At times the practice of teaching feels akin to looking at your pores in a magnifying mirror. It’s an activity to be pursued with great caution and great strength of spirit. It can be extremely unpleasant, may cause hyper-awareness of your flaws, and may result in a tendency to obsess over the tiniest imperfections imperceptible to anyone else. Before you know it you could be drowning in the microsphere. . . or perhaps you’ll be marveling at it. Perhaps you’ll step back and stand in awe of the miraculousness of life. It’s hard to tell on a given day if teaching will send me into a metaphorical pore-flushing frenzy or give me one of these awestruck moments, but that’s the strange beauty of teaching.

When I am in the thick of daily teaching practice, it’s all too easy to lose perspective. I catch my mind obsessing over the tiniest things like curved pinky fingers, a persistent F# when there should be an F natural, a bow that never seems to be rosined, a string that always seems to conveniently come loose before a particular song, the student who habitually plays songs on the wrong string, the jokester who is always vying for my attention, or those pesky friends who just can’t stop talking to each other. If only they’d stop being best friends for a moment maybe we could get something done!!

As a teacher of young children you learn that the tiniest of factors can completely destroy your lesson plan, and there never ever seems to be enough time, energy, or resources to handle all the problems you might see on a given day. Some of these factors are in your control, so you have to be on your guard at all times to make sure you don’t make a terrible mistake you’ll regret for the rest of the day – a mistake like leaving the dry erase markers out in the wild. Or forgetting to unpack your violin before your important demonstration, leading you to have to vamp for some precious seconds, during which time someone does a hilarious dance move and the focus of the entire room is completely lost and the rest of the day goes downhill from there. And why are the cellists suddenly playing tag instead of getting out their instruments?? Ah yes, of course, it is my fault. I forgot to take the cellos out of the closet. I really set them up for that one!

As teachers we learn to anticipate (and obsess over) every possible factor within our control that could go wrong. Occasionally we do a good job with our anticipations, but frustratingly there’s an even longer list of factors that are not in our control at all. I’m still learning what these even are, but I know the list includes things like: a bee could fly into the room, the temperature could be too hot or too cold, there could be a fight among peers before orchestra begins, a birthday party that everyone is super grumpy to be pulled away from, a holiday approaching resulting in a communal sugar overdose, an iPad taken away by a parent, a string breaking, a sick family member, a loss of a friend, or any number of factors ranging from kid-version-of-serious to actually serious. There is no way to predict or control these types of situations, and yet they have real consequences for how the orchestra rehearsal or lesson might go on a given day.

If monitoring, preparing for, and navigating all possible negatives sounds kind of exhausting, it is! Remember – pores in a magnifying mirror. Not an activity I could recommend to anyone.

Oh, but then there’s the magic.

There are the moments when I step back from the mirror and see the whole, and I suddenly realize “This is amazing!”  It could be hearing my own words echoed back to me from a student who I didn’t even think was paying attention in the first place. It could be a hug, a smile, an admission “I feel proud of that” or a “remember, you’re the one who taught me how to do that, Ms. Lisa!” or “No, silly, Thomas Tallis lived in the 1500s!” It could be hearing the students who spontaneously improvise together while waiting backstage for a performance or the student who teaches herself a piece by ear without any help from me at all. There are moments when I realize in spite of all the inevitable messiness, the imperfection, and the runny noses, progress is being made. Learning, music-making, and community building are all happening. Transformation is happening! In fact these things have all been happening right before my eyes the whole time, all while I was fretting over the location of the dry erase markers.

These magical moments can happen at any time, but for me they tend to amplify at the end of the school year, when I finally have space and opportunity to look back in time, to see the longer view of the year (or rather 6 years now that I have 6 years of time at CMW to look back on!). I had one of these moments recently when I watched the video of this year’s annual Gala – a video of every CMW student and musician joining together in an orchestra to make music. Mind you, when I was actually performing in the Gala I was too worried about a potential vomiting situation. It took watching the video for me to recognize what an incredible feat that performance was and how it truly represented the the invaluable work that every single person involved with Community MusicWorks is doing year-round (and has been doing for the past 21 years).

