CMW Founder & Artistic Director Sebastian Ruth will be in San Francisco and Palo Alto next weekend for two speaking engagements. If you live there, we hope that you will take advantage of this opportunity to hear Sebastian speak about CMW and our 15-year experiment at the intersection of classical music and public service.

Saturday, June 23 at 7:30 pm
Lecture: Redefining Musicianship for the Public Good
Hosted by Kelly Close, San Francisco
http://www.cpslectures.com/
Free with reservation, RSVP to kelly.close@closeconcerns.com

Sunday, June 24 at 2:30 pm
Keynote address, St. Lawrence String Quartet Chamber Music Seminar
Stanford University, Palo Alto
http://music.stanford.edu/Events/calendar.html
Free admission

The concert on June 2 was a success! Despite having only a few short rehearsals, CMW students, alumni, teachers, and visiting musicians in town for IMPS performed four pieces beautifully to a sizable crowd at the Knight Memorial Library. Listen/watch/read about all four pieces on the Media Lab website by clicking here.

-Jori Ketten, Media Lab Director

Scratch is my composition for string orchestra and field recordings. The strings section is in C major and based on a melody first exposed in the viola section. Underlying the strings part, there is texture of sounds recorded at a string restoration workshop. The piece is largely in sonata form with an interlude in the middle that could most accurately be described as a solo by the operator of the cassette tape players, which contain the recorded sounds from the field recordings.

-Liam Hopkins, Phase II

One exciting aspect of CMW's ongoing Mellon Foundation-funded project to share our model is known as the Third Year Fellowship. This spring, former Fellows and graduating Fellows were invited to apply for small grants that would provide seed funding for their own new or expanded programming. Two grants recipients were selected by a committee of CMW board and staff: Rachel Panitch (class of '09) and Ariana Falk (class of '12).

Rachel's proposal (excerpt)

Michelle and Rachel have worked closely together at the RI Fiddle Project over the past two years, developing the group fiddle class culture, pedagogy, procedures and repertoire. It is work that requires both long-range and short-term planning, constant revisions and reflection. This class (incorporating group fiddle playing and dance) is one of the main areas where the “alternative” element of the alternative model [from CMW] is honed and tested. 

In some moments, this alternative model feels as if it’s becoming stronger – learning how to stand on its own. We see this when one of our students volunteers to lead the class in starting a tune, or helps to line the others up for a performance. At other times, the model can feel delicate and in danger of toppling over. As some of our students have entered middle school this year, they have tested the program with poor role modeling and a refusal to participate in certain activities – and yet, they choose to show up without fail each week. We’ve had remarkable attendance. We know that they are drawn to RI Fiddle Project, the people in it, and to making music. But we may need to try something new to give our students challenges that are particularly well matched to their own age and ability groups. 

Over the summer, the staff would develop a new group class structure to better serve the diverse of needs and learning methods of our students. Here is one possible answer: a new group class structure where we hold two smaller-group sessions each week. Students would be required to attend the group class on the opposite day of their lessons, so that each student would not only have two experiences each week, but those experiences would be on two separate days. The groups would be divided up according to age and experience, and at our monthly music and dance events, students would come together to play in a larger group setting.

Ariana's proposal (excerpt)

As I draw near to the end of my Fellowship, I have looked for the right circumstances to pursue my project. Many key pieces have begun to fall into place for an educational project in Worcester that would mirror CMW’s values. I have accepted a position as Education Director for the Worcester Chamber Music Society; the group is a robust performance ensemble who wish to deepen their educational programming. My vision is to make that work the seed of a bigger project that would enrich the lives of Worcester youth through free music lessons and meaningful mentorship.

Worcester’s poverty rate is nearly twice the state average, and approaches 50% in the downtown area. A music project could offer a wealth of opportunities to communities in need, including the downtown and Main South neighborhoods, whose youth have little access to creative arts. School shows from the Chamber Society already reach hundreds of children. I envision as the ideal complement a free program that offers lessons in a downtown space. Alongside the teaching artists are college musicians who commit to year-long relationships with youth, and often stay for multiple years. The college mentors are part of a class that offers support, training, and college credit. They deepen the connection between college and city and glimpse a bigger mission to guide their musical careers.

