Kirby interviews her cello teacher Adrienne.

In February 2010, CMW’s Board of Directors approved a new Five Year
Strategic Plan. Subtitled "Deepening our Roots and Spreading the Word," the plan addresses what we feel are our primary challenges as an
organization: to extend the impact of our work (reaching more
people in more places), while at the same time deepening our
local programming (reaching deeper with our students and community in Providence’s West Side neighborhoods).

One major initiative for the next five years is "to develop and implement a space plan appropriate to our
neighborhood residency and growing space needs, add additional staff
hours to support new and continuing activities, and think through our
needs of an endowment and/or capital fund to support staff and space
needs."

To that end, CMW has hired local architecture firm 3SIX0 for a feasibility study that will help us determine what our physical space needs are. Chris Bardt and Kyna Leski describe their efforts with CMW this way:

Establishing relations is the function of architecture. The demographic divisions created by socio-economic forces dictate budgets that stratify buildings and divide neighborhoods. We feel that an acceptance of these divisions undermines the essential purpose of architecture in society. We feel that this project is truly in its essence asking for the essential core of what architecture is.

Read all about the Strategic Plan on the Profiles page of CMW's website.

Josh

1. If your piece were posted on the CMW website, how would you introduce it?

Our piece is a sample of a viola thrown down 12 notches and made it sound like an acoustic bass. Yeah it pretty much kicks butt in every sense. We [Paul and I] are planning on just freestyle playing on this. It was a Black Violin influence. Shouts to Henry! This will be available for everyone for free to play on. This piece is rugged and street but ambient at the same time.

2. If you were going to tell a friend about this class, how would you describe it? What did we do? What did you learn?

We get on a Mac and use Logic Pro and make hits. Monday is my favorite day of the week because I would come make good music.

3. Has this class affected the way you think about music? How?

I appreciate all types of music now. This class helped me understand the amount of work involved in making all types of music.

4. Has this class affected the way you play or study your instrument?  How?

I study more rhythms and different instruments. Also, I pay more attention to keys and melodies.

Paul

1. If your piece were posted on the CMW website, how would you introduce it?

I partnered up with Josh to work on a piece. In our piece we recorded ourselves playing our instruments and then put the recording on the computer. After, we made a beat using a keyboard. The keyboard we used could be used to sound like a drum or a violin or anything else. After we made the beat with the keyboard, we added the recording of ourselves. At first, the recording didn't match up with each other so we altered the recording to sync with the beat. Shout out to my boy Henry.

2. If you were going to tell a friend about this class, how would you describe it? What did we do? What did you learn?

If I was to describe this class to a friend I would tell them that this class is dead bangin'. We use a program called Logic Pro to make beats and we can record ourselves playing our instrument and sync it with the beat. So the class is fun.

3. Has this class affected the way you think about music? How?

This class has affected my thinking on music in a way that allows me to realize I can do so much work with music besides playing just sheet music.

4. Has this class affected the way you play or study your instrument?  How?

This class has affected how I play my instrument because I don't always have to play classical music.

Alana

1. If your piece were posted on the CMW website, how would you introduce it?

In the first half of my piece you're at a night club. Also in this part I included an improvisation part. Then once this part finishes, you are now waiting for the bus. You are now on your way home. I also used an improvisation part in this. In both sections I included a recording of me and Angie from when we were taking our expedition with Micah and Paloma. When I shared this piece at the Performance Party it was very exciting because I saw many people nodding their heads to my beat. It was very fun! But I also have to give props to Logic Pro because I found many loops to create my piece there.

2. If you were going to tell a friend about this class, how would you describe it? What did we do? What did you learn?

If I were to describe Media Lab to my friend I would say, "It's a class I go to every Monday and we make our own tracks on this program called Logic Pro. This program allows me to share my favorite styles."

3. Has this class affected the way you think about music? How?

This class has affected the way I think about music now because I see that you can take all different styles of music and it can still sound awesome and cool.

4. Has this class affected the way you play or study your instrument?  How?

This class has affected the way I play and study music because now I can always take my violin and improvise over my piece.

We're thrilled to welcome violist Kim Kashkashian to Providence next week! A recent addition to CMW's Advisory Council, Kim will join the Providence String Quartet for two performances of the Brahms Viola Quintet in F Major, first at the John Hope Settlement House on Friday evening and then at The RISD Museum on Saturday.