The mission of Community MusicWorks is to create cohesive urban community through music education and performance that transforms the lives of children, families, and musicians. A mission of transformation is a lofty one! Truthfully, in my earlier years here I sometimes felt frustrated that this lofty mission didn’t really distill down into simple, practical, manageable steps. There was no exact template for how to do this, no step-by-step guide to transforming lives and building community. No exact recipes, no guarantees, no user manual, no unit of measurement to tell if the process was working. And the practice itself didn’t always feel that magical or transformative! It seems a bit strange that achieving a lofty mission can involve a whole lot of seemingly menial tasks and a fair amount of stumbling around in the dark, and yet the reality that it does involve those things is a deeply comforting truth to me.

When I look at the evidence before my eyes, I’m faced with an undeniable truth – that the CMW community is collectively achieving its mission. I can see it in the ways the young musicians of the Daily Orchestra Program have grown and evolved, both individually and together, but I don’t really need to look that far. I can see it in myself and in the many ways I have grown, evolved, and learned through this work, with the support of this amazing community. In other words, to see a life transformed by CMW I only have to look in the mirror.

–Lisa Barksdale, Resident Musician

Be a Superstar! CMW is looking for a Director of Development and a Resident Musician Cellist to join our team. Are you a skilled philanthropy professional with a passion for cultivation? Are you a cellist that believes in the transformational power of music?

Learn more here:
https://opportunities.aspenleadershipgroup.com/opportunities/398

VanNashlee presents at the recent Phase II Youth Salon.

Community MusicWorks’ Founder & Artistic Director Sebastian Ruth introduces us to VanNashlee Ya, one of three graduating students we’ll be featuring this spring:

Over the past 21 years, I have seen Community MusicWorks’ mission come most clearly into focus when talking with our graduating seniors and seeing their maturity, broad worldview, and deep commitment to their communities. As you may know, we support students over the long haul, sometimes from age six or seven through high school, and it is the deep and long term connections that we know make the difference in our students’ lives, and that build the sense of cohesive community that we strive for and value.

Today I want to introduce you to VanNashlee Ya, a CMW violin student I have had the joy of teaching over the past two years. VanNashlee is a senior and is finishing her eleventh year learning journey with CMW. As you’ll see in her testimonial, VanNashlee has been involved with every dimension of CMW—from violin study, to Phase II discussions about artistry and social justice, to mentoring our elementary school students in the Daily Orchestra Program, to the important work of developing a voice as a leader among peers and adults in our community.

CMW has graduated dozens of students, most of whom have gone on to college (95% of our graduating students go on to college, compared to neighborhood graduation rates of 45%), and move into the working world with experience using their voice and collaborating with colleagues.

As we look toward the final months of our 21^st season, please consider the value of the experiences young people have with CMW, not to mention our over thirty free concerts each season, and make a gift in support of our mission and musicians. We have just $40,000 more to raise by June 30 to reach our fundraising goal for this year. It is your support that powers programs like our free music lessons, the Phase II program where VanNashlee and her colleagues have been working hard this year to prepare the annual Youth Salon, and so much more. Your gift will allow CMW to continue to offer these inspiring programs for free in our community.

We are grateful for your being part of our mission. As a supporter, your investment and partnership allows us to continue the collaboration between musicians, young people, and our community in a way that is engaging, meaningful, and available to everyone.

With deep appreciation,
Sebastian Ruth
Founder & Artistic Director

VanNashlee Ya, a current Phase II CMW student, lives in the Elmwood neighborhood of Providence, RI and is a high school senior. VanNashlee will attend Williams College in the fall and plans to major in Biology, pursuing the pre-med track.

I have been a student at Community MusicWorks for eleven years and throughout these eleven years, I have made connections with people in the community, explored and expressed my identity through music, and joined together with other youth at CMW to organize and lead events centered around music and social justice.

