by Alex Ross
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“Here I’m feeding off all this energy around me, this rebellious energy, and I’m playing for people who usually don’t know this music at all. We’re out here making it up as we go along, because we’re not teachers in the conventional sense and not performers in the conventional sense. Hopefully, we’re not just scattering experiences here and there, hopefully we’re creating continuity from one to the other. But I really don’t know what effect we’re having. Certainly, we’re happy. It’s as if we’d never left college. We’re posting signs, organizing things at the last minute, putting on performances in any space available.
“But what does it do? I don’t know if it changes anything right in a single moment in anyone’s life. But it might change how someone thinks. Maxine Greene talks about the arts creating openings, this mysterious clearing in people’s lives, so they walk out of the forest and can breathe. Maybe, at that moment, music becomes a huge part of their lives. Or maybe they use the clearing to see themselves in a new light, and go on to do something different. It could be any kind of music, could be any other art form.”
Ruth looked out at Westminster Street, which was empty of people.
“Of course, it’s all full of contradictions,” he went on. “Let me tell you a story about Vanessa Centeno, who’s been with us for many years. Her mom works various jobs, day and night. She doesn’t want her daughter to have the same existence. There was an article about us in the paper, in which she was quoted as saying that she loves our program because classical music is ‘for people who have class.’ It was funny that she said that, when my whole thing has been about trying to undo these stereotypes, deconstruct the idea that this music has ‘class,’ and make the point that music can be made anywhere by anyone at any time.
“Vanessa’s mom and I had such different ideas in mind. I was trying to get out of the world that she was trying to get into. But, in the end, we’re going in the same direction.” He stretched out his arm toward the door and the street. “We are both moving toward Violin.”
15
VOICE OF THE CENTURY
MARIAN ANDERSON
On Easter Sunday 1939, the contralto Marian Anderson sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The Daughters of the American Revolution had refused to let her appear at Constitution Hall, Washington’s largest concert venue, because of the color of her skin. In response, Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady, resigned from the DAR, and President Roosevelt gave permission for a concert on the Mall. Seventy-five thousand people gathered to watch Anderson perform. Harold Ickes, the secretary of the interior, introduced her with the words “In this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free.”
The impact was immediate and immense; one newsreel carried the legend “Nation’s Capital Gets Lesson in Tolerance.” But Anderson herself made no obvious statement. She presented, as she had done countless times before, a mixture of classical selections—“O mio Fernando,” from Donizetti’s La favorita, and Schubert’s “Ave Maria”—and African-American spirituals. Perhaps there was a hint of defiance in her rendition of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”; perhaps a message of solidarity when she changed the line “Of thee I sing” to “Of thee we sing.” Principally, though, her protest came in the unfurling of her voice—that gently awesome instrument, vast in range and warm in tone. In her early years, Anderson was known as “the colored contralto,” but, by the late thirties, she was the contralto, the preeminent representative of her voice type. Toscanini said that she was the kind of singer who comes along once every hundred years; Sibelius welcomed her to his home, saying, “My roof is too low for you.” There was no rational reason for a serious concert venue to refuse entry to such a phenomenon. No clearer demonstration of prejudice could be found.
One person who appreciated the significance of the occasion was the ten-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. Five years later, King entered a speaking contest on the topic “The Negro and the Constitution,” and he mentioned Anderson’s performance in his oration: “She sang as never before, with tears in her eyes. When the words of ‘America’ and ‘Nobody Knows de Trouble I Seen’ rang out over that great gathering, there was a hush on the sea of uplifted faces, black and white, and a new baptism of liberty, equality, and fraternity. That was a touching tribute, but Miss Anderson may not as yet spend the night in any good hotel in America.” When, two decades later, King stood on the Lincoln Memorial steps to deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech, he surely had Anderson in mind. In his improvised peroration, he recited the first verse of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” then imagined freedom ringing from every mountainside in the land.
