A Culture of Possibility Podcast #38, Sebastian Ruth and Arlene Goldbard on Music, Dialogue, and Agency through Community MusicWorks
NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 38th episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 15 March 2024. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net‘s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Soundcloud and find links to accompany the podcasts.
I’ve known Sebastian Ruth, founder and executive director of Community MusicWorks (CMW) in Providence, Rhode Island, for quite a few years now. He is one of the people I credit with enlarging my view of possibility in community-based arts work. Without thinking much about it, years ago I’d absorbed what was then a common view, that for the sake of accessibility and participation, community arts had to be centered on commercial and popular art forms. As a friend of mine described this notion, “You have to be able to hum the first eight bars after hearing them once, or it’s elitist.” Now this view seems condescending, lacking respect for people’s capacity to understand and enjoy complexity — not to mention respect for artforms whose complexity is ignored and dismissed by the red carpet arts. One of the experiences that helped me comprehend this was working on a 2011 project with Community MusicWorks that resulted in a publication I wrote called “Music & Civil Society: A Symphony in the Making.”
Sitting down with Sebastian 13 years later, I liked the way he described his initial ideas in the 90s for Community MusicWorks, a permanent residency of an ensemble of musicians, living, working, teaching, and performing in the context of an urban community:
“For me personally, playing music with people in communities always felt like a place of wayfinding for myself. It was a place of being able to locate my own self in the world, and it felt like a big enough container to hold ideas of social justice and expression and community building. But the forms and the institutions of classical music didn’t feel like they traditionally held all those things. So the idea was to try to build a program where all these could coexist.
“There were several inspirations for us as we were getting going. One was the writings and ideas of Maxine Greene, who was looking at the connections of art, education, and social change, particularly in the late 90s and early 2000s. And also the writing of Paulo Freire, the influence that we have to think carefully about the models and manners of how we do education so that education is a pathway for dialogue, for agency, for people finding themselves in the world, not just a way of reinscribing the patterns that already exist.”
Community MusicWorks is in an exciting transition, building a new space in their community. Sebastian explained the constellation of CMW programs and activities:
“We have worked out of a storefront for many of our 27 years. Some of my early mentors were very interested in storefront schools, spontaneous spaces of learning and gathering. We were lucky to find a cheap storefront in the early years as our headquarters. The programs emanate out from the lessons that young people have in string instruments: violin, viola, cello. About 130 students come regularly every year. They have a private one-on-one lesson or in a small group. They play in ensembles. They take part in classes ranging from composition to improvisation to doing electronic music, different styles of music.
“The youngest kids play in a daily orchestra program, so they come five days a week, usually starting in first, second, or third grade. Our teens come in Friday nights for a program called Phase Two, where they put their minds fully into the questions of what CMW is trying to be. They have an hourlong discussion about social justice issues in their lives and communities, how they as young artists play roles in their community, they share a wonderful dinner every Friday night cooked by local chefs. And they have a chamber music or orchestra rehearsal together.
“The ensemble (MusicWorks Collective) plays a series of concerts every year, sometimes in collaboration with students, sometimes not. The community gathers for certain kinds of ritual events, usually around student performances, where families bring a potluck meal and we celebrate the students and have a party. For many years, we’ve had a fellowship program where young musicians come and work alongside us for a couple of years. Recently, that’s pivoted to becoming a fellowship program for alums to come back and work here and learn about teaching artistry, learn about running the organization. One of those alums has now joined our staff as a musician and program coordinator. We’ve also run a series of Institutes over the years where we get to learn with and from other colleagues who are doing similar work in music. Eventually, that formalized into a network of organizations, some of which had actually grown up out of CMW, that are located in different parts of the Northeast and into Canada. That network also comes together in institutes to share ideas about pedagogy, about antiracist practice, about repertoire, or organizational functioning.”
Impressive, no? Based on the range of interviewees on past podcast episodes, many practitioners nowadays have both a collaborative community-based practice and a personal practice, seeing no contradiction between them. I asked Sebastian about work that had been commissioned for the MusicWorks Collective ensemble, which features himself and other CMW professional musicians. (I have a tiny role in his answer.)
“We’ve done a lot of commissioning over the years, sometimes for pieces that combined students and the professional ensemble, and sometimes just for the grownups. One of the recent commissions actually grew out of an idea that you shared. Over the last many years, we’ve been focusing on how to have a an adequate space for our work. The answer wasn’t obvious at first, because the model has always been to show up in places where children already hang out after school. And yet, there was always this ad hoc nature — a school changes its schedule, we no longer have access to that space, and we’re moving around a lot. It didn’t really lend itself to the kind of continuity and welcoming spaces that we were hoping families would have access to and students could feel a sense of belonging in. But to just build a school or build a center wasn’t the obvious first choice because we didn’t want to wall ourselves in and not be as nimble and flexible in the community. We realized what we needed was a center that didn’t wall us in. We were working with wonderful architects who put words to it. They said, ‘Sounds like what you need is a stronger heart to your circulatory system.’
“The neighborhood where we’ve had our storefront has been gentrifying for a long time. We said, ‘Well, maybe this isn’t the right place to locate our center.’ We had to recognize that if we build a new building for the arts in any community, it’s going to have an effect that may be unintended but real about driving up property values and fueling the same problems. To look at building in another neighborhood and bringing those dynamics and forces may be a bigger problem than moving a few doors down and building the center here, claiming space for the people that we’ve worked with in this location. I asked you about this when we saw each other at some point in this process, and you said, ‘Well, don’t hide from those questions, make work with those questions, find ways of talking about them.’
“That led to a big project called Traces. It started from the premise of whose land is this that we’re building on? Who has considered this place home? Who has memories of this place? So from indigenous history to the present day, what is the story of this land? That was from all sorts of research, but also oral history interviews with people with memories of this place. All of that got held by a composer, Shaw Pong Liu, who wrote a piece incorporating some of that material that we could perform with students and our ensemble on the land as a way to inaugurate the project. That was one example of how a commission gets to hold everything. We get to make a piece of music. That’s our mission. It’s the questions we’re asking ourselves, it’s the the unresolved tensions of this work, done in a ritual way with celebration.”
If you’re not already getting the idea that this work is thoughtful and multi-layered, the rest of the podcast makes that amply clear. We talked about Providence itself, “a city that has prided itself on reinvention after a big industrial base” in the 19th century, as Sebastian described, and now a community of many immigrants. He described Dominican, Puerto Rican, Guatemalan and other neighborhoods, noting that up to 70% of CMW students come from Spanish-speaking families, and also mentioned newcomers from Liberia and Southeast Asia.
Providence schools are very uneven in providing access to music instruction; CMW’s belief is that “just like a public school and a public library are free, you should have access to art experiences that are free. So our programs are free. And it means we have to raise a lot of money, to pay musicians to have a viable career and to offer free programs.” We had a really interesting discussion of financing that I know you won’t want to miss, touching on the “boundaries and lanes” we put musical genres in, and how that betrays their actual origins. “Permeable boundaries” are the goal. And that led us to talking about the huge contributions parents make, starting with the fundamental task of getting their kids to CMW programs daily.
Listen to the podcast to learn more about how CMW faces these questions, and also the upcoming reprise of Anthem: A tribute to the historical election of Barack Obama commissioned from composer Jessie Montgomery. You will be inspired.
Here’s the CMW Daily Orchestra Program concert from November 2022. You can find other videos here.
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