I currently study violin with CMW Artistic Director, Sebastian Ruth and am always excited to learn new skills, discover different challenges, and improve my musicianship. In addition, I enjoy having conversations about various topics such as our experiences as musicians, the importance of diversity and social justice in the community, our inspirations, our favorite songs, and even funny stories and jokes. He always encourages me to become a better musician and person.

 As a member of Phase II, I have the opportunity to spend time with other teenage students at CMW and engage in thought-provoking discussions about social justice. We have been working towards organizing the Youth Salon, an event we host every year where we invite the community to join us in our discussions and have a taste of what Phase II is like. Working with the other students is always special because we get to share our ideas, our love for music, our hopes for bettering the community, and we always have a great time just hanging out. Along with being in Phase II, I am a student representative on the CMW Board and a mentor at the Daily Orchestra Program.

These experiences have helped me to develop confidence in using my voice and becoming a leader in my community. I have three siblings also participating in CMW and we are happy to call CMW our second family. CMW is an awesome place that has granted me countless opportunities, helped me to express my identity, and make strong connections with the community. Even after I graduate, CMW will always hold a special place in my heart.  

–VanNashlee Ya

 VanNashlee, along with all of our graduating Phase II students, will be a featured soloist at our End-Of-Year Student Gala, Tuesday, May 22 at 6:00pm. Your generosity this spring will recognize the year-long work of all of our musicians and celebrate our performances—along with helping CMW continue our next decade of music making and our next generation of inspired students and musicians.

MusicWorks Collective violinist Jesse Holstein talks to composer Forrest Larson about his work as we anticipate the world premiere of Larson’s String Quartet on Sunday, April 8 at RISD Museum, 2pm. Also on the program, curated by Larson: Boccherini, Beach and Ives.

MusicWorks Collective
Sunday, April 8 at 2pm
RISD Museum, Grand Gallery
Admission to the Museum and concert is free

As the Fellows Quartet prepares for this weekend’s performances, violinist David Rubin reflects on a piece by Leoš Janáček.

Several months ago, I wrote for this blog about Aaron Copland’s violin sonata. My affection for that piece was uncomplicated. Every layer of meaning – biography, reception history, extramusical associations – made it richer, easier to love. Now, preparing for this weekend’s concerts at Everett Stage & Bell Street Chapel, I find myself in the opposite position. The deeper we delve into Leoš Janáček’s Intimate Letters, the more ambivalent I feel. What do you do when the circumstances surrounding a piece of music push you away, rather than draw you in?

———-

When I put bow to string and try to come to terms with the physical demands of this music, I quickly fall under its spell. Everything about it is unique.

The melodies. Little cells, packed with emotional energy and ready to combine, break apart, metamorphose. They have density of meaning, like Wagnerian leitmotif, but also a plainspoken quality – they burrow into your memory and haunt for days on end. Janáček spent the better part of his career trying to enshrine the Czech language in musical prose, and you can hear that effort. It’s easy to imagine words standing behind every note.

The rhythm. For most of Intimate Letters, one or more of the four players is busy shredding some frenzied, repeating pattern (in musical lingo, we call such repetition “ostinato”). Every so often, those ostinatos will converge – or clash – to dizzying effect. It’s a cliche to say that a work of small-scale chamber music is “symphonic in scope,” but in this case it rings true. The force of this combined rhythmic energy can be overwhelming. A cataclysm for four players – as written on the page, it’s almost too much to realize. Too much for a little box of wood, strung with steel or gut.

The texture. People often talk about “color” in concert music, whether in reference to the harmonic language of Ravel or Debussy, full of sensory appeal,  or the orchestration of Berlioz and Rimsky-Korsakov, rife with surprise. Janáček is one of the few composers who makes me feel texture just as strongly as color. A melody blurred by a rasping “ponticello” – the bow pulled against surface of the bridge – is it a memory of something precious past, or a portent of some idyllic future? A note so unexpected and poignant that you want to delay the vibrato or press the bow – things our teachers tell us not to do – because that’s what it sounds like when a singer’s voice aches, when music is spoken rather than sung. Sweetness tempered with grit. Beautiful and ugly sounds rendered in the same instant. That’s what I mean by texture.

