Kill-joy January wants you to stay home and sulk as you shiver. Resist. Instead, join our circle of fun, friendly people, draw in a deep breath and sing your winter blues away. That’s exactly what a handful of CMW parents, board members and friends have been doing for the past two months. We are led by CMW alum Alexis, an experienced chorister and excellent musician (no surprise there, she was trained by the best). Our goal is to learn a little bit about music and singing, enjoy each other’s company and make a joyful noise.

So far, we have sung Dona Nobis Pacem, an ancient tune in the original Latin; two intriguing rounds by Moondog, the NYC street musician famed for his Viking helmet and self-built instruments; the CMW theme song; and This Is My Song (A Song Of Peace), a favorite of Board President David Bourns. Next up: A Spanish folk tune. Somehow, no matter what we sing or how tentatively we begin, joining voices together lights an inner fire that warms us through and through and keeps us coming back for more.

Don’t let January win. Come sing with us. You are welcome to drop in and out as your schedule allows. We meet during CMW’s regular All-Play Days most Tuesdays 5:30-6:30 at CMW’s home away from home, the Trinity Academy for the Performing Arts on Messer Street in Providence. For more information and a listing of upcoming meeting dates, contact parentcommittee@communitymusicworks.org.

–Linda Daniels

Hello world wide web!
I am Hannah, the not-so-new viola fellow at CMW! For better or worse, I have been charged with writing for the CMW blog, bringing me closer into the fold of the Millennial generation than ever before. Having not even had a xanga in 8th grade on which to post angsty song lyrics, I’m not entirely sure how this whole blogging thing works. Most blogs I read involve food, which means they involve pictures, which means I actually don’t have to read at all.

In any event, it is today, on a bright and cold Wednesday afternoon, that I make my first entry on the inter webs. It was 377 days ago that I first heard about CMW. Before then, Rhode Island was not exactly at the forefront of my mind. It blended in nicely with the other states in New England that are on the Bolt Bus route to Boston from NYC. I may have even been slightly surprised to discover Rhode Island is in fact connected to the mainland USA. Basically, I knew nothing. But I applied for CMW because hey, I was graduating from my masters degree and I did NOT want to stay in the cesspool of misery and despair that is NYC on a student budget. I was also drawn to the idea of teaching, performing, and being within a community of people who believe in the power of music as a vehicle of change in the world. Despite a case of nasty food poisoning (a story for another post, I think), I auditioned, interviewed, and ended up being offered the position.

My realization of the week is that we’re always in the right place at the right time. A year ago, Rhode Island didn’t exist in my world. Now I live here. I still don’t know much about it. But I’ll keep learning. The right time and the right place are now and I’m excited to see where the next year and a half takes me on the Road to Rhode Island (Family Guy? Anyone?)! My next post may be about banana bread…or knitting. Thrilling stuff, really. Until then!

–Hannah Ross, Viola Fellow ’14-’16

Learn more about Hannah and her fellow Fellows on our staff page.

Happy New Year!
Last week the Daily Orchestra Program resumed its activities after a refreshing winter break. Students seemed happy to see their friends and their instruments again, and they remembered well the musical concepts we introduced before the break, including singing different intervals and recognizing the difference between major and minor.

This winter we’ve also been learning about the composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky through the Classical Kids audio story, Tchaikovsky Discovers America. Every Thursday at the beginning of orchestra time, students sit together and listen to the tale describing Tchaikovsky’s adventures during his visit to the U.S. for a performance at the grand opening of the newly constructed Carnegie Hall.

In our orchestra rehearsals we are learning to play a piece based on a theme from Tchaikovsky’s 4th symphony, which we’ll be playing at the Performance Party at Cavalry Baptist Church on Friday, January 30th. Hope to see you there!

-Adrienne Taylor, Director
Daily Orchestra Program

Explore over 20 local nonprofit organizations through the Imagine Providence website, where you can hear an audio story interview with CMW’s Sebastian Ruth in Barriers Bridged Though Musicianship.

Like you, this season I will be asked to make a donation to a number of extraordinary non-profits. The question I am compelled to ask before I contribute is this: Does this organization champion an unadorned goodness and inspirit me to give back to the world?

