STOCKTON - The first part sounds like walking, Stockton Symphony Conductor Peter Jaffe told the students who sat cross-legged on the floor of the Ansel Adams Elementary School multipurpose room.

The kind of walking that isn't in a hurry, that sometimes slows to consider.

The Promenade that opens Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" returns throughout the piano suite as though winding through its gallery of 10 pieces.

Jaffe recently has been leading San Joaquin County students through the suite in an exercise that aims to connect them to the process of musical architecture and inspiration.

"A lot of you have been hearing music that was composed by a guy called Modest Mussorgsky," Jaffe said Wednesday.

The Russian composer wrote "Pictures at an Exhibition" in 1874, shortly after the unexpected death of his friend, the artist and architect Viktor Hartmann. The 10 pieces that make up Mussorgsky's suite are inspired by Hartmann's drawings, paintings and costume sketches, many of which have since been lost.

Next Thursday and April 12, the Stockton Symphony will perform Ravel's orchestration of "Pictures at an Exhibition" in its season finale.

In the weeks before the concert, elementary school students have been invited to listen to the pieces and then to draw whatever the music leads them to imagine - a reversal of Mussorgsky's process, Jaffe said.

Some of the student pieces will be displayed at the symphony's concerts.

"I drew a castle," Cindy Nguyen, 11, said. "I thought it was just very interesting."

Agnes Litfin, a classroom music teacher at Adams Elementary, has collected stacks of pencil sketches, her students' responses to the suite.

There are flying gnomes, men with two faces, eggs dancing on spindly legs. (One of Mussorgsky's pieces, based on a costume design of Hartmann's, is called "Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks.")

Litfin said she wants students to understand the connections between visual and performing arts.

"Both represent an expression of the spirit of the artist," she said. "They go hand in hand."

Jaffe is visiting participating schools to perform excerpts from Mussorgsky's work and to show students the art that inspired it.

"Pictures at an Exhibition" is an engaging composition, he said. He called the pieces "10 little adventures," music that invites listeners, children or adults, to reflect.

"All of us, as human beings, love to hear a story," he said. "Each movement is sort of about how you were affected, or how you feel about something."

He stood at an upright piano Wednesday and introduced students to "Tuileries," a movement inspired by a picture of a garden. Mussorgsky added bickering children to the scene.

"One of the simplest songs that we learn, even when we're 1 or 2 years old, is just a simple two-note melody," Jaffe said.

He played the notes.

"Are you ever at recess with one of your best friends, and you decide to tease them, and you go, 'nyah nyah, nyah nyah'?" he said. "That's a song that we all learn when we barely know how to speak, and when Mussorgsky wanted to talk about children squabbling and teasing each other, he used that two-note melody."

He told students to listen for chirping in "Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks," to notice the heavy brass in "The Catacombs."

"Now," he said. "What do you say we go to another picture."

Contact reporter Jennifer Torres at (209) 546-8252 or jtorres@recordnet.com.