—————

But when I think about this piece, my relationship to it sours. Lately, I keep having the same experience, or variations of it. I’ll be humming one of its tunes, setting up the office for teaching… in the pause before the melody’s repeat, my brain will offer the same nagging reminder: remember what this music meant to the composer. Remember the ugliness behind those notes…

—————

“Oh, it’s a work as if carved out of living flesh. I think I won’t write a more profound and truer one.”

Leoš Janáček intended this piece as a musical portrait of his decade-long, one-sided, imagined love affair with a distant woman, Kamila Stösslová. Kamila was nearly forty years younger than Janáček himself, and a complete stranger. The two met briefly in 1917, while Janáček was on vacation. She was married, and did not return his interest in the slightest… but over the next ten years he penned hundreds – hundreds! – of letters, in which he poured out his soul, proclaimed his ardor, and declared her to be his muse.

When Janáček created this second string quartet – in a frenzy of creative energy, exactly ninety years ago – he was enshrining this private history in music, immortalizing it.  At first, he considered treating the piece as a public declaration, by giving it an explicit title: Love Letters. A friend talked him down from the ledge – that’s how we ended up with the more elusive Intimate Letters. In contemporaneous writing to Kamila, Janáček pointed to particular scenes in the quartet as pictures of their imagined life together – one movement a depiction of the son they would have had; another a portrayal of the composer conquering all obstacles to their union (“the ground shook”). You can’t make this stuff up! Well, I guess Janáček could, but… the saying still holds!

We’ve all had unrequited loves. We’ve all preferred the contours of fantasy to the disappointments of everyday life. But to invest so much of your life’s meaning in another, indifferent person – that seems like such a sadness! I cringe when this piece is discussed as some sort of hyper-romantic gesture. This isn’t love. That requires two real, flawed people. Kamila isn’t present in these pages – only Janáček’s picture of her. His fetishized, idealized woman.

—————

And for me, that’s the catch, the entry point to this bizarre artwork, only briefly visible. When I think about enigmatic Kamila… then I think about men chasing women who don’t want them. And I don’t want to hear any more. But if I acknowledge that only one personality is truly enshrined in this music – Leoš Janáček himself, and all of his desires – then I can begin to accept it as sympathetic, flawed, and deeply moving.

–David Rubin, CMW Fellow 2017-2019

Join us for one (or both!) of these performances:

Saturday, March 3 at 7pm
Everett Stage
9 Duncan Street, Providence
$20 suggested donation

Sunday, March 4 at 3pm
Bell Street Chapel
5 Bell Street in the West End of Providence
$20 suggested donation
Join us for a post-concert community dinner!

Since graduating from the CMW Fellowship Program, Ariana Falk (Cello Fellow, 2010-2012) has served as Education Director for the Worcester Chamber Music Society and runs Neighborhood Strings, a program that provides free music lessons and programming to youth from Worcester’s neediest neighborhoods. Here, Ariana updates us on the program.

Neighborhood Strings is now in its sixth year with two program sites and over 50 kids in the program. The new “Green Group” spent the fall learning basic theory and solfege and joyfully received instruments at the annual presentation ceremony, now held in Clark University’s beautiful Tilton Hall. Also at Clark, 14 students enrolled in Community Music and Social Action, a course co-taught  by Neighborhood Strings instructors Ariana, Peter, and Dean Matt Malsky, are serving as mentors this semester for our youth while learning about the philosophical ideas behind social justice and music.

One of the most moving things to witness as a teacher is when students take off with the material we give them and widen their own worlds.

One longtime Neighborhood Strings student, Peter K., has been doing that this fall in an inspiring way. Peter has been playing the viola since the very beginning of Neighborhood Strings, as a fourth-grader. As a student of “big Peter” Sulski, he has really taken off, reaching a level of comfort and joy on his instrument that has allowed him to move onto harder and more satisfying music.

