a perfect collaboration, with Sean doing all the research on instrument building.”

Murphy takes up the story. “I researched building marimbas and all the physics of tuning them, and consulted with some woodworking people here in town to learn about the tools and the materials. We built a demonstration model that was probably six feet long, with a box resonator and 15 or 16 keys. We loaded it up in a rental van and drove it to Nebraska city and they played it and they loved it. Then they said, ‘Okay, now we want a really big one for the installation.’” Murphy’s eyes bulge out a bit at the memory. “We were like, ‘A 35-foot, four-section, 99-key marimba? Okay …”

“They wanted a large one,” explains Froning, “because this outdoor classroom is exceptionally large. Most schools and botanic gardens don’t have such a big space to work in. But Arbor Day Farm is hundreds of acres and the outdoor classroom alone is like an acre. They wanted a 35-foot marimba because they were putting in a giant wooden stage for their music and movement area. That’s one of ten main areas in the Nature Explore outdoor classroom design.”

As it evolved, Nature Explore would end up exporting that design all over the country, though typically with marimbas built at a more modest scale. The organization clearly struck a nerve with educators nationwide, and now their Nature Explore Outdoor Classroom Design Services cater to schools, childcare centers, parks, and traditional playgrounds, with a certification program recognizing organizations (including Memphis Botanic Garden, which has featured a Being:Art instrument for a decade) that combine outdoor classrooms and programming to help children use the natural world.

To say Being:Art products are sturdy is an understatement. Having seen how their instruments weathered both the elements and rough handling by youngsters for nearly two decades, Froning and Murphy have perfected their durability. “That first marimba we built for the Arbor Day Farm in 2004 is still being played, all this time later,” says Murphy. “But we’ve learned some things about the materials to be used.”

Fox agrees. “The longevity on these things is just amazing. There was a flood in Missouri several years ago and one of our Nature Explore classrooms was completely covered. All the furnishings were washed away, and one of their marimbas floated in the water for several weeks, and then was recovered. It was still really sturdy and it still worked beautifully.”

More importantly, Fox emphasizes, the Being:Art instruments have offered thousands of young hearts and minds some musical excitement, and even a bit of healing. “There was a child that was dealing with a loss in her family. She was an older child, a child who was able to write poetry, and she had written a poem about the death, but it was really difficult for her to read the poem out loud. She struggled to get through the poem until her teacher suggested that she go to the akambira and practice. Each time she played the music it allowed her to center and calm and refocus, and then she was able to read this poem out loud.”

More generally, the instruments are approachable. “One time I was at Arbor Day Farm,” says Fox, “and I noticed that as some children and their families entered the space, the adults didn’t actually know what to do. Especially the dads, who were a little bit less engaged. But as soon as some of them found the musical instruments, they all gravitated over to them and began to play them together. It’s such a great connecting moment and a connecting place.”

Left to play on their own, the kids connect with the instruments even more. “There was a group of toddlers who were so enthralled with the marimba in their space that they actually gave it a new name,” Fox says. “Whenever they asked to use it, they would refer to it as the Blam Blam.”

Over the years, being curious artists at heart, Froning and Murphy have even moved beyond Blam Blams, designing a portable xylophone (inspired by the Bugandan people of Africa) that lies flat on a table top, which they’ve dubbed the barimba, and dabbling in other designs. But their basic work for Nature Explore has remained at the heart of their operation, and that is growing by leaps and bounds. Murphy shows a room in the house that’s bursting with boxed-up marimbas and akambiras to be wrapped onto pallets and sent down to freighter ships in New Orleans. “We have 38 instruments going to Puerto Rico that we are putting on a boat in about a week or two,” he explains.

With their new router and other efficiencies learned along the way, Being:Art is in full flower now, with no sign of slowing. The couple has recently hired two assistants from among their musician friends to help them keep up with demand. Froning and Murphy couldn’t be happier, driven on by a shared love of music, learning, and the natural world.

As Froning sums it up, “It all started with this concept of wanting children and families to love the Earth, and the only way that they can love the Earth is if they know and experience nature. It’s all about getting kids and parents outside, reconnecting them and taking them off the TV and the screens.”

opposite: A youngster plays a Being:Art marimba in an outdoor Certified Nature Explore Classroom.

LEFT: The Being:Art team assembling akambiras. L-R: Mimi Conn, Sean Murphy, Earl Lowe, and Anne Froning.

ABOVE: This child, playing a Being:Art akambira in an outdoor classroom, explores movement as well as music.

photography credits: KID ACTION SHOTS © Dimensions Educational Research Foundation | center photo by alex greene

photography credits: KID ACTION SHOTS © Dimensions Educational Research Foundation | instruments by jamie harmon

above: A young girl plays one of Being: Art’s marimbas, which support “learning music along the way, because they’re tuned as musical instruments,” as Heather Fox says.

above: Being:Art also makes barimbas for personal use, which can be disassembled for easy transportation. All of their instruments sport the engraved Being:Art custom logo. For more details,

visit beingart.com.