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  • Home
  • What we do
    • Who We Serve
    • Children's Program
    • Artistic Innovation >
      • Voices From The Land
      • Florence Comes Home
      • Water for My Soul
      • Women Composers Project
    • Concert Experience
    • Impact
    • Concert Calendar & Programs
  • Who we are
    • Our Story
    • Mission, Vision, Values, and Cultural Equity Statement
    • Musicians
    • Leadership
    • Internship Program
  • Donate
    • Donate to the Mission of SMB
    • Donate when you shop online
    • In-Kind Donations & Community Partnerships
    • Foundation, Corporate, and Individual Donors
  • Get Involved
    • Events >
      • Past Events
    • Host a Virtual House Concert
    • Subscribe to our Newsletter
    • Social Media
    • Contact Us
    • Volunteer Opportunities
    • Employment Opportunities
  • Press & Awards
    • Press
    • Awards
    • Social Innovation Forum
  • Video
    • Videos about SMB
    • Performances by SMB
  • Links
    • Citizen Artists Working for Social Change
    • Transformational Power of Music
    • Anti-Racism Resources
  • SMB Blog

Meet the Musician:      Julian Loida

3/25/2021

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PicturePhoto by Georgia Rae Teensma
Tell us a little about your background.
I grew up in a family that loved to listen to music but didn’t really play music. In 6th grade I took guitar lessons for a year and then stopped. I also started playing drums and taking some drum lessons in late grade school and then I stopped lessons and just kinda taught myself. I started playing in a rock band and that band kinda took off so I basically learned to play through playing in this band that played around St. Louis. We were a young cover band and we rose up pretty quickly. I was just playing in bars when I was 15 or 16 because the audience really loved what we did and we were solid. Meanwhile, I was the last chair in my high school band as a freshman and I just kinda worked my way up from there. I practiced scales and I tried to get better. I got into a higher band and I started taking some classical percussion lessons, trying to learn to read music particularly notes and not just rhythm. Eventually I got into a youth symphony. It was really rare at my high school for anyone to be interested in classical music, but I had some friends who were in it as string players and I was really interested in the orchestra, I just loved the sound of strings. That took me to studying with the principal percussionist of the St. Louis Symphony.

When it came time for college I looked for programs that had both jazz and classical. I ended up going to Indiana University. While there I got really into all the music and just worked really really hard for years. I’d always been moved by Martin Luther King, Miles Davis, Robin Williams so I created these interdisciplinary works with speech, percussion, and visuals and basically started to intertwine social justice with music. I showed them to professors at Juilliard and Manhattan School of Music because I wanted to go there for grad school and they loved them and were very impressed and intrigued. New York seemed like where I should go next for grad school and I actually didn’t think Boston was where I was supposed to be at all. I ended up not getting into the New York schools, but I got into New England Conservatory and it’s a great school and I knew I was going to have a great teacher, Will Hudgins, who was my high school teacher’s teacher. I’d been to Boston a couple times because of Berklee and I did the Berklee 5 week program, but I didn’t know what I was getting into. I got to Boston and within a couple weeks I thought to myself, “I think I love this place.” Then a month went by and that turned to, “I love this.” I just started playing - I started playing in samba groups and I was doing all the classical stuff at school. That’s when I found Shelter Music Boston and I started volunteering. As time went on in grad school at NEC, I was more and more playing in the city and less and less concerned with school and by the time my last semester came around I was playing in the band Night Tree and we were touring. I was gonna be staying in Boston after graduation so I started freelancing and working at Club Passim. I’ve always known about SMB but the timing just worked out right now and I’m really really excited to be a part of this super awesome team.

What drew you to Shelter Music Boston’s work?
My mom’s a religion teacher and she’s very into the Jesuits. I grew up doing a lot of service work and went to food pantries often. My mom was always leading her classes and there was a lot of service work at these Catholic grade schools in St. Louis. After school I would go with her to bring her 7th and 8th graders to the food pantry or to the shelter. That was just a part of life. Then in high school I did my service hours at a homeless shelter where we would serve food and it was a really cool community there. I was always taught if you’ve been given you give back. When I got to Boston I found SMB and thought, “This is amazing. This is exactly what I want to do with classical music.” I got on a list to volunteer and realized how special it is to go into these shelters and get a total reset of perspective and also to see the musicians playing in these spaces.

