All In The Family, Part 5 (Birthday Edition)

Today would have been my father’s 79th birthday. He passed away over five years ago, though for me, especially today, it feels like it happened yesterday. He gave me many different gifts, and since his passing, I’ve seen them come together in ways I hadn’t expected, but that I think he’d be pleased to see. We shared a love for many things, including baseball and the Pink Panther movies, but I’ll focus here on the two most important – music and social justice.

 

First of all, the music world is very different from the one he knew, but there are many things happening now that he would have liked.

 

My dad believed that art was for everyone, and often lamented that more people didn’t know and love the music that was so central to his life. Anyone who’s read this blog before knows I have offered many reasons why great music has such a small fan base, and I’ve tried to offer some solutions to the problem – thankfully, many others in the classical music world are working on this, too – a development I know he would appreciated.

 

I started Bach and Boombox because of the connections between all kinds of music that my dad showed me. Along with countless new classical music concerts, he also took me to many jazz performances (he’d been a jazz pianist in his early days), and introduced me to the Beatles, too. He was a firm believer in the saying – “There are two kinds of music – good, and the other kind.”

 

Nowadays, I spend much of my time sharing the joy of playing music with kids who might not get to otherwise, through 4-Way’s String Project at Woodford Paideia. My dad helped open my eyes to the inequities in society early on, and we often talked about how they could be addressed – I think he’d be especially pleased that we’ve found a way to be of service through music.

 

This past weekend, ProMusica Chamber Orchestra gave our final concert of the season, and the program began with a brief performance by violin students from the orchestra’s Play Us Forward program, most of whom come from economically challenging circumstances. On stage with them were players from the orchestra (including yours truly) and our guest artists for the evening, violinist Vadim Gluzman (who has been a big supporter of the program) and violist Paul Neubauer, who a few minutes later would give a thrilling performance of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante. In the picture below (courtesy of another ProMusica cellist – thank you, Cora!), you can see all of us, playing together – this is the kind of musical and social connection I’m sure Dad would have liked to see.

In his own music, my dad shared a great deal of himself, and you can hear his varied musical influences, from Schoenberg to Stan Getz. So to close, let’s hear a short dance for piano, performed by his friend Richard Becker, that gives you a good sense of him and where he was coming from. Like all his music, it’s both intense and subtle, and at about the 2:00 mark, it starts to sound (to me, at least) like an Earth, Wind and Fire record – a little bit of funk to finish.

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Happy Birthday, Dad – I miss you.

 

 

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

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One of my recent posts was about Play Us Forward, an educational initiative of ProMusica Chamber Orchestra, a great example of community engagement for performing groups. Another model for an orchestra getting more involved in the community comes from Germany, where the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, looking for rehearsal space, moved into a school in a neighborhood known for high crime and poverty rates.

The partnership, viewed with unease at first by both the orchestra and the community, has been a great success. Kids and the musicians have lunch together, and the students come to rehearsals, sitting in between the musicians. There’s even been some collaboration:

 

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The BBC article about the Bremen experiment points out the most compelling reason to do things like this: “the school’s test results have improved, its drop-out rates have fallen to less than 1% and the atmosphere in the wider neighbourhood has been ‘transformed.’ ”

In other words, simply by being there, the Kammerphilharmonie has improved the school and its neighborhood. What if every orchestra did something like this?

Now, cramming the entire Chicago Symphony into a high school gym to rehearse might not be such a great idea, but what about smaller orchestras (like ProMusica, for example)? We sometimes rehearse away from our home hall – why not rehearse at KIPP Academy once in a while, or spend a whole week there?

Another example of an orchestra strengthening its connection to the community comes this week from the Houston Symphony, which has created four new full-time positions for string players who will play about 25 performances a year, but whose primary role will be “community engagement and music education in area schools, neighborhood centers and health-care facilities.”

The article goes on to say: “The symphony is seeking musicians with varied ethnic backgrounds and who are fluent in at least two languages.” Orchestras have long been trying to diversify both their memberships and their core audiences, with limited success – this seems like a good way to help.

This hybrid of playing and teaching is something I’d love to see expanded and replicated in every orchestra, with one important tweak – more members should do both.

Someday, I would love to see a “full-time” orchestra whose entire roster teaches as part of their job.  What if part of your work as a full-time orchestra musician was to teach one day a week in the same inner city school, week after week, year after year?

I can imagine there would be resistance to this idea from some orchestra musicians, who would view it as a major change to their job description. I can’t argue that point – it would be. However, many orchestra musicians teach on the side already, and I bet the teaching part of the job could be factored into the workload in a way that didn’t raise the service count, at least not much. Maybe the dual responsibility of performing and teaching could be phased in with new hires, or offered as an option with extra pay.

