Community MusicWorks is keeping it green! In a ceremony at Roger Williams Park Botanical Center, Community MusicWorks was one of several local entities honored with an award to fund the creation of a green landscaping project for the Community MusicWorks Center (now under construction!).

The funding is from the Southeast New England Program (SNEP) a regional initiative funded by Congress and managed by the US Environmental Protection Agency, working to preserve and restore coastal waters by providing grants and technical assistance to communities, local organizations and partnerships in Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts.

This grant will support the creation of an exterior natural landscape with a self-contained rainwater recycling and irrigation system. The outdoor spaces are intended to expand the footprint of the building and invite pedestrians and the CMW community to enjoy much needed green space, a parklet, and woodland garden. The outdoor spaces act as green infrastructure recapturing roof rainwater for irrigation and bio-retention areas to capture stormwater.

Speakers included US Sen. Jack Reed, Congs. Jim Langevin and David Cicilline, Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza, and EPA Regional Administrator David Cash.

Learn more about the Community MusicWorks Center here. 

For this season of our popular Sonata Series, Community MusicWorks is excited to offer a listener’s choice: Join us in-person at Bell Street Chapel or enjoy the concert online through our first-ever live-streaming event.

The Sonata Series spotlights our wonderful resident musicians in programs of solo and duo music presented in collaboration with fabulous guest artists. Each program is curated with works selected by the musicians in combinations that represent a thematic arc and a range of artistic voices. This season, you’ll hear some familiar favorites and some works that may be newer to your ears. We hope you’ll join us for these very special evenings!

Sonata Series Event #1 features resident musicians Chloë Kline, viola, Miguel Vasquez, cello, and guest pianist, Eliko Akahori, for a rich and moving program of Hindemith, Villa Lobos, and Beethoven. 

Paul Hindemith’s Viola Sonata Op. 25, No.1 is a tour de force for the unaccompanied viola and shows the composer’s writing in a radical phase. The sonata traverses emotions from the fierce and nearly aggressive, to pleading moments, and ending with an elegiac movement.

Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Elegie for Cello and Piano from 1916 carries a nostalgic and plaintive lyricism throughout both instruments. The Ludwig van Beethoven Sonata No. 4 for cello and piano (Op. 102, No.1), sometimes called the “Free Sonata” because of its departure from conventional form, may be unexpected in structure but familiar in its musical representation of a wide range of human emotional experiences.

This is a program you won’t want to miss! Click to watch!

Community MusicWorks is grateful to Melanie and Stephen Coon for their sponsorship of the live stream for the Sonata Series in Season 26.

As we look forward to the first Sonata Series Event of the season, violist Chloë Kline offers this insider view of the piece she’ll be performing this Thursday at 7 pm. Join us for Sonata Series Event #1 in person or online! Click for more information.

Hello faithful CMW blog readers,

I’m sending a pre-Sonata Series update about the incredible piece I’ve been working up: Hindemith’s Solo Sonata Op. 25 No. 1. This piece, written in 1922 by German composer Paul Hindemith, has been on my performing bucket list for a long time, and it’s been a lot of fun (though I admit there has been a fair amount of ibuprofen involved!) to work on it this fall.

Hindemith is my favorite 20th-century composer—which is only partly because of all the incredible music he wrote for viola. He went through several distinct stylistic periods (his early music was in the late Romantic tradition, then he moved into more Expressionist writing, and then in the 1920s his writing matured into a style that has been called the “New Objectivity” style) – but across his compositions I find that there is an inventiveness and vividness that really pulls me in. I find his music completely visceral—the fast and manic movements feel like they’re pulsing within your very organs, and the more lyrical moments can make me feel like I’m floating on a gentle tide.

One of the unusual and fascinating aspects of playing Hindemith’s music is that there are recordings of Hindemith performing his own music—he performed—and recorded—a great deal up until his death in 1963, and there are at least two surviving recordings of him performing this sonata. (Many of his viola and chamber music performances are no longer available, though there are a lot of him conducting his orchestral works.)

I found it incredibly intense to hear Hindemith’s recordings as I was working this up. The recordings are OLD and the sound is unpolished and sometimes downright scratchy and warped. But it’s also like studying a foreign language and suddenly hearing a native speaker for the first time—all of a sudden, the phrases lock into focus in a new way, and the direction and intention of the music are newly clear.

