Well, it’s been a while since I last wrote. Mostly, I prepared for the trip: writing on a New York train, stopping at Hunter College on a Saturday afternoon to organize some things before flying to Lebanon tomorrow.
It was a busy time, setting up rehearsals and music for Chelsea, the Lansdowne Symphony, and the Riverside Orchestra (a fascinating opportunity with the NY Philharmonic has emerged) as well as the several ensembles at Hunter College. Plus, I got to spend more time than usual with my wonderful four-year-old daughter, whose inquisitiveness and humor is growing in leaps and bounds. I practiced the Schubert Rondo on violin, too, ahead of a performance at the festival directed by my friend Allison Kiger, raising scholarships for the Pierre Monteux School in Maine, where I studied conducting ten years ago.
The academies in Lebanon and Iraq are coming into focus, and we had some faculty conference calls. It is truly an amazing time in history when musicians in Alaska, Oregon, Texas, North Carolina, France, Lebanon, Iraq and Thailand can be on the phone planning activities for students from countries likely including Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Afghanistan!
My colleagues-to-be are an amazing group. The two I’ve corresponded with the most are Avery Waite (cello) and Kim Mai Nguyen (viola). With American Voices and also MusAid, they’ve worked with young musicians in some amazing places - most recently El Salvador, I think. After we finish in Erbil, Avery continues on to India with his cello, to study Hindustani music on a Fulbright grant. Everything I learn about Mai is that she’s amazingly talented as both an administrator and performer, and played with the Oregon Bach Festival, and plays with the Oregon Symphony this coming year.
Here are the Lebanon faculty, courtesy the American Voices website:
In the region I’m going, some dark things have happened since I wrote, yet these themselves confirm the value of what we do. While one can never say that music absolutely prevents violence, I believe arts exposure is transformative, allowing more creative and positive approaches to the world. Any positive effects or actions, ripple outward through time: students we work with will spread music beyond their own experience to their audience, their families, and future generations.
Not only can the arts contribute to the musical and creative life of our students and the world they live in, but it’s the health of classical music depends on it. The League of American Orchestras recently promoted (at their conference, in June in Baltimore) their commitment to improving diversity in Symphony Orchestras. Yet, aside from their unhealthy focus on the country’s largest symphony orchestras, and worthy support of El Systema and its related programs, I see little action in the field of education, where most music-making actually takes place. Diversity in youth orchestras, music education, universities, conservatories, composition - these are some of the critical areas where classical music has the most to gain from the the world, which is itself filled with diversity.
We take steps forward and steps back. The tragic bombing in Baghdad, with its 300-person death toll, included a young lawyer, Adel Euro, who was a hip-hop dancer and alumnus of the program - there was a story at Dance Magazine. It had been his colleagues who performed with the Hunter Symphony in 2013, and he’d been at the same program I taught at in 2013. John, the director of American Voices, has subsequently added a hip-hop dance component, UnStoppable, to the Erbil program, and I hope the students of the orchestra get to work together with the dancers.
Funding for student scholarships is, I believe, progressing, through the Generosity.com site.