What’s your favorite thing about working with Shelter Music Boston?
There’s 2 things that come to mind. The first is meeting Julie Leven in the interview and finding out she is also from St. Louis and her and I just totally hitting it off. She even knows the percussionist in the symphony there that I studied with in high school. I don’t meet many people from St. Louis in Boston so for the one person from St. Louis that I meet in Boston to be the founder of SMB was amazing.

The second thing easily would be the school programs at the Ellis school for a kindergarten class that we just started. These kindergarteners are the cutest things. We’ve just had one so far and I’m already excited for future programs at that school.
PicturePhoto by Georgia Rae Teensma
What else are you involved in outside of your work with SMB?
I started a podcast during the pandemic. I’ve been doing it now for the last year. It’s called A Millennial Musician and it’s available on all podcast platforms. It’s been amazing to celebrate millennials and talk about ourselves, our experience, and our relationship to each other and the generation around us. It’s been really great to celebrate those stories and have these artists come on and tell their stories from their own voices. I think that’s really powerful. I also play with harpist Charles Overton. We’ve been playing together for a couple years and we’re hoping to record some content in the near future. I have a solo album and repertoire and I’m planning to do more recordings of that. Pre-Covid I was touring with my solo music, playing drums in various bands, and freelancing around Boston. I’ve written music for ads and hope to one day write music for film. I also work at Club Passim.

I also love to travel and I’m a big cook. I treat cooking as seriously as music. I’m really into making new recipes and trying out food. I study Spanish. I take weekly Spanish lessons. I play a lot of music from South America and Central America. I’m trying to immerse myself fully in that culture better as an outsider and learning the language is a big part of that.

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What is your favorite performance you’ve ever attended? What made it so special?
When I was in high school I went with some friends to see our friend play in the youth orchestra. It sounds really goofy but the whole experience in my memory is just bright light, which was probably just the chandeliers of Powell Hall, but it truly changed my life. Of all the times for me to go, there was a marimba concerto. I just remember bright lights and it being the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. At the time it sounded like the heavens and I knew that I had to be in that group. I got completely obsessed and quit sports so I had more time to practice for the youth orchestra audition. Without that concert, I probably wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now.

There’s also so many jazz and rock concerts that have been amazing like seeing Wilco live in high school and seeing Dave Holland which was the first real jazz concert I went to. I’ve never seen people play their instruments that incredibly. I used to go to a music non profit in St. Louis called Sangeetha. It was all Indian music and they would bring world class Indians musicians there to play these ragas. The music was just unbelievable and the musicianship was some of the best I’ve ever seen - absolute technical perfection equally combined with musical perfection. The technique served the music and the phrasing. It was truly mind blowing.

What is your favorite performance you’ve ever given?
I loved the interdisciplinary concerts like the one I did at Chautauqua where I led 40+ artists from various backgrounds. Each piece was introduced by a poem. There was dance, sculpture, and electronics. It was really rad, just mega collaboration. There was a group piece at the end by Frederic Rzewski about incarceration and the cruelty of it. Having a full room of people at Chautauqua who hadn’t ever seen something like that and to be run by me and students in a way that the program was never able to do before was really special. They didn’t ask me to do it - I just did it and made it happen. That concert led to a lot of other connections and relationships and was just really special.

There also was a show outside of Asheville, NC a couple Falls ago. I was playing my solo vibraphone stuff. This woman came up to me after the concert and said, “I thought about not coming here tonight because this week my dog got run over by a car and it’s just been devastating for me, but your concert really gave me great joy and peace. It really allowed me to move on.” That’s what I want to do. Yes, it’d be great to make money and survive but that’s why I do this - to have that moment that I’ll have with me forever and to know that whatever is coming out of me has that ability gives me great meaning and purpose. Whenever I’ve connected with an audience member in a deep way and they’re able to share that with me - that’s the best concert.

