Listen to This (31 page)
Authors: Alex Ross
Many orchestra administrators cling to the idea that a smattering of Young People’s Concerts will indoctrinate children into the wonders of classical music. Sarah Johnson, when she was running education programs at the Philadelphia Orchestra, became skeptical of that approach. “Many people say, ‘Wow, we can bring twenty-six hundred students into the hall,’ and feel like it’s a great thing,” Johnson told me. “This may have worked in the age of Bernstein, when classical musicians were celebrities on radio and early television. Today, those kids need to meet the musicians, find out how they got into music, what else they do when they’re not playing. It has to be more up close and one-on-one. People have this picture of musicians as not quite human. We need to humanize them. We want to get to the point where we are cultural partners at certain schools, practically giving them a new music-faculty member.”
The writer and consultant Joseph Horowitz, the author of
Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall,
has long urged orchestras to reinvent themselves as miniature conservatories and cultural centers. With orchestras such as the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the New Jersey Symphony, and the Pacific Symphony, Horowitz has devised cross-disciplinary festivals that can be translated into curricula for area schools. “The orchestra should be, first and foremost, an educational institution,” Horowitz told me. “It should know how to explain to an audience what the art means and where it came from. Orchestras can feed the humanities programs at high schools. You can do Mozart and have the drama department put on
Amadeus.
You can do Dvorak and get American-history classes and African-American studies involved. Dvo
ák is the greatest gift, because there is no better way to link American and European musical traditions.”
Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall,
has long urged orchestras to reinvent themselves as miniature conservatories and cultural centers. With orchestras such as the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the New Jersey Symphony, and the Pacific Symphony, Horowitz has devised cross-disciplinary festivals that can be translated into curricula for area schools. “The orchestra should be, first and foremost, an educational institution,” Horowitz told me. “It should know how to explain to an audience what the art means and where it came from. Orchestras can feed the humanities programs at high schools. You can do Mozart and have the drama department put on
Amadeus.
You can do Dvorak and get American-history classes and African-American studies involved. Dvo
ák is the greatest gift, because there is no better way to link American and European musical traditions.”Not every orchestra is prepared to undertake such an approach. When Horowitz was working with the New Jersey Symphony, he made contact with Hassan Williams and the students of Malcolm X Shabazz. He invited them to events at the hall and visited the school with members of the orchestra. (It was Horowitz who suggested that I observe Williams’s class.) On the occasion of a New Jersey Sibelius festival, Vernon Jones was inspired to write a Sibelius-like piece for band. Unfortunately, the initiative met resistance from a member of the administration, who did not enjoy
having the students on the premises. One day, when they left the hall, he was heard to say, “Never again.” That man is no longer with the orchestra, but his spirit persists at more than one classical institution.
having the students on the premises. One day, when they left the hall, he was heard to say, “Never again.” That man is no longer with the orchestra, but his spirit persists at more than one classical institution.
On Westminster Street, in the West End section of Providence, Rhode Island, there are diners, corner markets, auto-repair stores, and, at number 1392, the Providence String Quartet. People often do a double take at the surreal sight of a chamber group playing Beethoven behind a storefront in a lower-income neighborhood. Although the quartet performs at colleges and museums, its main mission is to teach. It is the heart of a nonprofit organization, Community MusicWorks, which does more than bring music to young people; it is an authentically revolutionary outfit in which the distinction between performing and teaching disappears.
The core members of Community MusicWorks, which was founded in 1997, are Jesse Holstein and Jessie Montgomery, violinists; Sebastian Ruth, violist; and Sara Stalnaker, cellist. They were trained for conventional careers at Juilliard, Oberlin, and Brown University, but they chose a different definition of success. Ruth, a man with an elegant face and a mellifluous voice, is their ringleader. He grew up in Ithaca, the son of two ex-hippie parents, who sent him to the Alternative Community School. Instead of going to a conservatory, he went to Brown and studied the philosophy of education. He read the work of Paulo Freire, the author of
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
, and Maxine Greene, who wrote
Releasing the Imagination.
Greene has argued that arts education can be not only a leisure pursuit or subculture for gifted children but an instigator of social change. Ruth decided to put these ideas into practice, by playing in a group that was part of the street life of a city.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
, and Maxine Greene, who wrote
Releasing the Imagination.
Greene has argued that arts education can be not only a leisure pursuit or subculture for gifted children but an instigator of social change. Ruth decided to put these ideas into practice, by playing in a group that was part of the street life of a city.
“We want people to see the quartet where they wouldn’t expect to,” Ruth said. “We’re here on the street, we’re in the community center, we’re in the soup kitchen, we’re in the nursing home, or the ‘assisted-living center,’ I should say. We’re over at the Rhode Island School of Design, or an indie-rock club, or City Hall. We kind of feel like there should be an office with a string quartet in City Hall. They’ve got a lot of offices there for things you might not think are strictly necessary”
Ruth dislikes the word “outreach,” which makes it sound as if he and the other musicians were extending their hands to unlucky souls drowning at sea. “We are already living in the place that other people reach out
to,” he said, with a mildly pugnacious look. He also resists the idea that his program’s primary purpose is to scout out and nourish exceptional talent. “We’re not searching for genius, for ‘diamonds in the rough,’” he said. “We’re relating music-making to the community.”
to,” he said, with a mildly pugnacious look. He also resists the idea that his program’s primary purpose is to scout out and nourish exceptional talent. “We’re not searching for genius, for ‘diamonds in the rough,’” he said. “We’re relating music-making to the community.”