In recent seasons, Kim has appeared as soloist with the major orchestras
of New York, Berlin, Vienna, London, Milan, Munich and Tokyo. She has
performed recitals at the Metropolitan Museum and the 92nd Street "Y" in
New York City, in Boston, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San
Francisco, Cleveland and Los Angeles. Kim has performed with
the Tokyo, Guarneri, and Galimir Quartets, and toured with a quartet
which included Gidon Kremer, Daniel Phillips, and
Yo-Yo Ma.

Her extensive teaching activities have included professorships
at the University of Indiana and in Freiburg and Berlin, Germany. In
2000, she joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory in Boston.

Click here to listen to a recent interview with Kim on National Public Radio.

Excerpt from an email from Kathy Swann, President of the Rhode Island Civic Chorale and Orchestra:

RICCO has named Community MusicWorks as the designated organization to receive a portion
of the proceeds from our golf tournament. We are so pleased to support
your important work with children and music! It is
especially important for RICCO to support youth string programs because
we have a commitment to perform with live orchestra, using composers'
instrumentation and not score reductions. Our mission is to promote
great music through performances with chorus and orchestra and through
outreach to young people. This is the first time we've decided to
include fund raising for a youth music program in our own work and I am
so glad that Community MusicWorks will be our partner in this.

To learn more about the RICCO's benefit golf tournament and dinner on Sunday, June 13, please click here to download an informational flier or visit the RICCO's website.

The Providence String Quartet will perform and discuss Bartok's String Quartet No. 5 in a "preview" event at the Providence Athenaeum on Wednesday, May 12. Visit CMW's website calendar for details.

Having transcribed and cataloged thousands of folk songs from all over Eastern Europe and even some from North Africa, Béla Bartók, along with his compatriot and colleague Zoltán Kodály, invented the field of ethnomusicology. Bartók’s music is an amazing synthesis of traditional Western-tonality and authentic Eastern European/Magyar folk music.

Bartók's String Quartet No. 5 is composed in five movements in a large, palindromic structure. At the core of the quartet is quickly flowing scherzo with a distinctive Bulgarian swing of 9 beats to a bar distributed in a limping 4+2+3. The inner wings of the quartet are slow hypnotic examples of Bartók’s “Night Music,” the sounds of the Hungarian countryside in the evening with bugs, birds, and things that croak. The outer wings are a sonata form first movement and a rondo finale. The first movement itself is a palindrome as the three themes from the exposition are restated in the recapitulation in reverse order and upside down!  The finale zips along with tremendous force until a banal hurdy-gurdy gives pause before the final thrust to the finish. 

Commissioned by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation in Washington, Bartók wrote his Fifth String Quartet in an unusually short amount of time, from August 6 to September 6, 1934. The Quartet received it’s premier in Washington by the Kolisch Quartet on April 8, 1935.

-Jesse Holstein, PSQ

To read about Sebastian's 3-month sabbatical, click here.

On April 12 and 13, Aaron and Heath traveled to Washington to attend Arts Advocacy Day, sponsored by Americans for the Arts. Along with over 500 arts advocates, we went to Washington to underscore the importance of developing strong public policies and appropriating increased public funding for the arts.

This trip was a chance for us to see what role CMW could play in advocating for the arts in Washington. Our students are growing accustomed to being advocates for the arts and arts education (recently our Phase III teens performed at the Rhode Island State House), but we wanted to explore how we could expand our advocacy efforts beyond Providence and Rhode Island.

April in DC: allergy season in full bloom

And so it was with this in mind that we set out on our first day. Our congressional office visits were scheduled for Tuesday, so Monday was devoted to training. Heath and I plunged head-first into the lobbying world, taking Lobbying 101 and quickly graduating into Lobbying 201. We learned the difference between advocating and lobbying, how to present a unified message, the importance of getting your “ask” in early in your meeting with busy staffers and legislative assistants, and how best to explain how arts funding serves the interests of not only small communities, but also the country at large.

The Patricia M. Sitar Center for the Arts

During our lunch break we walked over to the Sitar Center, a local, multidisciplinary arts center that offers lessons in visual arts, music, drama, dance, digital arts and creative writing to predominantly low-income youth. We were especially curious to see their relatively new facility – food for thought as CMW ponders what shape our future home will take! Having admired their practice rooms and concert hall (and having had a brief glimpse of the First Lady of Malaysia who was also visiting!), we walked back to the conference, admiring the cherry blossoms in full-bloom on the way.

Attending a speech by Rocco Landesman of "Art Works" fame

The afternoon saw more sessions on lobbying – Facts and Figures, Role Playing Demonstrations, and Breakout panels on the various policy issues we were tackling on Tuesday. Full of facts, Heath and I set out in the direction of the Kennedy Center to attend the 23rd Annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy.