What 5 albums would you take with you to a deserted island? 
  1. Bach: The Goldberg Variations by Glen Gould
  2. Sky Blue Sky by Wilco
  3. Blood by Lianne La Havas
  4. The Joker soundtrack by Hildur Gudnadottir
  5. A compilation album of Afro-Cuban music from an alumnae musician that I got in college

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Water for My Soul

8/13/2018

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During August 2018, Shelter Music Boston (SMB) audiences in homeless shelters and recovery programs will hear the world premiere performances of a suite of music called Water For My Soul.  This new work of music is the result of over two years of collaboration between the musicians of SMB and the audiences Shelter Music Boston serves 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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How did this collaboration work?  Release, by Danielle Williams, was the first piece of the suite to have been written.  This is a musical setting of the words of a 2012 Pine Street Inn-Shattuck Shelter guest.  She wrote, “The music reminds me that I am still human and renews my ambition to resolve my circumstances.” The poetry in her words compelled me to seek a composer to set these words to music, which Danielle Williams did in 2016.  Release was performed in shelter and public concerts in the autumn of 2016.  Audiences loved it. In particular, a shelter audience member said, “This is great…the words of someone who walked in my shoes inspired a new piece of music!”
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Julie Leven and Jennie Dorris leading a collaborative composition workshop at Pine Street Women's Inn in June 2017.
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I then decided to expand the collaboration 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 a short piece 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 piece that resulted after each workshop became the musical ideas Danielle Williams used to create Shells From the Sea and Wicked Spirits. The titles of these two movements of the suite result from the words of audience members attending the workshops.

Finally, composers Yu-Hui Chang and Francine Trester were inspired by the beautiful statements audience members have written following SMB concerts over many years. These composers have created The Path In Front of Me and In Our Own Words.  Both of these movements include words of Shelter Music Boston audience members.  The August 2018 performances of In Our Own Words even provide shelter audience members who would like to join the performance with an opportunity to participate in the concert by reading the quotes from previous audience members before the musicians perform Fran’s music.

The sublime music of W.A. Mozart and Leonard Bernstein, whose 100th birthday is being celebrated this year, will also be heard on SMB August concerts. ALL of the music reflects the creativity of many individuals, some with famous names, and some whose names we don’t know. I believe that the music of these world famous composers belongs on the same program as the collaborative creations of Shelter Music Boston audiences and musicians.   

The August 2018 SMB concerts celebrate creativity and collaboration. We are grateful to the Harvard Musical Association for their support of this empowering performance. And thank you for your interest and investment in this unique project!

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Meet SMB Supporters, Barry and June Dietrich

8/22/2017

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Barry and June Dietrich are lifelong music lovers. June’s father listened to show tunes and Barry’s father was committed to listening to classical music on records. Despite being tone deaf, his father had a discerning ear that didn’t tolerate anything less than the highest quality, a trait that he passed on to Barry. Together, Barry and June have cultivated their passion for excellent classical music as long time patrons of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and the Bach and Beyond Baroque Music Festival. It was at this annual celebration of period music in New York that the Dietrichs first met SMB founder, Julie Leven, and became taken with the idea of bringing the music they love to those in need. During a discussion not long after meeting several years ago, Barry told Julie, “That first talk you gave in the conference room [at Bach and Beyond] brought tears to my eyes.”

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Barry and June were both educated at Carnegie Mellon University, where June’s father had been a much beloved professor. Barry spent his career in electrical engineering and June worked as an editor of books and magazines and still does some editing for the Pittsburgh Symphony. The couple met while taking ice skating lessons and each have two children from previous marriages, with four grandchildren and a great grandchild who is almost 18 months old. The Dietrichs have spent many summers at Chautauqua, the institution in southwestern New York that comes alive each summer with lectures, performances, and recreation for all ages. In fact, six generations of Dietrichs have attended Chautauqua.

While health issues have slowed them down of late, Barry and June love traveling, particularly in Europe and South America, and riverboat cruises have been their favorite way to see the world. Music, however, has been Barry’s most enduring hobby. Beyond listening, Barry has been playing the violin since childhood and picked up the viola after college. Not the only musician in his family, Barry fondly recalled an aunt, who in his words was a “fantastically good pianist” and played recitals until she was 92, as well as his twin uncles who played violin and viola.

Shelter Music Boston is fortunate to have the generous support of such kindred spirits who are so intimately connected to and moved by the power of music. Last fall, the Dietrichs made the trip to Boston for SMB’s Music & Meaning Benefit Concert and they hope to return this year for one of our shelter concerts. According to Barry, it is “marvelous that the players are all professionals working with people who are down and out and homeless,” and told us that he and June give to SMB because it is a “worthy cause and unusual commitment.” SMB is proud to have a place among the other meaningful organizations the Dietrichs support, including the ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Freedom from Religion Foundation. In his direct and honest approach to conversation, Barry said, “I want to support those groups that are working toward those things that I think need to be done.”