I sat in the back of the Westminster office to see how the idea of Community MusicWorks played out. The students, who are between seven and eighteen years old and come from Dominican, Haitian, Liberian, and Cambodian backgrounds, walked in one by one, their parents hovering at the door for a minute or two with smiles on their faces. The Providence players bantered with them for a while. Then Holstein shouted, “Let’s do it!” and the children sat down to play. The Providence musicians corrected mistakes and suggested improvements, but accuracy wasn’t their primary concern. “You’re worrying too much,” Jessie Montgomery told Tae Ortiz, a violinist. “Even if you make mistakes, you’ll find people don’t care.” Afterward, about five boys and ten girls sat down for a spaghetti dinner. There was an extended discussion of a young man who appeared on a motorcycle in a Britney Spears video; hip-hop selections played on the Community MusicWorks computer. Everyone stopped eating to sing along to Ciara’s “1, 2 Step.”
At one point, Carolina Jimenez, a young cellist, turned to me and happily announced, “I got into Classical!” I told her that I also got into classical when I was her age, but it turned out that she was talking about Providence Classical High School, a local public school. Ruth suggested that perhaps getting into one kind of “classical” helped Carolina get into the other Classical, and she rolled her eyes.
Ruth and his colleagues regularly go with the kids and their families to concerts by local orchestras, where they are faced with such questions as “Why are we the only black people in the audience?” Some of the older students meet up on Friday nights or on weekend retreats in a program called Phase 2, where they delve into deeper emotional and social issues. For this smaller group of students, the musicians of the Providence Quartet become, in effect, full-time counselors, even part-time foster parents. In 2006, there were 132 people on the waiting list for Community MusicWorks, and news of the program had begun to spread around the country. A fellowship program was established for young professional musicians, who sit in with the group and learn its unusual methods, in order to apply them elsewhere.
One evening, the Providence players gave a concert at the West End Community Center, a mile or so from their studio. They use this space at least once or twice a week to teach larger groups. The concert took place on the center’s basketball court: a piano was wheeled out, a rug was placed in the middle of the floor, and strings of Christmas lights provided a bit of atmosphere. About two hundred people showed up—parents, older and younger siblings, friends, and supporters of the quartet. Sitting in with them was Jonathan Biss, a meticulous and poetic young pianist who knew Heath Marlow, Community MusicWorks’ director of development, from music camp.
This being a classical-music concert, there was a certain amount of concern about decorum. “Sit like a lady,” one parent said to her preteen daughter. “Ladies don’t sit like that.” Before the first piece, Ruth got up to encourage the crowd to stay silent during the performance, but he avoided taking a hallway-monitor tone. “Sometimes we get excited by this kind of music, but mostly we stay quiet,” he said. “If it makes you want to get up and dance, well, just
think
about getting up and dancing.” There was some giggling, a shout of “Cut it out!” and much changing of seats, but I have witnessed noisier and more disrespectful audiences on Sunday afternoons at Carnegie Hall. There was no dancing.
think
about getting up and dancing.” There was some giggling, a shout of “Cut it out!” and much changing of seats, but I have witnessed noisier and more disrespectful audiences on Sunday afternoons at Carnegie Hall. There was no dancing.
The Providence opened the concert with the first movement of Beethoven’s
Serioso
Quartet. Tae Ortiz, now less nervous, played Boccherini’s Minuet, accompanied by Biss. Jovanne Jean-François and Carolina Jimenez played the Adagio from Vivaldi’s Concerto in G Minor for two cellos. Vanessa Centeno and Ruth Desrosiers, violinists, performed Schumann’s “The Two Grenadiers.” The main event was Brahms’s Piano Quintet in F Minor, a craggy monument of the chamber repertory, which Biss and the Providence delivered at a level that would have satisfied most chamber-music audiences. A couple of lanky teenage boys tapped their feet to the driving rhythms of the Scherzo. “That was bangin’,” one of them said afterward. “I wanna play on the piano someday,” an eight-year-old behind me told his mother.
Serioso
Quartet. Tae Ortiz, now less nervous, played Boccherini’s Minuet, accompanied by Biss. Jovanne Jean-François and Carolina Jimenez played the Adagio from Vivaldi’s Concerto in G Minor for two cellos. Vanessa Centeno and Ruth Desrosiers, violinists, performed Schumann’s “The Two Grenadiers.” The main event was Brahms’s Piano Quintet in F Minor, a craggy monument of the chamber repertory, which Biss and the Providence delivered at a level that would have satisfied most chamber-music audiences. A couple of lanky teenage boys tapped their feet to the driving rhythms of the Scherzo. “That was bangin’,” one of them said afterward. “I wanna play on the piano someday,” an eight-year-old behind me told his mother.
