New Video from 4-Way String Project

by | Aug 2, 2017 | Uncategorized

As hard as it is to imagine right now, school starts in two weeks! 4-Way will once again be in residence at Woodford Paideia, assisting with 5th and 6th grade orchestra, this time for the whole school year. We’ll begin our after school program in early September, and we can’t wait! There will be more news coming soon about the program, new supporters, and upcoming concerts – stay tuned! In the meantime, here’s a video Kevin made with highlights from last year’s program – I hope you enjoy it as much as we do, and if you’re able to support our work, please click the donate button below the video – thank you!

 



World Record

by | Jul 27, 2017 | Uncategorized

 

Classical music presenters are always looking for new ways to boost attendance at their concerts. Well, the search is over – turns out all you need is skydivers and a soccer team.

On Monday night, I played the American and Spanish national anthems with some colleagues from the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra in front of over 23,000 people, the largest audience for a string quartet performance in history.*

We were preceded by skydivers, who delivered the game ball and an enormous American flag, and our performance (which received the loudest ovation of all time**) was followed by a match between FC Cincinnati and Valencia.

 

*In keeping with our country’s transition to a fact-free society, I am going to say that this is true until someone proves that it isn’t. So there.

** see above

 

In all seriousness, there’s a lesson here – anyone who puts on concerts could learn a lot from our counterparts in the sports world. Fans were piling into the stadium over an hour before the game, and they could see the players warming up, get autographs and pictures with them, and, of course, buy lots of stuff. There were also lots of announcements about the club’s work with local organizations, and for at least a half-hour before the game, something was always happening on the field that fans were encouraged to watch and participate in.

In short, there was lots of interaction between the entertainers and the audience, as well as activities to build excitement for the event to come. The “pre-game show” is pretty limited before most classical music concerts. Now some of this stuff wouldn’t work, but just having more going on before concerts, especially involving the players, is certainly worth exploring. Post your suggestions in the comments, and PLEASE, e-mail me if you know skydivers willing to work at non-profit rates.

 

Till next time,

 

Nat

 

 

 

Music (is a) Haven

by | Jul 18, 2017 | Uncategorized

It’s hard to believe that the summer break is more than half over – in about a month, we’ll be back to work teaching at Woodford Paideia, and possibly elsewhere, too! Stay tuned for more details about that.

We’re putting together a short video about 4-Way’s education program, and it will be up next week. In the meantime, here are two videos from the Music Haven program, one of our models, based in New Haven, CT. They remind us why this work is so vital, and show what’s possible when it’s done well.

The first video features the Phat Orangez, a student quartet. In it, the students talk about playing chamber music, and it’s crystal clear how vital it is to them, and how well they get along because they play together.

 

 

The second video is a slightly longer look at the Music Haven program. It’s well worth 6 minutes of your time – you’ll be inspired and see why we aspire to follow their lead!

 

 

Enjoy!

 

Till next time,

Nat

Some Nerve

by | Jun 7, 2017 | Uncategorized

To regular readers of this blog, please bear with me today – things are going to be a little different. There is still a video in which I perform and embarrass myself – however, I’m not playing the cello, and I’ve got some company for a change.

This past weekend, I went back to New York to attend my redacted anniversary high school reunion. I was incredibly fortunate to attend Hunter College High School, a unique place that gave me a great education and many of my closest friends. (Film buffs may recognize the exterior from the movie “The Fisher King.”) Hunter is a public school, but admission is based on a highly competitive exam given citywide. Alums include Elena Kagan, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Ruby Dee. Our class was drawn from across the five boroughs, from my Upper West Side neighborhood to the far reaches of Riverdale, Jamaica and Bensonhurst. The class also looked like the city we lived in – ethnic and economic diversity was both a given and, more importantly, a strength.

New York is a city of constant change, and Hunter too has changed in the years since we were there – the student body is richer, whiter and less representative of the city as a whole. That’s not a positive, in my opinion – I learned so much from those different from me as we went through school together, and the work many of my classmates are doing shows how important true diversity is.

Meet Fred McIntosh, who came to Hunter from P.S. 244 in Brooklyn – he went on to NYU Law School, and has been working towards getting more students of color ready for the exams necessary for admission to Hunter and the city’s other elite public high schools. On Saturday, Fred mentioned the staggering cost of test preparation tutoring which many wealthy parents now spring for in hopes of landing their child a spot at Hunter. In our day, that tutoring didn’t exist, and if it had, neither he nor I (nor many of our classmates, I suspect) could have afforded it, and we might not have been accepted. You can watch Fred’s inspiring TedX Hunter talk here, and support his efforts to re-level the playing field by contributing to Exam Schools Partnership Initiative.

There are so many others in our class I could talk about – a doctor who visits elderly homebound women; a counselor for academically challenged students at a technical college; a director of programs at the Interfaith Center of New York – the list goes on and on.

I think the “other-directed” work these people do comes in part from what they got at Hunter – being surrounded by so many interesting, different people makes you better able to see the world through someone else’s eyes, and more interested in making things work for them.

I’m proud to be a part of such a great group of people, and I was really excited to see them all. However, I was quite anxious about the reunion, too, because I’d agreed to do something I hadn’t done in a while – sing in public.

One of my closest friends at Hunter was Morris Levy, a man who knows more about the history of American popular music than any six people you could name, and a very gifted singer and arranger. We became good friends in Jazz Chorus, which was my favorite extra-curricular activity at the school, and in our junior year (I think), we formed a barbershop quartet, because, hey, what teenage girl doesn’t like a guy in a weird hat and bow tie?

The group decided to sing again for the reunion, and half a dozen times in the months leading up to it, I thought about backing out. Now, I’m no stranger to making a fool of myself in public (I do it for a living, after all), but this was different – I’d be up there without my cello!

Patty Chang Anker, another great friend from Jazz Chorus who was at the party Saturday, made quite a splash a couple of years back with her book “Some Nerve”, about how she and others overcame fears of experiences ranging from public speaking to wedgies. The book has helped me a lot, and its lessons came in handy on Saturday, that’s for sure. If you’re afraid of anything, pick up a copy!

Luckily there was an open bar, and it was hard to hear. And we even inspired someone to join us – that’s our classmate Rob Otey behind me, playing the role of Yoko Ono. He had some nerve, too!

From last Saturday's reunion – the triumphant return of the Hunter College High School, Class of 1987 barbershop quartet, with special guest Robert C Otey in the role of Yoko Ono.

Posted by Nat Chaitkin on Wednesday, June 7, 2017

Thanks to all my classmates for reminding me how lucky I am to have you as friends and sources of inspiration. And to everyone else, I’ll get back to Bach next week, I promise.

 

Till next time,

Nat

 

 

 

 

 

All In The Family, Part 5 (Birthday Edition)

by | May 16, 2017 | Uncategorized

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.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/322913645″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”100″ iframe=”true” /]

 

Happy Birthday, Dad – I miss you.