Ickes, in 1939, bestowed on Anderson a word that put her in the company of Bach and Beethoven: “Genius, like justice, is blind … Genius draws no color line.” With the massive stone image of Lincoln gazing out over her, with a host of distinguished white men seated at her feet—senators, cabinet members, Supreme Court justices—and with a bank of microphones arrayed in front of her, Anderson attained something greater than fame: for an instant, she became a figure of quasi-political power. In Richard Powers’s novel The Time of Our Singing, a magisterial fantasia on race and music, the concert becomes nothing less than the evocation of a new America—“a nation that, for a few measures, in song at least, is everything it claims to be.” Fittingly, when Barack Obama became the first African-American president of the United States, in January 2009, “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” floated out over the Mall once more, from the mouth of Aretha Franklin to a crowd of two million.
Anderson was born in 1897, in a poor section of Philadelphia. Her father died when she was young; her mother worked in a tobacco factory, did laundry, and, for some years, scrubbed floors at Wanamaker’s department store. Her musical gifts were evident early, but she had an arduously difficult time finding voice teachers who were willing to take on someone of her race and economic background. A core of self-confidence, rarely visible behind her reserved facade, allowed her to endure a series of potentially crushing disappointments. The sharpest setback is described in her autobiography, My Lord, What a Morning: when she applied to a Philadelphia music school, in 1914, a young woman at the reception desk made her wait while everyone behind her in line was served. Finally, the woman said, “We don’t take colored.”
Anderson received positive notices throughout the 1920s—her first New York Times review, in 1925, registered “a voice of unusual compass, color, and dramatic capacity”—but she needed time to master the finer points of style and diction in foreign-language songs. A notable aspect of her story—related in Allan Keiler’s biography, Marian Anderson: A Singer’s Journey—is that she found real recognition only when she began an extended European residency, in 1930, giving numerous recitals with piano accompaniment. German critics received her respectfully, and with little condescension. In Finland and the Soviet Union, there were near-riots of enthusiasm. In 1935, she sang in Salzburg, eliciting from Toscanini his voice-of-the-century plaudit, which the impresario Sol Hurok promptly spread through the press. During a series of American tours in the late thirties, she performed in sold-out halls night after night and found herself one of the better-paid entertainers of her time. (In 1938, she earned nearly a quarter of a million dollars, which, adjusted for inflation, comes to $3.7 million.) The American critics capitulated. Howard Taubman, of the Times, who later ghostwrote her memoir, called her the “mistress of all she surveyed.”
What d
id she sound like in her prime? A slew of recordings made between 1936 and 1939 give an indication, although her voice plainly possessed the kind of incandescence that no machine can capture fully. The discs certainly demonstrate her ability to produce a deep-hued timbre in all parts of her range, from the lowest tones of the female voice well up into the soprano zone. When she sings Schubert’s “Erikönig”—in which a child, his father, and the headless horseman speak in turn—you seem to be hearing three singers, yet there are no obvious vocal breaks between them. She is fastidious but seldom stiff, with caressing little slides from note to note and a delicately trembling tone adding human warmth. Perhaps Anderson’s most famous performance was of Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody, which she first recorded in 1939, with Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. (It can be heard on a Pearl CD that collects some of her finest early recordings.) In the Goethe poem on which Brahms’s work is based, an embittered soul wanders the desert, eliciting a prayer for his redemption: “If there is on your psaltery, O father of Love, one sound acceptable to his ear, refresh his heart with it.” Anderson effortlessly issues the healing tone, but, before that, she mobilizes the lowest register of her voice to evoke the dark night of the soul.
Anderson was a musician of a pure, inward kind, to whom grand gestures did not come naturally. The historic drama at the Lincoln Memorial was not something she sought, and, in fact, she contemplated canceling the concert at the last minute. Throughout her life, she preferred not to make a scene. As Raymond Arsenault writes, in The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America, her negotiation of Jim Crow America displayed a “spirit of pragmatism” that could be interpreted as “quiescence.” Although she refused to sing in halls that employed “horizontal segregation”—that is, with whites in the orchestra seats and blacks in the galleries—for many years she did accept vertical segregation, with whites on one side of the aisle and blacks on the other. She usually took her meals in her hotel room, in order not to cause complications in restaurants. “I always bear in mind that my mission is to leave behind me the kind of impression that will make it easier for those who follow,” she explained in her memoir.