Now a high school sophomore, Peter has come to ChamberFest (our music camp) three times and played works by Corelli, Handel, Mozart alongside advanced players his age and older. Most exciting – last fall, he took on the challenge of playing in Clark Sinfonia, a college-level ensemble, where he played the entire program last month as a member of the viola section. I loved watching him sit with the college students, studying his scores and standing proudly on the stage of Razzo Hall. Any younger Neighborhood Strings student can simply look at Peter to see how music can send them on an amazing journey.

Coming up, all students in our program will get on stage in Worcester’s gorgeous Mechanics Hall to play at our group’s annual family concert  in front of a sold-out crowd of 800 people (the opening act to Peter and the Wolf). The NS Club, our team leadership group, received a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for a number of youth-led concerts around the community, a recording, and a TV appearance. And for the first time, all Neighborhood Strings students will be invited to attend our two-week summer Chamber Fest camp and mingle with advanced chamber music players from around the region. By the way, we welcome students from other programs looking for a similar experience and will do our best to provide scholarships. A lot to look forward to!

–Ariana Falk
Director, Neighborhood Strings

Learn more about Neighborhood Strings here.

Cellist Lauren Latessa has spent her post-CMW Fellowship time creating The Music Project (and getting married: congratulations, Lauren and Ryan!). Recently, Lauren updated us on the project’s developments.

“This project saved my life. Suddenly I realized the arch of my life could go up again. I found something I loved and could give back to.” — a participating senior.

Hello CMW friends!

As many of you know, I have spent the last three years creating and developing a music program for a large retirement community in Rockville, MD. I am a full-time employee and feel very lucky to work with talented, thoughtful colleagues across the artistic spectrum. Each day I learn more about how to harness music’s power to provide joy, meaning, and texture to a time of life that is often filled with loneliness and isolation.

In this video, senior resident Marjorie talks about the impact that the Music Project has had in her life: “I think the only thing that keeps you alive is learning new things.”

In February of 2017, this project took a huge step forward as I welcomed Sara Matayoshi and Jessica McKee and formed the Iris Piano Trio. Three days a week we collaborate with elders from four retirement communities, working in independent living, assisted living and memory care contexts. Each year we curate an annual rotation of concerts, open rehearsals, participatory group programs and one-on-one sessions designed specifically for these communities.

This past year has been an incredible journey, full of peaks and valleys as we’ve navigated our way through the different environments and found our voice as a trio. We are thrilled to now be embarking on our second year working at the intersection of creative placemaking and creative aging!

The trio is just putting together our website (www.irispianotrio.com) and newsletters. Send an email to contact@irispianotrio.com if you’d like to be added to our monthly newsletter!

Wishing you all the best in 2018,
Lauren Latessa
CMW Cello Fellow 2012-2014

Learn more about The Music Project’s day-to-day activities in this blog post.

“The Last Supper” painting by Jessica Van Daam, on loan to the Trinity Brewhouse.

CMW Fellow and violinist Luke Fatora muses upon Beethoven as a pop culture icon.

Earlier this year, an unexpected downpour of cold rain unleashed itself as I was out for a walk. Passing by the Trinity Brewhouse on Fountain Street, I took refuge inside and found myself seated near a musician-themed mural riffing on The Last Supper. I was enjoying a nearby table’s particularly slurred conversation – its contents better left unexplored here – when it took a hard turn. One of the speakers interrupted a waitress, gesturing towards the mural hanging on the wall where Ludwig van Beethoven (not to confused with Beethoven the dog but more on that later) was stoically seated next to Billie Holiday in the company of other musicians like Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon. He asked “Who’s the guy with the curly hair??”