After the concert, as people stood around and talked and the younger children resumed running around the room, Ruth Desrosiers’s brother David—a stout young man in a Shady University T-shirt—gravitated toward the piano on which Biss had just hammered out the coda of the Brahms. David is one of Sebastian Ruth’s viola students, but he has also
taught himself some piano. He approached the instrument somewhat stealthily, but Biss noticed him, and watched with curiosity as the boy launched into a bluesy melody apparently of his own invention, with a strong bass line and a snaking melody. It turned out to be a West End variation on Beethoven’s
Für Elise.
taught himself some piano. He approached the instrument somewhat stealthily, but Biss noticed him, and watched with curiosity as the boy launched into a bluesy melody apparently of his own invention, with a strong bass line and a snaking melody. It turned out to be a West End variation on Beethoven’s
Für Elise.
The philosopher John Dewey, in his 1934 book,
Art has Experience,
lamented the American habit of putting art on a “remote pedestal.” He wrote, “When an art product once attains classic status, it somehow becomes isolated from the human conditions under which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life-experience.” Dewey’s book was widely read, but the argument never really sank in. To this day, the arts in America, when pressed, define themselves in opposition to society. Perhaps the most intractable problem with contemporary music education is that so many teachers have been trained in the monastic culture of the music conservatory, where mastery of technique is the dominant topic and where discussion of music’s social or political or spiritual meaning is often discouraged. The Canadian scholar Paul Woodford, in a book-length essay on the relationship between Dewey’s ideas and music education, writes, “In my own experience, few music education majors entering their senior year can distinguish Marxism from capitalism, capitalism from democracy, the political Left from Right, or the modern from the postmodern.” They are, in cultural terms, idiot savants.
Art has Experience,
lamented the American habit of putting art on a “remote pedestal.” He wrote, “When an art product once attains classic status, it somehow becomes isolated from the human conditions under which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life-experience.” Dewey’s book was widely read, but the argument never really sank in. To this day, the arts in America, when pressed, define themselves in opposition to society. Perhaps the most intractable problem with contemporary music education is that so many teachers have been trained in the monastic culture of the music conservatory, where mastery of technique is the dominant topic and where discussion of music’s social or political or spiritual meaning is often discouraged. The Canadian scholar Paul Woodford, in a book-length essay on the relationship between Dewey’s ideas and music education, writes, “In my own experience, few music education majors entering their senior year can distinguish Marxism from capitalism, capitalism from democracy, the political Left from Right, or the modern from the postmodern.” They are, in cultural terms, idiot savants.
Releasing the Imagination,
the Maxine Greene book that so impressed Ruth, proposes that the arts must be incorporated into democratic culture not for their own sake but for the sake of democracy itself. She believes that children can gain deeper understanding of the world by looking at it from the peculiar vantage point of a work of art. She writes, “To tap into imagination is to become able to break with what is supposedly fixed and finished, objectively and independently real.” Children learn to notice surprising details that undermine a popular stereotype; they grow tolerant of difference, attuned to idiosyncrasy. They also can experience a shock of perception that shows them alternative possibilities within their own lives, whether or not those possibilities or those lives have an obvious relationship with the artwork in question. Thus, Greene argues, even the oldest
art forms can become vehicles of democratic thinking. Because they have transcended time, they can become part of any time.
the Maxine Greene book that so impressed Ruth, proposes that the arts must be incorporated into democratic culture not for their own sake but for the sake of democracy itself. She believes that children can gain deeper understanding of the world by looking at it from the peculiar vantage point of a work of art. She writes, “To tap into imagination is to become able to break with what is supposedly fixed and finished, objectively and independently real.” Children learn to notice surprising details that undermine a popular stereotype; they grow tolerant of difference, attuned to idiosyncrasy. They also can experience a shock of perception that shows them alternative possibilities within their own lives, whether or not those possibilities or those lives have an obvious relationship with the artwork in question. Thus, Greene argues, even the oldest
art forms can become vehicles of democratic thinking. Because they have transcended time, they can become part of any time.
But why Brahms? Isn’t it simply a self-indulgent fantasy to think that German chamber music could change the world of a girl whose mother is living on food stamps?
Ruth paused, his rueful smile indicating that he had answered this question many times.
“I don’t know how it works,” he said. “I guess, in the beginning, it is something I want to do for myself. Because there’s something so bleak about a performing career these days. I don’t mean just in terms of the prospects of getting a job. I also mean what you feel once you get the job. You are in this tight, closed-off world. You are playing generally at very expensive concerts for people who can afford it, and who are already steeped in it. You fight the feeling that it’s not real. We get wonderful collaborators like Jonathan Biss because other people are fighting that feeling, too. They want to tap into a much more visceral sense of emotional connection.
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