Joseph P. Riley, Jr., Mayor of Charleston, South Carolina, delivered the lecture on Arts and Public Policy this year. In an inspiring and often humorous lecture, Mayor Riley outlined how the art of city design transformed cities into more livable and cultural communities. Heath and I had the pleasure of being accompanied by friend of CMW, Eva Jacob. While at the National Endowment for the Arts, Eva was central in the establishment of the Rural Residency program for chamber music groups.

Aaron checks out the Kennedy Center's grand foyer

Tuesday saw us rise early to head to the Hill for the Congressional Arts Kick Off event, where the Congressional Arts Leadership Award was presented to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Along with several senators, she spoke to the assembled crowd of arts advocates and re-affirmed her support for arts initiatives. We met up with the rest of our substantial Rhode Island delegation (at 7 delegates we out-represented a number of much larger states!) and finalized the details of our presentation for our congressional visits.

Arts Advocacy press event in the Congressional Caucus Room

Itʼs important to note that Rhode Islandʼs senators and representatives
have been very supportive of the arts. Our visits served two purposes:
to thank them for their continued support, and to highlight some key
issues we think they should focus their efforts on. Heath and I focused
on funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. Americans for the
Arts was asking for a funding increase from the current level of $167.5
million in 2010 to $180 million in 2011. In addition, Heath and I
highlighted the impact that the arts funding in the federal stimulus
bill has had on CMW this year.

The RI delegation in Representative Kennedy's conference room

We met with one of Representative Patrick Kennedyʼs aides first, outlining our requests and thanking Representative Kennedy for his past strong support. We then walked past the Capital, the Library of Congress, and the Supreme Court on the way to the Hart Senate Building, admiring the large Calder sculpture in the atrium. There we met with Senator Jack Reed and his legislative assistant, again thanking him for his support and recommending where he might focus his efforts.

Public art (a Calder) in the Hart Senate Building

Heath and I had to depart for the Baltimore aiport to return to Community MusicWorks for a board meeting that evening, but the rest of the Rhode Island delegation met with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative James Langevin later that afternoon.

All told, it was a fascinating glimpse into the world of Washington advocacy and  lobbying, and it gave us a better picture of what a future trip with CMW students would look like. It was exciting to see how strongly the arts are represented in Rhode Island!

-Aaron McFarlane, CMW staff

More photos of Arts Advocacy Day in the Americans for the Arts' Flickr account.

Artist-educator Eric Booth recently shared some reflections after returning from his second trip to Venezuela and that country's amazing national music education program.

The truly radical promise of El Sistema is that it invites a rediscovery of the purposes and processes of classical music. As our field in the U.S. struggles to find the relevance of classical music to more than the small “arts club” percentage of our populace, El Sistema proposes answers that can change not only the life trajectories of our at-risk children, but the trajectory of our at-risk arts culture.

One statement I sometimes witness in the U.S. makes my blood run cold. As some hear about how the program works in Venezuela, they say, “We already do that.” No we don’t. We do many things that look very similar to the teaching and learning practices in Venezuela. This essay hopes to illuminate what it is they are doing that is not what we already do, and what it is we must humbly, patiently commit ourselves to learn.

Read Eric's essay in its entirety here.

An excerpt of interest:

I see the dynamism of seemingly opposed directions in the musical choices. Everyone “knows” El Sistema is a “classical music” program; and yet, there is a lively presence of folk and popular music, even jazz appears in some places. Also, many new Latin American composers are composing hybrid music that defies category and fits with El Sistema processes. El Sistema is alive with music people love, that is the greater goal, and this makes it both a classical music program and, equally truthfully, a many-kinds-of-music program.

Another:

In the U.S., the ethos of continual improvement is an oft-stated article of faith in many industries that is rarely fully embodied. El Sistema lives that article of faith so naturally, from top to bottom, from the youngest student up through Dr. Abreu’s endless curiosity, that it is the very nature of the endeavor. Indeed, the energy of experimentation and aspiration is so palpable that El Sistema feels more like an inquiry than an institution.

One more favorite excerpt:

As Dr. Abreu says, “We believe a certain level of chaos is important for us.” I confess I am not sure all his administrators welcome the norms of chaos that Maestro Abreu enjoys, but they all go with the flow of it as an intentional part of their constantly-growing endeavor.

-Heath Marlow, CMW staff

More photos by Jori in CMW's Flickr account.