When Jennifer Malmstrom gets frustrated playing her Bach invention at a music lesson, her teacher sometimes sticks a jar of peanut butter under her nose. “Take a whiff of the Chunky jar,” the teacher will say to the 14-year-old pianist. “It is a great source of wisdom. Ah! Feel that energy.”

So Jennifer whiffs, laughs, and then begins to play Bach again with new-found inspiration. It’s a quirky trick, but in the five years she has been studying with Daryl Rhodes, Jennifer has come to trust it.

Some might say that Rhodes, the founder of the Northern Conservatory of Music and the Performing Arts in Bangor, is nuts for using a jar of peanut butter as a teaching device. But others, such as young Jennifer, know the seemingly silly prop is simply a careful diversion which relieves the frustration of a difficult moment, and ultimately gets the lesson rolling smoothly again.

After offering more than 50,000 music lessons in the past 10 years, Rhodes knows about peanut butter. More importantly, he knows about music, and about teaching children with artistic minds. In 1983, when he quit his job teaching piano for Knapps Music Center in Bangor, he opened the conservatory, with his wife Neia, and together they began pursuing a dream to start a high school for the performing arts.

In the first year of the conservatory, enrollment increased from 45 to nearly 100. Since then, Rhodes has been at it six days a week, 51 weeks a year. The Rhodes and percussionist Al McIntyre, who joined them the second year, now cater to nearly 400 students of music. Both children and adults come toting flutes and violins and guitars to the third-floor suite of studios on Hammond Street. The Rhodes and McIntyre also teach in the music program at John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor, but back at the conservatory, they join nine other teachers in offering lessons in piano, voice, strings, winds, percussion, theory and composition.

The dream for the high school surfaced most notably again in 1988, when the conservatory sponsored a contest to raise funds for the proposed school, but the project failed because of lack of money.

Today, the dream begins again at 3:15 p.m. when the Rhodes and McIntyre publicly announce their signed option agreement to buy the land on the corner of Union and Main Streets in Bangor, and their plan to build what they have named the Maine School for the Arts. The event, which will take place on the plot of land, will include students’ testimonies about arts in education and an announcement of supporting parties for the project.

The conservatory has until the end of March 1994 to raise $110,000 to buy the land, which is the first phase of establishing the school. If fund raising is successful for both the land and construction, the group hopes to break ground on the four-story building in 1994.

Despite the blows that have come to most arts organizations because of budget cuts in the last few years, Rhodes is confident that the non-profit, private high school will not only thrive, but be flooded with artistic students whose particular talents in music, dance, drama and graphic arts are not at the forefront of their academic pursuits in other secondary schools. The school will provide academics, says Rhodes, but they will be “skewed toward the arts.” The school will also continue to offer private lessons to students of all ages.

“We’ll be giving the artistic kid the chance to build character and self-esteem,” he says.

“We’re opening up an avenue to challenge artistic interests,” adds Mrs. Rhodes. “And as cliched as it sounds, love is the nucleus on which this is founded. As long as love is at the foundation, no matter how many obstacles come our way, we’ll be victorious.”

The “love” to which Mrs. Rhodes refers has made the conservatory a warm and lively place for the past 10 years, assures Lawrence Griffin, who has been a student there throughout the decade.

“It’s tremendous for younger children to older folks like me,” says Griffin, who is 66. “When I was growing up on the farm, it was hard times. The first experience I had of music was in high school, and a neighbor was selling a cornet. I bought it for three cords of wood and joined the high school band.”

Griffin became an accountant instead of a musician, but he continued to play the organ after high school and later when he was an assistant to the chaplain while in the military. He is certain, however, that if he had had the chance to go to a school such as the one Rhodes is proposing, his life would have taken a musical path.

“If I had the advantage of this type of school, I would have been a different person than I am,” Griffin says. “I would have gone into music.”

John Kaiser has a similar story to tell. At 47, with a career as a pathologist, Kaiser is in his second year of studying piano with Rhodes. He, too, is drawn to the conservatory because the atmosphere is “fun, positive and very uplifting.”

Plus he has learned not only the technical and theoretical aspects of music, but the heart of it, too. And although Kaiser doesn’t get the peanut butter treatment, he knows that Rhodes is particularly adept at understanding the value of innovative education.

“Daryl knows that there are many people whose talents are of a creative and artistic nature, and that those abilities are different from those that might make a good administrator or computer keyboard operator,” explains Kaiser. “Daryl’s aware that there’s a real shortage of opportunity for people with that ability. He gives very positive feedback, which has been good for me, but has been especially good for young people. There is so much warmth and shared good will at the school. Daryl brings that same positive focus to his plans for this new school.”

“We want a high school that is also a family school,” says Rhodes of the proposed art school. “My students are not only my students. They are part of my family. The amount of love I’ve gotten back has given me an awareness of how people feel about the arts.”

And that’s a lesson you simply can’t put into a jar of peanut butter.