For Community MusicWorks, the answer is an emphatic yes.

This year I’ve had the privilege of serving as Community MusicWorks’ new Managing Director. I recently had an experience that is a poignant example of how CMW lives and breathes its mission of transformation through music and community.

In October, a bus full of CMW students, parents, staff musicians, and guests headed to New York City to perform with virtuoso violinist Johnny Gandelsman, Venezuelan composer Gonzalo Grau and a professional salsa band. The hall was packed and abuzz with energy and excitement.

The concert’s resounding success was a group effort. Each person played a critical role, from our student musicians and the professionals mentoring them, to our pride-filled parents, who managed logistics, and an audience that sang, danced and clapped along. What a night!

Together, we created a community through music. Together, we were transformed.

That evening, I witnessed CMW at its best. And this is just one example of the ways in which Community MusicWorks, through 18 years of nurturing student musicians through our free afterschool programs, builds community and creates transformation.

But as exciting as that trip was, it’s the daily hard work of dedicated musician-teachers and students in lessons and rehearsals here in Rhode Island that makes an evening like our New York concert possible. Your donation today makes all of this possible.

The connection we build through music, each and every day, inspires hope. Our families live in Providence’s toughest neighborhoods and represent diverse cultures and ethnicities. Yet music brings us together. Andrew, one of our students, said it best:

“CMW is like the world, but it’s better.”

From the lesson room to the concert hall, the unadorned goodness that Community MusicWorks champions is the creation of joyful community. Seeing first-hand the ways in which this organization transforms lives, I know I want to give back to this world, made better.

Will you join me in supporting this amazing work? We cannot do this without you.

Click here to make your secure online donation to Community MusicWorks.

Gratefully,
Kelly Reed
Managing Director, Community MusicWorks

Watch the video Fantasía in NYC: Behind the Scenes.

Community MusicWorks “happening” on October 18 in New York was a lot like salsa dancing for gringos. It was hard to keep up. It was hard to know what or who to watch – Venezuelan composer Gonzalo Grau or violinist Johnny Gandelsman or CMW players – and even harder to know how this viscerally charged, salsa-art music-classical collaboration was holding together.

Take the dazzling centerpiece Fantasia con Guayaba Habanera, commissioned by CMW in 2013. Before you grasped one sound, something new had started, a rhumba, a pop riff, a different key or mode or Dionysian blast from the trumpets while violinists plucking their strings. Grau composed and arranged this large shifting composition with fast feet and arms wide enough to hold a CMW classical string section, Latin timbals and horns, and a magical violinist, Gandelsman. Under the wide reach of Latin music, forms were present – along with the creative impatience to turn left, try right, get moody, go elegant, charged for maximum effect.

The hall in the DiMenna Center was nearly full with spry little kids sitting on the floor, and a mix of seated New Yorkers who were there for the cultural experience. The composer, being a bit of a tease, gave no hint to the question: “What kind of experience?” That one you’re going to hear, he so much as said, tipping his black bowler. The one you’re going to hear as you travel freely with a creative mind through different musics.

The experience began with a suave master of ceremonies, Jainardo Batista, who crooned, played flute and bounced through two charged Grau compositions. Then CMW Players – 28 violins, viola and cellos – came out to join the composition Moros y Cristianos. Moors and Christians coexisted and clashed in Andalusia, Spain, but the piece was inspired by flamenco, the art form of the itinerant gypsies who live in Andalusia. Grau played a few bars of flamenco to show the complex and brooding underpinnings of the music – how notes move without a clear signal of their return to home key. Also influenced by Islamic and Jewish music, flamenco provokes questions about home. It is comfortable in modes of travel and with a continual redefinition of “home”. It’s music where border crossings are taken for granted, but the forms themselves are rigorously maintained.

This is CMW’s purview – crossing borders from stage to community, from one music to another. In his introductory remarks, Sebastian Ruth explained that CMW had commissioned Grau to compose the piece with the question in mind: Could the Latin music that many Providence CMW kids hear at their family homes mesh with classical forms? What if we tried it? What would it sound like?

