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!

CMW's students and teachers gathered recently for Community Day, a celebratory start to the new season of lessons that included music, food and games like Illustrated Telephone, which Rhiannon describes below.

Community Day was an exciting day for me, starting my second year of the Fellowship. It was great to see so many familiar faces, to reconnect with all of the friends that I've made in the last year, and see how so many students have grown over the summer. I can't believe it's only been three months and some of them have sprouted like trees! After just a year, it feels like a homecoming to be back in the TAPA cafeteria surrounded by students and parents.

To give everyone a sample of the fun we had with group games before going to our first ensemble meetings, I saved some of the finished pages from our game of 'Illustrated Telephone.' The rules of the game: One player begins by writing a descriptive sentence and passing the paper to their right. The next player's task is to draw a picture based on the sentence handed to them, then folds the paper and passes it to the right so that the next player sees only the picture and has to write a descriptive sentence based on the picture. The cycle continues all the way around the circle–there's no limit to the number of players, and each page passes until it's filled up. As you will see, hilarity ensues!

Unsurprisingly, many of the sentences centered around instruments, with the anticipation of impending music-making hanging in the air. Here is one that stayed remarkably on-topic despite a number of creative variations: ​

We had so many players, we continued on another page so everyone could get a chance to play:

​Not all of the sentences were music-themed. Some were just good fun to draw and write. This one features my own exquisite artwork, but I'm too shy to say which drawing is mine: ​

This one, though, was my favorite. It has everything–a great subject, vivid illustrations, and a surprise plot twist! ​

On the back of the page, the final sentence reads:

"Mr. Barracuda is happy about his new shoes."

I have a feeling it's going to be a good year.

–Rhiannon Banerdt, Fellow