NORWICH - The Norwich City School District music program is starting the year off on high note, thanks to some generous contributions from a few newfound supporters.

Facing uncertainty as to how the district would provide instruments for the growing number of kids participating in the school orchestras, music teachers in the Norwich elementary, middle and high schools were almost sure this year’s orchestra classes would be limited - that is, if they could cary on at all. But a generous donation of 26 string instruments from the owner of a music shop in Long Island changed that, saving the orchestra program from closing the curtain on some students who want to participate.

“Most families with kids in the orchestra depend on borrowing instruments from the school,” explained Alyssa Jutting, Perry Brown Elementary orchestra instructor. “We were facing this problem where there was getting to be too many kids and not enough instruments.”

The solution came only by chance and few close connections with the right people. Jutting told her mother, a string teacher in Long Island, about the problem born by the music staff in Norwich. Her mom then mentioned it to a colleague who, in return, told a man named Bob Murphy, owner of a business called Murphy’s Music and Violin Shop in Melville, NY.