Here’s a 1934 recording of the piece as performed by the composer:

As a performance, the recordings are uneven…scroll through the YouTube comments, and you’ll find a lot of complaints about his intonation, his tempi, or the fact that he ignores a lot of his own markings…but in my opinion, all that is secondary. Wikipedia captures what I’m trying to express in a comment from a critic for OPERA magazine in 1954: “Mr. Hindemith is no virtuoso conductor, but he does possess an extraordinary knack of making performers understand how his own music is supposed to go”.

I’ll talk a little bit more about the structure of the piece and the different movements on October 20th (spoiler alert: the 4th movement is straight adrenaline) but in the meantime, enjoy this musical blast from the past.  I hope to see you there!

—Chloë Kline, violist

Join us in-person or online Thursday, October 20 at 7 pm EST for Sonata Series Event #1.
Click for details.

Conductor Larry Rachleff chats with CMW students. 

We are saddened to learn of the passing of Larry Rachleff, longtime music director of the RI Philharmonic, mentor to several of our colleagues who attended the Shepherd School of Music in Houston, and valued member of CMW’s Advisory Council.

Read a remembrance by Rice University colleagues here.

“The way we go about building this Center has to reflect our ambition for the evolution of the organization toward ever-increasing responsiveness to, and governance by, people in the community of CMW.”

In late spring CMW launched the Community MusicWorks Center project, a milestone moment in plans to build a future home for the organization in the West End of Providence.

In this piece for the Ensemble, CMW Founder & Artistic Director Sebastian Ruth reflects on a new set of challenges in the long and iterative journey in planning this facility.

Read it on the Ensemble website.

Learn more about the Community MusicWorks Center here.

“One thing that’s beautiful about CMW is the way that it connects communities.” — Marconi Hernandez, CMW Alum and Board Vice President

From a small beginning in the computer room at the West End Community Center, Community MusicWorks has grown into an organization that has changed lives in twenty-five seasons of bringing people together through community and music.

At our recent Reunion Concert, friends, families, students, and alums came from near and far to gather in Dexter Park and celebrate our 25th Season with music, reflection, joy, and gratitude.

“Community MusicWorks offered a different perspective of what I could be doing in my life.” — AlexisMarie Nelson, CMW Alum and Current Fellow

We’re pleased to share this video presentation capturing interviews that show the impact this organization has had over decades of work, an impact that has reached well beyond our community in the West End of Providence.

CMW’s 25th Season ends on June 30, but your gift today has an impact that helps ensure that CMW continues to change lives for the next twenty-five seasons.

Click to support CMW’s 25th Season year-end goal today!

This season, violinist and composer Kevin Lowther, a/k/a Big Lux, is our CMW Artist-in-Residence. Lowther works with CMW students on improvisation, listening, and musical explorations, and produced a newly commissioned piece for our 25^th Season Reunion Concert. Writer Jill Pearlman connected with Big Lux during a recent group lesson.

The Bigness of Big Lux
by Jill Pearlman

Kevin Lowther is a master of the unexpected turn, the off-ramp, uprooting. In music and in life, he follows mythic displacements and exile that allow him to study himself and the world, take measure of freedom and make meaning. His wanderings and acquired “hats” — from Army officer on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, to émigré in S. Korea, to political and cultural activist— all lead to the bigness of hip-hop violinist Big Lux.

I’m watching him as he sits all coiled energy, joyously large in his red felt hat, camouflage pants, snaky boots. Lowther is working with CMW students, guiding them in what he knows best — improvisation. Their instruments have been amplified with pickup mikes, and the freedom is both tempting and intimidating. One student restlessly bangs, another plays a yearning melody, with feedback through the soundboard. Lowther, classically trained in his youth, cradles his violin, hooked up to machines, and smiles patiently as he observes their process. “I’m somebody who’s had to improvise his whole life — I’ve spent my life creating a cultural home that I can live in. It’s the same thing I’m trying to provide to students.”

Big Lux improvising with CMW students.

Lowther’s starting point was in Westerly, RI where he was a fiercely devoted violin student, studying Suzuki, playing with the Rhode Island Philharmonic Youth Orchestra.  He was often the only one who looked like him in the room.

