Our Mission
To create cohesive urban community through music education and performance that transforms the lives of children, families, and musicians. Our model is centered around the teaching, mentoring, program design, and performance activities of our musicians-in-residence, the MusicWorks Collective.
Community MusicWorks has received local and national recognition, including the prestigious National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award. First Lady Michelle Obama presented the award to CMW’s Founder and Artistic Director Sebastian Ruth and CMW student Kirby Vasquez during a ceremony at the White House in 2010. That same year, Sebastian was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, commonly known as a “genius” grant, for his work building CMW. Sebastian received an honorary doctorate from Brown University in 2012.
Our Story
As we enter our third decade, Community MusicWorks continues its work as a community-based organization that uses music education and performance as a vehicle to build lasting and meaningful relationships between children, families, and professional musicians.
CMW is a living experiment in forming new roles for musicians in today’s society. At one level, we are focused on creating a viable and satisfying career option for musicians to perform at a high level, teach in a community-based setting, and become positive contributors to community life.
Founded in 1997 by Sebastian Ruth with start-up funding from the Swearer Center at Brown University, the program began with just fifteen students. Over the past 23 years CMW has grown to employ fourteen Resident Musicians in teaching, performing, and community-building activities deeply entwined with participating neighborhoods. Resident musicians teach lessons in violin, viola, and cello, mentor students, and perform as the ensemble MusicWorks Collective in a robust concert series throughout Providence and surrounding communities.
Our students, who live predominantly in Providence’s South Side neighborhoods, receive instruments free of charge and participate in a variety of activities, including lessons, studio classes and workshops. The success of our program is demonstrated by a 90 percent student retention rate from year-to-year. CMW receives strong ongoing support locally and from our growing community of supporters across the U.S. and beyond.
CMW supports a new generation of teaching artists through a Fellowship Program and the MusicWorks Network, an initiative that comprises a group of ten organizations that have grown out of CMW’s model or that have parallel missions.
Recognized nationally for its role in establishing a model of musicianship that connects artistry and community service, CMW creates viable and satisfying career options for musicians to perform at a high level, teach in a community-based setting, and become positive contributors to community life.
CMW was founded on a commitment to social justice. Access to arts opportunities forms part of CMW’s social justice commitment, and since 2016 that has expanded to examine organizational practice, pedagogy, and performance activities with an anti-racist lens. In that spirit, CMW devotes time and resources to the work of learning about the history and living legacy of racism so that we can continually work toward necessary change.
CMW is committed to an anti-racist praxis, which means that we recognize the always-evolving interplay between reflective learning and implementing change. While classical music organizations have not traditionally been at the forefront of social justice practice, we are encouraged by a growing movement to implement necessary changes in the concert music field, and to play a role in evolving practices locally and beyond.
Our own work grows out of a social justice commitment embedded in the organization’s founding principles, and which requires renewal. In the past two years, the staff and board of Community MusicWorks has committed to reviewing all of our practices– organizational, pedagogical, performance– to align our work with anti-oppressive practices, and to be able to fully realize an anti-racist organizational stance. The work ahead involves a continual interplay of focusing on our learning and setting real and measurable goals in our organizational practices.