Building Spring: Reflections on the CMW Center

We recently invited some local community members to take a peek inside the Community MusicWorks Center to view the work in progress, and our long-time treasured friend, supporter, and former CMW Board President Karen Romer shared her impressions with us.

Spring, you might think, is well named. Key plants seem to spring up, heralding the approach of others—daffs, narcissi, and lilies of the valley, to azaleas and fruit trees and rhododendrons— stages to appreciate and anticipate, wherever you live.

I recently toured a building, soon to be the physical center of an organization I have worked with since retiring twenty-three years ago when it had just begun, Community MusicWorks.  The day was a lovely spring afternoon, with bright sun and cloudless sky for our hard-hat tour of the completely framed and closed-in building on Westminster Street. The sun flooded in the many windows as we moved through the three floors of the bony structure of the building which they expect to be totally finished in June.

We had celebrated the site on which it was located, and its history, two years earlier, with representatives of the community surrounding it, in a staged program called  The Traces Project, sharing their histories and music traditions.  At the end of that event, we all planted sunflower seeds, which bloomed all over the lot the following spring until the excavation for the building began, folding the sun flowers into the foundation of the new building.

Now, another year later, the building has materialized. It has so many features that we dreamed of nearly 15 years ago, when we first started imagining it, and visiting buildings that might be candidates for a future home. Nothing, then, met our needs, so we managed, with scattered sites, until unexpectedly, a piece of land close to our center on Westminster Street came up for sale.

So here is what we now have emerging: a two story concert hall with movable chairs, – so it can be used for various community events, – a room for the Daily Orchestra Program, small practice rooms, and larger ones for groups; a student gathering room (with some inviting tiers to spread out or converse privately on),  an elevator, administrative offices, a library space, an instrument room with work space for a luthier, and a well-lighted café that will be open to the community from 8-2, and in the afternoon for students and parents, dropping off and picking up their kids.

This building is situated in a community that has a rich history. CMW designed it to enable its ongoing work for years to come: to teach, challenge, and inspire, and also to continue to share in the growth and evolution of the community around it.

Why, you might ask, does this building take its place in thoughts of spring?  It’s not just that it took shape this spring, but much more, because CMW has an amazing capacity to turn the seeds of our collective future into sturdy plants with great roots.

We know that some of these have already taken root as young adults in Providence, contributing their skills and social consciousness to their places of employment; many, many others, in the years ahead, will go forth to enrich and engage other communities, and in turn to spread new seeds wherever they have themselves taken root.  Who knows what new ideas will spring to life as the years unfold into the future!

-Karen Romer

Learn more about the CMW Center here.

Watch the story of The Traces Project on our YouTube channel: