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CMW welcomed elected and community leaders to a recent preview event: Senator Jack Reed, Councilwoman Rachel Miller, Mayor Brett Smiley, Lt. Governor Sabina Matos, CMW Board President Ramiro Encizo, CMW Founder & Artistic Director Sebastian Ruth, Congressman Gabe Amo, and Representative Seth Magaziner.

This week, CMW hosted a first look of our dynamic new building and performance space for elected and community leaders. This kickoff marks a new chapter for the organization as we move from a small storefront to a 24,000 square foot center, which will open to the public for the first time at a Grand Opening Celebration on Saturday, September 28.

“Access to music and arts education can be a transformative force in the lives of young people. For nearly 30 years, Community MusicWorks has been bringing music into the lives of Rhode Islanders and fostering connections through lessons and performances,” said U.S. Senator Jack Reed. “This new facility we are celebrating today is a testament to the dedication and hard work of Sebastian and his team, helping Rhode Islanders of all ages develop and hone their love of music and passion for the arts.”

“The Community MusicWorks Center aims to be the heart of a musical community that inspires and connects. This new space will allow young people for generations to gather, make those connections, and develop their craft as musicians,” said CMW Founder and Artistic Director Sebastian Ruth, who in 2010 was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the “genius grant,” for his work creating the organization. “We are excited for the building to inspire young people and professional artists in creative endeavors and community building.”

The new space will better serve the growing network of students, alumni, and professional musicians that benefit from CMW programs. From our humble beginnings with 15 students in 1997, the organization now serves approximately 130 students each year, engages world renowned musicians like Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax, and offers regular public concert performances as the MusicWorks Collective.

“Every child, regardless of their background, should have the opportunity to pursue their passions and interests. As a former teacher, I understand how music can serve as a creative outlet for young people to express themselves, and Community MusicWorks has done incredible work to expand access to music education and the arts for all Rhode Islanders,” said Rep. Seth Magaziner (RI-02).

“As we work to expand opportunities for young people to develop and grow their passion for the arts, I thank Community MusicWorks for their decades of service to Rhode Island,” said Rep. Gabe Amo (RI-01). “Congratulations on their brand-new space that will expand the positive reach in our community, support creative voices, and bolster music education for future generations.”

CMW purchased the lot at 1326 Westminster Street in 2017 and broke ground on the project in spring of 2022. With students slated to begin string lessons on site by mid-September, the new Community MusicWorks Center features teaching and practice rooms, administrative offices, a cafe that will eventually be open to the public, and, for the first time in the organization’s history, a designated performance hall.

“For nearly 30 years, Community MusicWorks has been a cornerstone in shaping the lives of Providence students and families,” said Mayor Brett P. Smiley. “I am grateful that our city has partners like Community MusicWorks who foster a culture or creativity and inclusivity in Providence and utilize music and community to open up new opportunities for every member of our community.”

Funding for the project came from a record $15 million capital campaign, including ARPA funds through the City of Providence, Cultural Facilities Bond funds administered through the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, ARP funds administered through Rhode Island Housing, and New Markets Tax Credits from the Massachusetts Housing Investment Corporation. The center’s design was conceived through a series of planning charrettes with CMW students, parents, alumni, musicians, and community members, and a thoughtful focus on sustainability. It is only the second building in Rhode Island to use a Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) technique that reduces the need for carbon-emitting steel and concrete.

The public is invited to tour the building and celebrate this milestone at a free community celebration on Saturday, September 28. Doors will open at 2 p.m., followed by a world-premiere by composer Wang Lu, which includes a student procession and performance from the old space to the new at 3 p.m.

Join us!
CMW Center Grand Opening Block Party
Saturday, September 28, 2:00-7:00 pm
1326 Westminster Street, Providence.
Admission is free; Make your reservation here.

We’re grateful to our partners, who helped to bring this project to life:

James Comer
Deputy Executive Director, RIHousing
“RIHousing is proud to have provided critical funding for the Community MusicWorks Center, a multi-use facility that replaces a vacant, blighted piece of property in Providence’s West End. CMW’s Center will act as a community space for the neighborhood and a destination for those living in and around the city, its impact extending far beyond its walls. We are dedicated to continuing to invest in projects like this that, along with building more affordable housing, are integral to community revitalization across Rhode Island.”

Moddie Turay
President and CEO, Massachusetts Housing Investment Corporation
“The New Markets Tax Credit Program aims to empower low-income communities by attracting new investments and revitalizing neighborhoods. With its strong presence and longstanding relationships in the West End of Providence, Community MusicWorks has established itself as a respected local partner. Now, with the space to grow, they can further enhance their role as a good neighbor. CMW embodies the type of organization we seek to support, and we are excited to see them leverage these tax credits to create an inclusive and dynamic environment for creativity.”

Barbara Sokoloff
President, Barabara Sokoloff Associates, Inc.
“We are excited to bring financing to such an innovative, sustainable design.”

Kyna Leski
Principal, 3SIX0 Architecture
“Community MusicWorks shared a quote from Maxine Greene that serves as a guiding principle for their organization: ‘I am what I am not yet.’ Those words were an inspiration for our team as we sought to create a design that evoked an ethos of promise. From the unfinished rawness of exposed mass timber walls, beams and columns, pipes and conduits, to the mix of sheathing and exposed framing of the faceted acoustic panels in the performance hall, our architectural goals were to create a space that the community could call ‘home’ and that left open the opportunity to grow and evolve in unexpected ways.”

Alban Bassuet
Principal, Arup
“We’re proud to help realize CMW’s new home that can better support its vital mission to ensure music education for all. To create a top-notch environment for learning and performance, Arup brought the state-of-the-art acoustics design and venue planning for quality sound insulation and managing the unique properties of mass timber for music and Providence’s first mass timber building.”

Jonsara Ruth
Co-founder and Design Director, Healthy Materials Lab
Associate Professor of Interior Design at Parsons School of Design
“A healthy building is particularly important for children because it is now understood that environmental exposures can be a powerful determinant of health and human development. We are proud to partner with Community MusicWorks and 3SIX0 Architects on the new center, which both prioritizes the health of the community and inspires creativity for students.”

Tom Ardito
Director of the SNEP Watershed Implementation Grants program, a partnership between EPA New England and Restore America’s Estuaries, which funded stormwater management aspects of the building
“With this new Music Center, Community Music Works has established a space that will truly serve this wonderful organization, its constituents and the community. Most remarkable from our perspective is that CMW went beyond the requirements of a great concert and teaching space, to create a building that will be not just a cultural resource, but an environmental asset as well.  The Southeast New England Program is pleased to support this project for its positive impacts on clean water, climate mitigation, and in fostering a sustainable, creative and equitable community in Providence.”

Learn more about the CMW Center here.

Photos by Rebecca Atwood/Atomic Clock

“Everywhere you turn on this project, there’s a small challenge.”

 While workers put finishing touches on the new CMW Center, Sebastian took a walkthrough with Pezzuco Construction representatives Ron Pezzuco and Doug Valcourt to chat about materials and features of the soon-to-be-opened project at 1326 Westminster Street.

Providence-based architecture firm 3SIX0 designed the Community MusicWorks Center to be constructed out of mass timber, only the second building in Rhode Island to be using the material as the structure of a building. The building reduces carbon-emitting steel and concrete production by using Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) as the structure. The CLT used in this project was made from gluing together 5 layers of spruce wood and was manufactured in Austria.

CMW, together with 3SIX0 and Pezzuco Construction, worked closely with Healthy Materials Lab, a design research lab at Parsons School of Design, with the goal of making a pioneering, healthy, low-embodied carbon center in the heart of the West End. All building materials and furnishings were evaluated to minimize the presence of toxins known to contribute to childhood disease.

The entire team, from planning to placement of each carefully considered element, has met any challenge in service of a healthy, light-and-music-filled place that our students, neighbors, and friends can call home.

Save the date: The Community MusicWorks Center Grand Opening Celebration is on Saturday, September 28, and we can’t wait to welcome you!

Video by Atomic Clock

We’re putting the finishing touches on the new Community MusicWorks Center and getting ready to move in! We look forward to celebrating this new space with you with food, fun, tours of the new building, and of course, music!

Stay tuned for more details.

Save the Date: CMW Center Grand Opening Celebration!
Saturday, September 28
1326 Westminster Street, Providence

“It’s a learning experience for me, not only in construction but in community.”

Construction has entered another exciting phase as workers shape and outfit the interior spaces of the Community MusicWorks Center. Take a peek inside as CMW student and board member Dayana quizzes Pezzuco Construction owner Ron Pezzuco with key questions about the building’s finish date and what kind of sandwich he hopes to see featured in our café.

Learn more about the Community MusicWorks Center here.
Enjoy photos of the interior-in-progress.

This week, CMW welcomes composer Reena Esmail to the organization for a week-long residency that includes a Q&A lunch on Wednesday and the End-of-Year Student Gala on Friday. Jill Pearlman talked with the composer in anticipation of her visit to CMW.

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One of Indian-American composer Reena Esmail’s secrets is that she keeps a dizzying number of conversations going simultaneously, somehow making it look easy. Not just dialogs between sitar and harpsichord, but also between orchestra and the street, between Hollywood and Bollywood. She does the intricate thinking to meld these layers but wants us to enter with our emotions first.

On first hearing her music, I felt some déjà vu, as if the music stemmed from a vast ocean of origins, and those echoes, resonances and combinations have always existed – but where?  There are secrets to these compositions that Esmail holds and keeps to herself – graciously rolling them out little by little as we immerse in her lush, often provocative project.

Rigorously trained in the classical western schools, at Juilliard and Yale, Esmail had been looking for ways to step out of boxes, closed systems, assumptions.  “I think people overintellectualize music,” she says.  “Professional musicians have been trained to experience things in an exact way. When you take some of those things away, people are forced to read their own intuitions and emotions. I want people to have a visceral response. I’m trying to tap into a third rail of emotion.”

Esmail’s third rail involves not shock and confrontation, but invitation and seduction. In her words, when having intercultural conversations, “I’m inviting others to be uncomfortable in the most comfortable way.”

Her personal mélange of cultures could be infuriatingly confusing. Esmail, 41, was raised in Studio City, Hollywood.  Her parents were “super weird” — although both Indian, her mother was raised in Kenya and her dad in Pakistan, eleven languages between them but English the only one in common. The school scene meant being immersed in movie and pop culture, Spice Girls and Alana Morrisette the backdrop to hanging out with friends whose parents were stars. Bollywood was a rare nod to Indian music heard at home.  She gravitated to Western classical music and pursued a career path, entering Juilliard as an undergrad.

As a budding composer, she felt challenged by the priority of Western harmony, and found herself intuitively drawn towards melody. A year-long fellowship in India when she was 22 filled out pieces of that puzzle – she felt immediately at home in Hindustani composition, the northern Indian classical tradition, and began to study similarities and differences.

A well-known 2018 composition, “Darshan,” for instance, is based on the Bach partita. It flows so beautifully that before you know it, you’re wondering if Bach used those rich textures, that lyrical, head-rolling rhythms, the darkness and lightness.  “It works between sensibilities, taps into new western music style with texture coming in the forefront than background,” says Esmail. “A lot of the surrounding texture approximates a drone. The warmth and buzziness of Indian instruments are similar to elements of baroque music.”   (It was featured in the New York Times’ piece, “Five Minutes That Will Make You Love the Violin.”)

