Artistic Innovation
Shelter Music Boston creates innovative programming centered around collaborative composition projects and amplifying the voices of diverse composers and identities.
“This is great...the words of someone who walked in my shoes inspired a new piece of music!”
—​​Water For My Soul Audience Member
2023 Julie Leven Artistic Project:
Songs of Life
Songs of Life is a series of arrangements and commissioned compositions for string quartet based upon songs of significant importance to our audiences, related to their identity, stories and emotions. SMB musicians gathered stories and selections from partner site listeners, and four area composers created new works based on these discussions. The new works were then premiered for our listeners and community in September of 2023.
Part 1: Listener Feedback
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In January 2023, a quartet of SMB musicians presented a program of music based on four emotions - PEACE, SADNESS, HOPE, AND JOY. Each musician curated musical selections based on an assigned emotion, and asked listeners what their choices would have been. Using dialogue and ideas from listeners, SMB then commissioned new works based on the pieces audiences chose as their "Songs of Life."
Part 2: Four New Works
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Four composers listened to dialogue from the January concerts, analyzed songs that were suggested, and read comments from our audiences. They created new works inspired by these conversations and ideas.
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A Snug Glove, by Anthony Green
Inspired by Can I Kick It? by A Tribe Called Quest
Tiger Eye, by Francine Trester
Inspired by Eye of the Tiger, by Survivor
I like you, by Che Buford
Inspired by Eu gosto de voce
Inspired by Happiness, by Dead Prez
Part 3: Public Concert
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The last stage of the project was to premiere the new works for our program audiences and perform a public concert in September 2023. The concert was featured on WGBH radio and in the Boston Globe.
2022 Julie Leven Artistic Project:
Voices of Hope
Voices of Hope is a series of short musical compositions based upon poems written by individuals experiencing homelessness in Boston, set to music by local composers, and performed by Shelter Music Boston musicians in collaboration with the Black Seed Writers Group.
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​Every Tuesday since 2011, homeless, transitional or recently housed people meet at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul for an hour and 15 minutes of free-writing. They are the Black Seed Writers Group. The writers' works are published in the literary magazine The Pilgrim and performed at readings at Brookline Booksmith.
The Poetry
Laurel Lee Lambert
James Augustus Foy
Denin J. Simon
Voices from the Land (2021)
​Shelter Music Boston is honored to collaborate with the Grand Canyon Music Festival and the
Native American Composers Apprentice Project (NACAP) to present:
Voices From The Land: An Indigenous Composers Project
Tutsqwat angk Taatawi, My Land Songs (Hopi translation)
Náhastsaan biyiin, Songs of the Land (Diné, or Navajo, translation)
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With this collaboration, Shelter Music Boston seeks to create empathy for Indigenous people and share knowledge of the ancestral and tribal land of modern day Massachusetts and modern day Arizona. Throughout Massachusetts there are 50,000 residents with at least partial Indigenous ancestry, some from tribes outside of the region.
More than 300,000 residents of Arizona have Indigenous ancestry.
The twelve virtual concerts in this project, presenting music written by living Indigenous composers of Diné (Navajo), Hopi, Laguna, Salt River Pima-Maricopa, San Carlos Apache, and Tewa ancestry, offer and respect the musical stories and human emotions that can bring together marginalized and traumatized, and all, populations.
These virtual concerts, recorded in 2021 by SMB musicians, take place only on the SMB YouTube Channel. ​​
Florence Comes Home (2019)
How many African American women composers can most classical music lovers name?
Florence Beatrice Price (1887-1953) was a brilliant, prize-winning, New England Conservatory-trained composer who wrote more than 300 works, including orchestral, chamber, piano and organ music, and choral and solo vocal compositions. She was the first African American woman to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra. Happily, musicians and audiences are now rediscovering her creative work, long left languishing. What more might have been her successes, and how much more celebrated might she have been if she wasn’t an African American woman facing the Jim Crow era and deep hardships as a single mother?
"To begin with I have two handicaps— those of sex and race. I am a woman;
and I have some Negro blood in my veins."​
-Florence Price to Serge Koussevitzky, 1943
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​Like so many of our audience members, Florence Price faced overwhelming obstacles - poverty, homelessness, racism, sexism, single motherhood, and more. Her musical voice was unique; our audiences were moved by this story and the music that conveys it. ​
Shelter Music Boston commissioned this chamber opera to tell Florence Price's story. Florence Comes Home, by Francine Trester, scored for soprano, mezzo soprano, baritone, and string quartet was performed in concert version.​
Water for my Soul (2018)
​During August 2018, Shelter Music Boston audiences in homeless shelters and recovery programs throughout Greater Boston heard the world premiere performances of a suite of music titled Water For My Soul. This composition was the result of over two years of collaboration between the musicians of SMB and Shelter Music Boston audiences at Caspar Emergency Shelter, Pine Street Women’s Inn and Shattuck Shelter, Lifebridge Salem, and My Sister’s House and Women’s Recovery at the Dimock Center.
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We are grateful to the Harvard Musical Association for their support of this artistic collaboration!
“This is great…the words of someone who walked in my shoes inspired a new piece of music!”
—Water For My Soul Audience Member
​Release, by Danielle Williams, was the first piece in the suite. It is a musical setting of the words of a 2012 Pine Street Inn-Shattuck Shelter guest who wrote, “The music reminds me that I am still human and renews my ambition to resolve my circumstances.” These poetic words inspired SMB Artistic Director Julie Leven to seek a composer to set them to music. Release was performed in shelter and public concerts in the autumn of 2016.
​The collaboration was expanded to include many more shelter guests. In June of 2017, SMB musicians presented six workshops which invited and inspired our audience members to create and evolve musical puzzle pieces into short pieces of music. During the workshops audience members heard a simple musical idea and then were able to “play” with it. That meant: ask the musicians to play it higher, lower, faster, slower, backwards, forwards, in different rhythms, and many other variations. The short pieces that resulted became the musical building blocks Danielle Williams used to create Shells From the Sea and Wicked Spirits. The titles of these two movements of the suite quote the words of audience members attending the workshops.
Finally, composers Yu-Hui Chang and Francine Trester were inspired by audience members reflections written following SMB concerts over many years. These composers wrote The Path In Front of Me and In Our Own Words, works based on the words of Shelter Music Boston audience members. In Our Own Words was designed to provided shelter audience members with an opportunity to participate in the performances of the piece by reading previous audience members quotes, or the lyrics of the piece, during the performances.