Many musicians, myself included, wear several hats, combining multiple part-time positions as performers and teachers to make a living. When I first heard about CMW ten years ago, the idea of a single place to both play chamber music and teach sounded like a dream come true. I am starting a program modeled on CMW this fall (more about that in an upcoming post), and I went to IMPS to see firsthand the model I’ve admired from afar. It was even more inspiring than I’d imagined.
The significance of CMW goes far beyond the unique balance of work for its musicians. They help create an environment in which they and their students grow as musicians, and, more importantly, as members of their community, and the results are, quite simply, breathtaking.
Sebastian Ruth started CMW in 1997, teaching 15 violin students in his neighborhood in Providence. Since then, the program has grown to include 13 resident musicians and more than 125 students. CMW’s students often perform on the same concerts as their teachers (and guest artists such as Jonathan Biss and the Kronos Quartet), in settings that foster connection between audience and performers.
Sebastian is influenced by the work of philosopher Maxine Greene, who wrote of the need for education that enables students to see new possibilities for themselves and effect social change, and it is in this regard that CMW shines brightest. The IMPS participants met and played music with some of the students in Phase 2, CMW’s teen leadership program, and, frankly, I was floored by these kids.
To hear 14 year-olds speak so thoughtfully about their place in the world was a profoundly moving experience, and spoke volumes about the impact and importance of CMW.
I remember the relationships I had with my teachers and colleagues as a young musician, and they continue to be some of the most important I have had in my life. I didn’t, however, have anything like the sense of purpose and place that CMW’s students displayed this weekend – they’ve been given a great gift, and are the kinds of citizens and leaders the world needs.
CMW’s staff has devoted significant time and effort to sharing their model, through the Institute, as well as through a fellowship program for young professional musicians, several of whom have gone on to start programs of their own.
One former fellow, violist Chloe Kline, is now CMW’s Education Director, and directed the Institute with great poise and sensitivity – her ability to manage a discussion so inclusively and thoughtfully was a perfect example of the culture of CMW, and just observing her in action this weekend was a great lesson in itself.
So to Sebastian, Chloe and the rest of the CMW family, you’ve given us a powerful reminder of what music is really for, and inspired many (myself included) to follow your example – thank you and bravo!
Lately, I’ve gotten a lot of nice reminders about why I play music, and the cello in particular – this photo is exhibit A. On the right is my student Bailey, and on the left, another cellist.
Yo-Yo Ma is one of the few classical musicians everyone’s heard of, and a genuinely nice guy. Bailey asked for tickets to his recent Cincinnati performance as a birthday present, and obviously had a good time! I had a similar experience meeting him after a performance, when I was first starting to play, (redacted) years ago.
He was not yet the superstar he’s become, but already very well known, and certainly could have acted like it, but instead he spent a lot of time talking to the group of young cellists gathered backstage about Bach and practice habits – he was incredibly gracious and engaging, and completely content to talk about what he loved as long as anyone wanted to.
Years later, I was playing in a chamber ensemble at the entrance for my first White House state dinner. Yo-Yo snuck up on me, waiting for me to look up from my music and see he was there. When I finally did, we both burst out laughing.
Anyone who’s spent time around cellists knows we’re all sharers – we will sit and talk about the cello all night, often to the despair of concert organizers, flight attendants, and spouses.
Cellists also tend to believe in the essential goodness of what we do, and organize events to share it more widely. I play cello quartets regularly with my colleagues in ProMusica – it’s one of my favorite ways to make music. Most of the music we play was originally written for orchestra or other instruments – I often joke that we’re playing “improvements” rather than arrangements. Most instruments don’t lend themselves to this kind of ensemble – try to imagine for a minute a violin quartet concert (shudder).
I think we cellists see ourselves as public servants – that our playing our instrument can uplift and transform any location or situation – in that vein, last week, I started playing in a medical center, which I’ll write about in a future post. In the meantime, here are a few more examples of cellists trying to improve things in our impractical, idealistic way.
Vedran Smajlović, the “cellist of Sarajevo,” playing in the ruins of that city’s National Library:
A group of 1,000 cellists performing in Sendai, Japan to support victims of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami:
Iraqi cellist Karim Wasfi, playing in front of a just-bombed Baghdad hotel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tyDtGAGoqI&w=550
Speaking of sharing, I am off today to the Institute for Musicianship and Public Service, at Community MusicWorks in Providence, RI, to learn more about becoming a true community musician – more posts about that (and my plans to build on it in Cincinnati this fall) soon.
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:
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.
Today would have been my father’s 77th birthday. He was a composer and played a big part in my musical development. We often played music together, and talked about music (along with baseball and politics), from when I was in elementary school until he passed away three-plus years ago. I miss him terribly.
My dad wrote works for various instrumentation from chamber works to pieces for full orchestra – my favorite, of course, is the one he wrote for me, which my wife and I recorded for his Albany Records CD, released in 2006. It’s a perfect example of his musical style, which I once described as both intense and subtle. Here’s an excerpt:
You can hear the entire piece here, and learn more about my dad and his music at his website.
Classical music has long been a family business, from the Bachs and Mozarts to more modern examples like Sergei Prokofiev and his grandson Gabriel. I wrote about one of Gabriel’s works in a previous post – sometimes the apple falls a little farther from the tree!
Recently, I was reminded of the extra power music has when it’s inspired by the closeness of family.
Dmitri Shostakovich was known for music that reflected his difficult life in Soviet Russia – nearly all of his works contain sarcasm and harsh writing. However, I recently was exposed to a different side of Shostakovich, in his 2nd Piano Concerto. The piece was written for his son, Maxim, for his 19th birthday, and Maxim performed the solo part at his graduation from the Moscow Conservatory.
Last month, I played this piece with ProMusica Chamber Orchestra. The excellent soloist was pianist/composer Huw Watkins, who has a family musical connection of his own – his brother Paul is the cellist in the Emerson String Quartet. They have recorded several cello-piano works including Huw’s own – you can learn more here.
Our music director, David Danzmayer, reminded us in rehearsal of the story behind the concerto as we rehearsed the slow movement, which sounds nothing like any Shostakovich I’d ever heard. The directness and love expressed in this piece can’t be missed, and it sounds in places like Rachmaninoff:
There are lots more examples of music inspired by the closeness of family, and I’ve put a few of them on a new Spotify playlist, including my dad’s cello-piano piece and a song cycle he dedicated to my mom. As usual, it’s open to additions from you – please add your favorite piece of music that has a family connection!
In closing, I’ll share one more, that was a particular favorite of my dad’s. He was a jazz musician early on, and passed on to me a love for Charlie Parker and Oscar Peterson. One of our favorite groups was the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Band. I remember going to see them at the Village Vanguard when I was about 12 – how he got me into a place like that at that age is beyond me, but it was incredible.
Here’s Thad Jones’s best-known tune, whose title says it all: “A Child Is Born.”
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.
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.