“What do you do if you stand out?” His plan: “Stand out more.”

Presto! When he was 17, Lowther did an about-face from music and attended the prestigious West Point Military Academy.  When September 11 attacks brought on the drumbeat of war he was off to Iraq, starting a different life, outside music, outside the U.S. He’d wanted to be of service to his country and was now, as he says, “living history.”  The battlefield experience marked him in the intimacy of war, fear, and knowledge of other political systems.

Lowther also learned that bumping up against difference was a key part of his essential mix. When he returned home, “everything was beautiful, everything amazing… until it became ordinary again.”  That was a turning point.  “I knew I was going to have to push to have an amazing experience, to travel or perform to feel myself alive. I’m trying to put pedal to the metal to do as much as possible.”

A move to South Korea allowed him to let music rebalance his system.  He discovered the affinities of the country and became a luminary on the émigré circuit.

“I’ve spent most of my adult life living outside of the U.S. inside a culture that wasn’t mine — Korean, German, Kuwaiti — and I forced myself to experience those cultures as a native, without diluting it.”

Against that backdrop he kept interrogating his African American identity, his roots in hip-hop, his youth in 95-percent-white Westerly — and his pride in a country that hasn’t lived up to its promise for Blacks. Hip-hop had always been a passion, and he dived full force into its genre-bending expansiveness. He worked his violin to tell truths about war, to put plangent Middle Eastern melodies to a beat, to evoke the high, lonesome whistle of bluegrass. Moving back to Westerly, he also has become an activist — coordinating the Westerly Anti-Racism Coalition, working with town fathers, intent on confrontation that is productive, insistent, but nonviolent.  He is now running for Westerly Town Council.

As Lowther handles his violin with supple fingers and bowhand, one can see his utmost gentleness and respect — while meaning business.   “My whole life and political strategy has been an attempt to stay in harmony with things around me. I consider the violin a tool rather than anything else.  I prefer precise technique to brute force. Force is not the way. I listen to something nuanced and deeper.”

For Community MusicWorks’ 25th Season Reunion concert, Big Lux has composed a ten-minute composition for an ensemble of CMW musicians.  Each of the five parts of his piece, “Five Vibes,” explores an emotion, which he has brilliantly named ‘Bubbly, Doubt, Anticipation, Insecurity, and Celebration.’  “If a chamber music piece is playing hip-hop, is it still a chamber music ensemble?  That’s the million-dollar question.”

On his latest soon-to-be-released album, Lowther returns to boom-bap – a core and restless joy of ‘90s hip-hop of his youth, all with the violin as his tool and master. He will be debuting some of this fresh work in his concert as one of the headliners for PVD Fest.

Reflecting on CMW students, Lowther says, “It’s very important that CMW is giving them classical education, with history and technique. I’m guiding them a little bit to where they want to be. I’m channeling them towards a cultural home, a place they can express themselves through improvisation or wherever they choose to go.  It’s been a privilege.”

***

Join us in celebrating the premiere of Big Lux’s commissioned piece, “Five Vibes,” at the CMW Reunion Concert on Saturday, June 11 at 2 pm at Dexter Park in Providence (rain location is John Hope Settlement House). More information on our events calendar.

Learn more about Big Lux on his website bigluxviolin.com.

Jill Pearlman is a writer, poet, and former CMW board member based in Providence, RI.  Read more of her work at jillpearlman.com.

Big Lux portrait photo by Villas Channel Miami Beach Photography

CMW student lesson photos by Erin X. Smithers.

Join us in celebrating our graduating CMW seniors!

“I will always keep CMW close to my heart. I appreciate the sense of community that we have.”

Congratulations to Jaden on 10 years of musicianship with CMW! Jaden is a violinist and Phase II member who shines her bright light onto everyone she meets. Jaden loves to “de-stress” by playing her instrument and finds the community of CMW to be very supportive and open to listening. From here, Jaden will attend the University of Rhode Island in the fall, majoring in criminal justice and minoring in music.

“CMW is a place where I know I will always be welcomed, valued, and supported.”

Congratulations to Jannessa on 11 years of musicianship with CMW! Jannessa has been an active CMW participant since the age of 7 (along with 5 of her siblings!) and serves on the CMW board and student committee. She was instrumental in creating the student blog, and credits CMW with playing a large role in constructing her values and worldview. Jannessa will be attending Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY.