The resulting Fantasia con Guyaba Habanera floated one of many possible answers while at the same time, remaining undefinable. It is a sophisticated intelligent work – starting with an extended struggling voice of Gandelsman’s sometime dissonant violin through various dances and forms. The borders of music kept shifting from intellectual to full sensory to big band dance. At the beginning, individual voices played, then politely listened. They became more and more layered until everyone was joyously playing on top of/with each other. What had begun with one voice ended in a singsong communal chant from the audience.

Just before Fantasia came Johnny Gandelsman. He explained that the piece he was performing, Chaconne, is the product of J.S. Bach’s meditating on a Spanish folk dance form as a basis for his classical composition. Gandelsman is a strong physical presence, dipping and swaying, but he dissolved the materiality of the violin to arrive at something freestanding, that existed almost without him. His border crossing was extraordinary as well.

All in all, it was a wonderful evening.

–Jill Pearlman

Throughout the day any number of thoughts and feelings pass through our minds. Some leave as quickly as they enter but others stick with us, clouding our minds and pulling us away from where we are and what we’re doing. It’s a challenge at any age to focus on the task at hand and to give yourself fully to the present moment. I for one wish I had had more guidance with this at an earlier age!

That’s why I was so excited when last Thursday Jesse Holstein visited the Daily Orchestra Program and offered to lead a guided mindfulness activity at the start of the class. I admit I was nervous. Would the kids be able to sit still for 5 minutes? Would they start goofing off in the face of something new and unfamiliar? Nevertheless, I knew we had to start somewhere, and I trusted Jesse had something good up his sleeve.

As the kids entered the room I could see they were immediately curious and engaged. They wanted to know what Jesse would be doing with the mysterious array of materials he had laid out on the floor – a glass jar of water, some bags of colored sand, and a bell. He definitely had their attention! Once everyone gathered around close (making extra sure they could see everything that was going on), Jesse used the glass jar of water to simulate the mind. We talked about the different thoughts or events that might upset our minds during the day. Perhaps we left our homework at home by accident, or at lunch someone ate our very last chicken nugget! With each upsetting experience, a student poured a different color of sand into the water and stirred. Gradually the water jar became one dark, cloudy mess! At the ringing of a bell we were instructed to wait in silence, to focus only on our breathing and watch the water.

When the bell struck there was a level of silence and concentration I had never witnessed before from our orchestra. It was truly an exciting moment! For the most part the students breathed calmly while the water slowed and sand settled in the bottom of the jar. Of course, once the sand had settled that wasn’t enough! They demanded to do the experiment again, and kindly Jesse obliged.

I am so happy that Jesse was able to visit us and introduce our students to the concept and practice of mindfulness. We hope he visits us again soon!

–Lisa Barksdale

Read a profile of Community MusicWorks' Senior Resident Musician Jesse Holstein as he talks about bringing mindfulness to his teaching practice.

Read the piece here.

Photo by Sandor Bodo

The Daily Orchestra Program is off to an exciting start!

Lisa and I are very happy that every student from last year has registered to return to the program this year. We started off our first week playing some of our favorite games, and playing and dancing to the tune, Boil ‘em Cabbage Down. This year all of our students already have experience playing in orchestra together, so I’m looking forward to seeing how far they will go this year. Here are some photos of our first day together.

–Adrienne Taylor

Community MusicWorks presents the New York premiere of Fantasia con Guayaba Habanera!

CMW brings an evening of genre-bending virtuosity and electricity to New York's DiMenna Center on Saturday, October 18 at 7pm.

Join Community MusicWorks, Venezuelan composer Gonzalo Grau, and violinist Johnny Gandelsman (of the Silk Road Project and Brooklyn Rider) on October 18 for the New York City premiere of Fantasia de Guayaba Habanera. "Fantasia" features Johnny Gandelsman on violin alongside CMW students and resident ensemble, with Grau's nine-piece Guayaba Salsa Band. The concert includes additional works by Gonzalo Grau. The evening will be capped with salsa dancing, so bring your dancing shoes! This project brings together all elements of the Community MusicWorks mission–music education and performance in the context of building community.

Tickets online here.

Enjoy this video of the 2013 performance of Fantasia at the John Hope Settlement House in Providence. See it live in NY!