The acclaimed violinist known for this exquisitely expressive piece is Vijay Gupta, Esmail’s husband of four years. Also born in American to Indian immigrants, Gupta had been deeply involved with Bach’s sonatas and partitas, so he commissioned Esmail’s piece before the two were married. Another shared interest: expanding the classical music world’s narrow reach, in setting, audience and power structures.  In 2010, Gupta founded Street Symphony, a Los Angeles-based project established to play music for and with people on Skid Row, in prisons and in shelters.  The work has been appreciated and lauded, establishing community and fortifying Gupta’s urgency of being a “Citizen Artist.”  Gupta is artistic director, and Esmail was the resident composer in 2016-2018.

Being an artist, Esmail says, means “putting ourselves in service of bigger questions. We don’t spend enough time thinking about them.”  Her answer has been to create work that connects, rather than divides.  Similar to the commitment of Community MusicWorks, Esmail says, “this is not outreach, not a thing that is a separate thing from music making. This is not that different in terms of interaction.  We meet people where they are emotionally. That’s the job of artist.”

Lately this has meant asking herself how to write music that engages youth.  Over the years, her compositions for young musicians have expanded one hundred percent. She has written a band piece for high school band, children’s piano and choral pieces with Oxford University Press, written for student ensembles.  “Professional music making, we don’t value enough educational music making.  If you hadn’t played Bach’s Minuet in G as a student, would you value St Matthew Passion as an adult?”

Add to that Esmail’s much anticipated guest residency at CMW, May 14-17.  She will be testing out some of her compositions, such as “Twinkle Twinkle” with Hindustani rhythms, on a tough audience, the kids: “It will be a clear litmus test. A child doesn’t owe you anything!”

 The workshops will culminate in the End-of-Year Student Gala, May 17^th at the Lindemann Performing Arts Center, where CMW staff and student musicians will celebrate by playing an Esmail program.  Watch for “Concerto for You,” a piece which embodies Esmail’s commitment to minimize hierarchies within an orchestra; the soloist, Minna Choi, will circulate and trade on and off with student musicians.  The moving conclusion embodies Esmail’s concept that this concerto is for “you.”  You who?  Gupta, her husband, asked if it was for him. Esmail turned him down and pointed to the musicians. The musicians will gesture outward from the stage –consider yourself invited, this happening is made for you.

— Jill Pearlman

Jill Pearlman worked as a music and arts journalist in New York and France for over a decade.  Now mainly a poet, writing at the edge of music and words, she lives in Providence and is a massive CMW fan.  Her work can be seen at jillpearlman.com.  

Join us for these two events:

A Conversation and Lunch with Composer Reena Esmail
Join us for a conversation and lunch with the composer, where you can ask questions, hear more about her work, and enjoy refreshments. Lunch will be provided. Join us!
Wednesday, May 15 at noon
Southside Cultural Center
393 Broad Street, Providence
Admission is free; Make your reservation here

End-of-Year Student Gala
Join us for a large ensemble performance where the event’s musical centerpiece, Reena Esmail’s composition Concerto for You, is scored for a professional violinist to play with a youth string orchestra, and our very own CMW Resident Musician violinist Minna Choi will perform as the featured soloist. Reena’s compositions combine influences from western classical and Hindustani or Indian classical music, so, we’re pleased to feature master tabla player Nitin Mitta, who’ll lay down percussion with our student ensembles and perform a sure-to-be-stunning percussion solo. Join us at the Lindemann Performing Arts Center at Brown University for this celebratory event as CMW beginner to graduating students take the stage with the MusicWorks Collective and special guests. Cheer on our young musicians, enjoy the fabulous venue, and stay for the delicious buffet! We look forward to seeing you there.
Friday, May 17 at 6 pm
The Lindemann Performing Arts Center
146 Angell Street, Providence
Admission is free; Make your reservation here.

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:

Writer, speaker, and social activist Arlene Goldbard talks with CMW’s Founder & Artistic Director Sebastian Ruth about how classical music can connect with community arts and cultural democracy on a new episode of her podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.”

Three ways to listen!

