Welcome to Season 18!

Welcome to our 18th season! Community MusicWorks was founded on the question of how musicians living and working in an urban community could make a significant positive impact, both on the community and on the art form itself. In the 2014-15 season we have a special opportunity to deepen this inquiry through a major grant from ArtPlace America, a national funding initiative looking to stimulate the field of “creative place-making,” the notion that the arts can transform places for the better. We are excited for an organization-wide inquiry this season into what it means to inhabit a place as musicians and with music.

Inhabit is a thread that you will see presented in various ways through out the season. From a series of informal concerts at the Friendship Café in South Providence to a series at our CMW storefront and pop-up events in Olneyville, we will be exploring how participants begin to see a place differently after experiencing special musical events that bring people from diverse backgrounds into community.

In the music we play this year, you can expect to hear us exploring the notion of place. How do we know something about a place through hearing its music? How does this temporal art form provide an unusually rich opportunity to connect us to someone else’s lived experience?

Highlights include a reprise of the wildly energetic Fantasia con Guayaba Habanera, the violin concerto CMW commissioned in 2013 based in Afro-Cuban themes and rhythms. We’ll be performing this in New York City in October, taking the energy of our Providence premiere on the road—please join us! November marks the return of the beloved annual Bach concert at the John Carter Brown (JCB) Library on the Brown University campus, this year including a work from the Americas, reflecting the Americana mission of the JCB Library. We will explore what it meant to composers of the baroque era to be writing in Latin America, far from the European capitals, and proudly honing a local style.

CMW continues its commitment to commissioning new works, featuring a new piece by Ken Ueno, made possible by a grant from the MAP Fund—a competitive national commissioning fund. Ken’s piece will be based in the RISD Museum’s recently re-opened Buddha gallery, and will allow the audience to experience how a piece composed for a particular place opens that place to new experiences, and also carries that place with it when performed elsewhere.

And culminating the season will be a concert commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act (1964). We are excited to bring back Daniel Bernard Roumain, violinist, composer, hip hop & classical artist extraordinaire, to lead his “Rosa Parks Symphony” with CMW professional and student musicians. The same concert will feature a newly commissioned work by former CMW musician Jessie Montgomery, now a rising star in the composition world.

This alongside a rich season of works spanning the 18th to 21st centuries, in chamber music and orchestra formats, the elegant Sonata Series at RISD, the Ars Subtilior series exploring contemporary experimental music, and more. We look forward to having you with us for Inhabit!

–Sebastian Ruth, Founder & Artistic Director