I found myself thinking back to this experience recently at CMW’s Phase II students’ weekly dinner and discussion. The students were exploring the interdependent relationship between a piece of art and the settings that a culture places it in. Later that night I grappled with unanswerable questions as I tossed and turned. How would Beethoven have responded to someone telling him that two centuries into the future, Americans would scarf down nachos and beer under his quasi-religious image in a brewpub in Providence, RI? How about being told that Andy Warhol, an iconic 20^th century American artist, would designate Beethoven as the figure from western classical music to join the likes of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and Chairman Mao, as portrait subjects? Finally, what would he have had to say about the movie Beethoven released in the 1990’s?? My guess is as good as anyone’s as to how Beethoven would have reacted to being told that his name would become synonymous with a Hollywood movie about the adventures of a goofy, slobbering, St. Bernard.

The composer’s canine namesake.

After entertaining these hypothetical reactions, we’re left with some serious questions. Why did Andy Warhol choose Beethoven over someone like Schubert or Tchaikovsky as an iconic portrait subject? Why is the comedic reboot of Lassie centered around a St. Bernard named Beethoven (the surface explanation is here) and not Schoenberg or Bach?

Warhol’s Beethoven

Beethoven was an incredibly forward thinking composer – so much so that nearly a century after he wrote his wild Grosse Fugue, composers such as Arnold Schoenberg would look back to it as a premonition of their own radical breaks with tradition. Are we to believe that Beethoven’s seat at the table of musical disciples in the Trinity Brewhouse is a result of his technical wizardry as a composer?

Another explanation lies in his easily accessible humanity. As many people know, Beethoven lost his hearing over the course of time and had a generally tough life. His struggles led him to rail against fate in his Fifth Symphony. There is hardly a more universal human experience than struggling with circumstances that are beyond our control. Beethoven’s loss of hearing is tragic and his response to continue living for the sake of creating art is certainly heroic (you can read about it in his own words in his famed Heiligenstadt Testament). This said, other composers, being human (for now…), have certainly also struggled with circumstances beyond their control.

Popular culture’s obsession with Beethoven (the composer) risks encapsulating his image in the opening bars of his 5^th Symphony and “that epic part of the 9^th symphony where people are singing about something in German.” Only a sliver of Beethoven’s humanity is seen when it is through this lens. Recently, I have been working through his Third op. 12 Piano and Violin sonata and have been enjoying how starkly it contrasts popular notions of what Beethoven should sound like (“bark bark bark baaaark!”). Beethoven began working on his op. 12 Piano and Violin sonatas in 1797; he was 27 years old and had been living in Vienna for 5 years. At that point, he was 5 years away from writing the Heiligenstadt Testament and presumably contemplating suicide in the face of his worsening deafness. The Heiligenstadt Testament details the agony of Beethoven’s depression but it also mentions his lifelong heightened sensitivity to “tender feelings of affection” and his general “love for man and feelings of benevolence.”

Ludwig Van Beethoven, composer and guy with the curly hair.

Beethoven’s Third Piano and Violin Sonata can be seen as stemming from these general underlying dispositions; it is brimming with a particularly sparkling and playful energy, never taking itself too seriously. The beginning and ending movements are strikingly joyful romps through E flat major. The second movement is an Adagio in C major that begins with a simple melody containing an emotional pureness that becomes transformed throughout the movement. The theme passes briefly through distant and more complicated emotional landscapes, emerging to playfully evade a committed return to its original character – one gets the sense that Beethoven is exploring what it feels like to make peace with an unattainable ideal’s imaginary nature. This is the side of Beethoven that, two centuries later, keeps me warm on a slushy February day. Beethoven’s ability to probe such an extreme range of emotion leaves me in awe of his (very human) ability to reach across time and space to connect with us and – most importantly – inspires me to stop reaching for my phone to check the latest news and reach for my violin instead.

–Luke Fatora

Please join us Thursday, February 15 at 7pm for the Sonata Series Event at RISD Museum’s Grand Gallery as Luke Fatora performs Beethoven (the composer) along with pianist Jeff Louie. The event also features violinist Jesse Holstein performing a composition by Amy Beach.