“I had no idea I was going to meet some of the greatest people who I’m thankful to call my friends.”

Congratulations to Jarilyn on 5 years of musicianship with CMW! Jarilyn is a violinist who serves on the CMW board and student committee and is an engaged participant in CMW’s Phase II teen group. Jarilyn brings her wise and kind presence wherever she goes, and this fall will attend the University of Rhode Island College of Engineering, where she’ll study biomedical engineering.

Need some tips and tricks to keep up your violin, viola, and cello chops? Jarilyn and Jannessa are here for you! Read their comprehensive Practice Tips guide on our CMW Student Blog, which includes advice and techniques that will make productive practice time a breeze.

Read it on the CMW Student Blog

CMW’s Season 25 is still going strong! Check our calendar for upcoming events

“What we’re going to build here is a community center for music. This is about neighbors helping neighbors; about opening the door for musical possibilities as a way to build deep and solid connections between us.” 

CMW Founder & Director Sebastian Ruth set the stage for the launch of the Community MusicWorks Center building project during the May 14 groundbreaking event on the lot at 1326 Westminster Street.

Guest speakers included Rhode Island Lieutenant Governor Sabina Matos, R.I. State Representative Anastasia Williams, City of Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza, City Councilwomen Mary Kay Harris and Rachel Miller, CMW student Jannessa, and Capital Campaign Committee Co-Chairs Doris De Los Santos and David Bourns.

The event brought together a community of people including CMW students, alums, staff, neighbors, and supporters that basked in the mid-May sunshine and celebrated the launch of the Community MusicWorks Center building project.

Learn more about the CMWC project here:
https://communitymusicworks.org/the-community-musicworks-center/

Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza spoke to the crowd. “We are eternally grateful that CMW exists, that CMW is firmly rooted in our community, and that Community MusicWorks is going to grow and build a 15-million-dollar institution that will be around for my kids, and my kids’ kids…long, long into the future.”

“If CMW has been able to touch so many students and so many lives without a physical location, can you imagine the possibilities once this place is built?” Capital Campaign Co-Chair and former CMW parent Doris De Los Santos hosted the celebration and welcomed a wonderful lineup of speakers and student performers to the stage.

CMW students imagine the possibilities as they admire a rendering of the Performance Hall at the future Community MusicWorks Center.

Guests stayed cool with the help of umbrellas and refreshments from Amos House chef Linda Kane while CMW’s Youth Alliance performed an improvisation inspired by the concept of beginnings.

CMW student and board member Jannessa said, “This building will not only continue to support us in being learners and practitioners of music-making but also in spreading love and respect for each other and creating stronger bonds.”

RI Lieutenant Governor and former CMW parent Sabina Matos: “The work that Community MusicWorks does to help us to be sure that we have access to art for our children here in the city of Providence is crucial. Community MusicWorks has given us the opportunity to bring equity to this neighborhood.”

Extra-special shout-out to alums, students, staff, and supporters who pitched in to make this important day…and every day at CMW…a big success! Thank you!

Community MusicWorks Seeks Family Engagement Coordinator

Are you someone who is passionate about building strong relationships with young people and their families? Are you experienced in helping individuals find and access social services, dedicated to continual growth and learning, and someone who enjoys the challenges of both collaborative and individual work? Are you good at keeping track of details, and also interested in making sure the details fit with the big picture?

If this sounds like you, we invite you to apply for the position of Family Engagement
Coordinator at Community MusicWorks.

The Family Engagement Coordinator will be responsible for building and maintaining a robust support system for all aspects of student and family involvement in CMW programming. This includes both logistical and programmatic support (systems to track attendance and feedback, coordinating program space needs, creating  and supporting a parent volunteer system, and supporting parent leadership in the organization) and also connecting with resources outside CMW (assembling and maintaining a web of support for families that may include social service resources, language resources, self care resources, and others).

The position is envisioned at 30 hours/week, including some weekends and evenings.  Spanish proficiency is a huge asset for this role. The position includes health and dental benefits and offers a salary range of $32,000 – $37,000 based on experience.
CMW is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to building a culturally diverse staff that reflects the neighborhoods in which we are situated. Women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and people of color are strongly encouraged to apply.

Application details are here.