SPOTIFY:

APPLE PODCASTS:

MIAAW.NET:

Read the summary on Arlene Goldbard’s website

Composer and cellist Laura Cetilia shares thoughts about her piece, counterglow, which will be performed by the MusicWorks Collective in a world premiere event this Sunday at Bell Street Chapel.

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As you may or may not know, I served as the first Cello Fellow at Community MusicWorks from 2006-2008 and later as a Resident Musician from 2010-2018. I have since been in grad school at Wesleyan (2018-2020) and now Cornell (since 2020) to study music composition.

Fortunately, this year I was able to rekindle my relationship with Community MusicWorks when my daughter became a CMW student studying viola with Jesse Holstein, and I was commissioned to write a new work, counterglow, which will have its world premiere this Sunday at Bell Street Chapel. It has been such a pleasure to write music for close friends — I am grateful for their understanding of me as a person/artist and for their gracious acceptance of what this new piece asks of them.

Over the last twenty years I have developed my own technique of listening to and playing the cello — when the bow is placed very lightly on the string, overtones and a fuzzy layer of soft noise are allowed to speak. I enjoy creating opportunities for these disregarded sounds to be the focus of my compositions. In counterglow, I ask the musicians to go outside their comfort zone and embody this technique within their own playing.

To me, the resultant sparkling yet gossamer timbre beautifully conveys some of the larger ideas around counterglow. Printed throughout the score is a quote from visual artist Yayoi Kusama, “Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos. Polka dots are a way to infinity. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environment. I become part of the eternal and we obliterate ourselves with love.”

My specialized bowing technique brings out Kusama’s appreciation of the granular with both finite and infinite points occurring within a wash of sound. Similarly, fundamental pitches, such as the open strings of the violin family, are comprised of a multitude of overtones, or partials, that give that note its defining character. I ask the quartet to use their open strings often, and to strive for those overtones to shine through.

In counterglow, I also make use of the smallest interval in Western music theory, the minor second. At times this interval is suspended by one or two players while another instrumentalist slowly glissandos (slides) from the lower note to the next. What results is a sort of shimmering harmony where “dissonance” is treated as a timbre and negates traditional resolution. This technique explores the hidden but rich worlds situated within a sustained semitone, or the notes in between the notes (otherwise known as microtonality, a common musical practice in non-Western cultures).

The title counterglow is taken from an astronomical phenomenon when a bright spot appears in the night sky, caused by sunlight being scattered by interplanetary dust. This is proof that despite the dismal state of the world’s current affairs, we are still surrounded by and are ourselves part of immense and random occurrences of spectacular beauty. I hope the performance of this quartet is a shining moment within this instant of time and space before us.

— Laura Cetilia, cellist and composer

Join us in experiencing the world premiere of Laura’s piece, counterglow!

MusicWorks Collective in Concert
Sunday, January 14 at 3 pm
Bell Street Chapel, Providence

Admission is free but seating is limited
Make your reservation here

***

Read more about Laura here and on her website: https://laura.cetilia.org

As a daughter of mixed heritage, Mexican-American cellist, Laura Cetilia is at home with in betweenness, straddling multiple worlds as cellist / composer / educator / artist while working within acoustic / electronic / traditional / experimental sound practices. Her compositions have been described as “unorthodox loveliness” (Boston Globe) and hailed as “alternately penetrating and atmospheric” (Sequenza 21). Her works have been performed by TAK Ensemble, loadbang, Mivos Quartet, Splinter Reeds, Dog Star Orchestra, a.pe.ri.od.ic, LCollective, and others. The Grove Dictionary of American Music describes her electroacoustic duo Mem1 (established in 2003 with Mark Cetilia, electronics/ modular synth) as a “complex cybernetic entity” that “understands its music as a feedback loop between the past and present.” And in the performer / composer collective Ordinary Affects she has collaborated with, commissioned and premiered works by composers such as Alvin Lucier, Christian Wolff, Michael Pisaro, Jürg Frey, Eva-Maria Houben, and Magnus Granberg. Laura is currently pursuing her DMA in Music Composition at Cornell University and is also a proud mother of one.