The budding project in Worcester is long-term and seeks to nurture many aspects of its students’ lives, and as such its intended outcomes are multifaceted. Youth will discover a creative outlet that hones life skills like discipline, cooperation, imagination, and leadership. Mentors will be encouraged to forge strong relationships with students that strengthen colleges’ ties to the community.

Congratulations to Rachel and Ariana, and we look forward to hearing back from them about their projects at this time next year!

-Heath Marlow, Managing Director

More photos by Jori in CMW's Flickr account.

"I don't know of another organization that's answering the question of what music and musicians are for in a better way than CMW. It is an honor to be associated even in a peripheral way." –Pianist and CMW benefactor Jonathan Biss, addressing an adoring audience during his all-Beethoven recital at The RISD Museum on Sunday, May 20.

More photos by Jori in CMW's Flickr account.

CMW favorite Eric Booth was invited to give the keynote address at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston last month. He treated the audience to four distinctly different performances of "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams, a wonderful exercise that he shared with CMW staff during his two-day residency in Providence last year.

You can download Eric's address here or read it online here.

-Heath Marlow, Managing Director

Donald Tarallo, CMW's graphic design consultant since 2003, has been awarded a prestigious fellowship by Bridgewater State University to spend the 12-13 academic year engaged in a project that Don has created to benefit the Providence Youth Arts Collaborative. Below are excerpts from the text of Don's successful proposal.

I will devote my time to employ graphic design toward creating positive social change for youth living in the urban neighborhoods of Providence, RI. The change my project will embody addresses a paradigm shift taking place in the graphic design community as the focus moves from design as a practice that fuels a market to the awareness that graphic design is a social practice and that it can be vehicle for powerful and sustainable social change. This project embraces a culture of heightened social awareness and practical application of visual means to address real world problems.

I will work within a regionally established network of after-school arts programs organized under a body called the Providence Youth Arts Collaborative (PYAC). This network of organizations is regarded as one of the top programs in the United States for their efforts in offering quality after-school arts education to urban youth.

My project will entail working with a team of youth from this network to investigate how graphic design can act as a tool of intervention directing youth away from negative life choices toward positive ones. I will investigate how graphic design can intervene at points in life where youth are confronted with important choices through mapping various social systems in the Providence community (education, social/peer groups, cultural, recreational, etc.) and identifying opportunities for intervention and persuasion. The results will yield a method and approach to graphic design as a civically engaged practice encapsulated in a process book or video and a visual outreach campaign that accomplishes the above mentioned interventions.

Congratulations Don, and we're looking forward to seeing how this project will unfold!

Whew! The last 6 weeks in CMW's Media Lab were a blur. In this short time, we came up with an idea for a movie, created characters, wrote out scenes individually, and combined them into a script. We talked about the mood of each scene and created (and recorded) music on our instruments to score the scenes. Then we filmed the scenes, revised our script a little, created some new music to fit the revisions, and put it all together into our final movie… the Pillow Monster!!!! Enjoy here.

-Jori Ketten, Media Lab Director

OUR HEARTFELT THANKS FOR YOUR GENEROSITY!

The Concert for Hope & Healing to Benefit Charles Sherba was a phenomenal success! The outpouring of support and generosity exhibited by the hundreds of contributors to the Charles Sherba benefit fund has been awe-inspiring. As much as we would like to thank each donor individually, it will be impossible to do so. Please accept our sincere gratitude for your gifts as we continue to pray for Chuck's complete recovery.

-Amy Goldstein, Aurea Board President

Editor: We hear that Chuck is doing well, and planning to resume performing activities this summer, including an Aurea concert and performances with the Vermont Symphony.

Commencement Forum – Education, Music, and Possibility: CMW at 15

From Brown University's website: The educational goals of CMW include creating what American philosopher Maxine Greene calls “openings,” where young people, through experiences with the arts, conceive of new possibilities for their lives and futures. CMW founder Sebastian Ruth ’97 describes the history of this organization, and discusses the educational experience with CMW alumni Sidney Argueta ’13, and Natasha Rosario ’16, followed by a musical performance.

Click here to view Sebastian's commencement forum.

Photos by Jori