I also think this would help the bottom line. All orchestras, no matter how many tickets they sell, rely heavily on contributed income to survive, and were they to become known for civic engagement on this scale, I bet they’d attract support from individual donors, corporations and foundations who may not have given them much attention before.

Most importantly, it would help orchestras to be seen as essential parts of their communities, and not just something for the rich, which, sadly, is often the image they have.

I am working on starting something combining playing and teaching myself, on a smaller scale with a string quartet in Cincinnati, and to learn more about how to go about it, next month I will be attending the Institute for Musicianship and Public Service, hosted by one of the standard bearers of community arts engagement, Community MusicWorks, in Providence, RI. I’ll post more about that soon.

 

Till next time,

Nat

 

 

 

Welcome To The Club

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 “Welcome to the club.”

With these words last night, one of the world’s great violinists, Vadim Gluzman, (near right with microphone, above) handed out instruments to children from four Columbus, Ohio charter schools, to launch a program called Play Us Forward, an initiative of ProMusica Chamber Orchestra to bring music education to these schools for the first time. The program will provide violins and instruction to students at these schools free of charge, thanks to the generosity of donors like The Hattie and Robert Lazarus Fund, Key Bank and the Loft Violin Shop.

Vadim had just given a magnificent performance of the Bruch G minor Violin Concerto with us in his role as Creative Partner. ProMusica is lucky to have him, once or twice a year, as our own “in-house” soloist and/or leader, conducting from the concertmaster’s chair. But last night, he played an even more important role, making the kids (and everyone else, myself included) feel both welcome and included in something special.

Before giving out the violins, Vadim spoke of his own childhood in the Soviet Union, and his own first instrument, (a 1/8th size, I believe) which took some doing to acquire in a country where, as he reminded us with a wry smile, even basics like toilet paper were often hard to come by. He also spoke of the doors that have opened for him and the wonderful people he has met playing the violin, and radiated gratitude for the life music has given him.

Our wonderful music director, David Danzmayr (far left, above) spoke of his own good fortune as a young musician – he was born into a musical family (in Mozart’s hometown, no less!) and had a piano waiting for him in his living room. As David pointed out, not everyone has that kind of luck, and that programs like Play Us Forward bring these opportunities to kids who would likely never have them otherwise.

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To help launch Play Us Forward, I gave presentations of Bach and Boombox at the four schools (including the KIPP Academy, pictured above). I was really struck by the level of sound in the hallways and classrooms – it was very quiet. At each school, there was great emphasis on self-control and respect for others, and that even extended to how the kids expressed themselves.

When I mentioned that I had worked at the White House, the KIPP kids all began snapping their fingers – I thought I had wandered into a production of “West Side Story” for a second, but their teacher explained that this meant they liked what they were hearing, and would do this in the classroom when someone gave an insightful answer, too.

All this tells me that these kids will make excellent music students (not to mention audience members!) – more on that in a minute.

The kids I met were invited to our concerts this past weekend free of charge, and I bet that for many, the performance was the first orchestra concert they’d been to. They got to see what’s possible on a violin (quite a bit, if you’re Vadim!) and now they will get violin lessons themselves.

With this program, ProMusica is saying, “Here’s what we do, and now you can do it too.” There are so many reasons why this is a great idea, I don’t know where to start, but here goes.

These charter schools tend to serve children with numerous challenges, academic and otherwise – this program will help equip the children with tools to meet these challenges in ways that only the arts can.

There is no shortage of data showing that studying music helps kids in reading and math, and I am sure we’ll see that with these students. Charter schools tend to place great emphasis on academic performance and metrics, and I guarantee that the kids taking violin lessons will exceed their peers in these areas.

So many schools cut their arts programs when they face budget cuts or focus on raising test scores – this will be a strong reminder that they are working against themselves when they do.

We’re also giving the kids a chance to learn something deeply satisfying, but very demanding, too. Anyone who’s studied an instrument knows that instant gratification is NOT what you get.

The experience of doing persistent, sometimes frustrating work in pursuit of incremental but meaningful improvement is a very powerful one, and with the schools’ emphasis on self-discipline and positive, respectful self-expression, these kids will be exceptionally well-prepared to reap the benefits.

Lastly, there’s a benefit (and a lesson) for professional ensembles here. There’s much talk these days about how orchestras need to rethink their place in society – often viewed as elitist and walled off from society as a whole, many performing groups are finding new ways to impact the communities they serve. More on that in my next post.

The Play Us Forward program is a great model for orchestras to follow, and by offering the gift of music to children who otherwise would not have it, it makes a more powerful and longer lasting impact than any concert ever could. It also reminds all of us, both inside the music world and out, that the doors of “the club” can and should be open to everyone.

Till next time,

Nat