All of us at Shelter Music Boston are deeply grateful to Barry and June Dietrich for their friendship and their enthusiastic belief in our mission.

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Composing in Boston's Homeless Shelters

8/17/2017

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Written by Jennie Dorris

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For a week in June, I gave hour-long concerts to which I brought no prepared music. And these were less-than-typical concert venues -- every night I was in a different homeless shelter in and outside of Boston. I had my marimba, a load of different-sounding mallets, and an oversized sketch pad propped up on an easel. I wasn’t alone -- two incredibly talented string players joined; a violinist for the first five concerts, and a violist for the sixth. With just our instruments, our huge notepad, and our imaginations, we had a goal: Could we create an experience for people who were homeless to compose music with us?

​This project was the brainchild of Shelter Music Boston, who for the past seven years has offered monthly classical concerts to homeless shelters. (I've joined them as a musician for the past five years.) Founder and artistic director Julie Leven (pictured at left playing with me at one of the shelters), had a vision for a new work to be composed that was inspired by the audience. Two of those movements would be sourced entirely from this week of concerts where the audience composed with us. We would give the materials from these concerts to a composer, who would score out the music. The project was funded by The Boston Foundation’s Live Arts Boston grant. 

Getting Ready

Planning sessions took place over Skype between Julie (who lives in Boston), myself (I’m in Pittsburgh), and the piece’s eventual orchestrator Danielle Williams (who lives and teaches in the Middle East).  
 
​How could we get our audience to compose with us? While we knew that our audience was opinionated -- one of the best parts of a SMB concert is discussing the music with our audiences after the show -- we also knew we didn’t want to put them on the spot. We knew many of them would enter into this process without having played a musical instrument or receiving formal musical training. 

We settled on the idea that we would be their “musical jukebox” (an idea that was inspired by my work at the Hillman Cancer Center). We would present different options on our instruments and ask open-ended questions that would let them guide our playing. Their opinions would be heard through us. We broke music into its puzzle pieces -- including melody, harmony, rhythm, texture, timbre, dynamics, and tempo -- to help focus our plans for each shelter. 

We also knew that the process would be different at every place we went. Some locations had a separate room, and were quiet. Some enforced substance-free living. Other concerts were given in the middle of their living spaces, abutted by the sounds of running showers and flushing toilets.

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Each night we started with what we called a "musical meditation." We musicians would improvise together in a certain key, and we'd explain to the audience that we had no idea what the piece was going to be like before we started playing and reacting to each other. We asked them to keep track of any words or images that came to mind as we played. One of my favorites was: "It keeps the wicked spirits in line." These words guided the mood of each of the compositions. ​

Next, we'd move into the main focus of the night -- the musical puzzle piece that would begin their process of composition. At one location, we focused on harmonic progressions. We’d play through different lengths of progressions, and let them choose how many chords they thought should be involved in their composition.

Using the chords as the backbone, we had the audience clap in time until they found a tempo they liked. This would be the speed of the melody we wrote over a given chord. We’d improvise a few short melodies and they would choose which one they liked best. We’d play the melody on the different instruments -- did they like it on viola, marimba, or both? Did they want the viola to play high, and the marimba low? How loud should each of our levels be? Should Rebecca Strauss, the violist, use her bow, or pluck the strings? Should I use the loud mallets, the softest ones, or a combination? 

We’d play a draft of the composition for the audiences and let them give feedback. In our last shelter, guests told us to play the harmonic progression backwards and then ended up liking that progression best for their piece -- a really good brain workout for us musicians! 

What’s next

​After each concert, I'd take the giant notepad home and turn the notes from our score into musical notation we could send to Danielle, our orchestrator. We explained how the audience came up with each of their ideas, and the mood in the room from each night. 

Danielle is currently orchestrating the musical ideas from all six shelters into two movements -- one of those movements will be a solo violin piece for Julie, and the other will be a chamber ensemble piece for marimba and strings. 

It gets bigger from here! These two movements will join two other movements to become part of a larger suite. The two other movements are settings of the audience's words to music. One has been composed by Danielle, and the other is being composed by 
Yu-Hui Chang. 

In 2018, Shelter Music Boston plans to premiere the full multi-movement work in a public performance as well as at each of the shelters. ​

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A Volunteer's Story

5/29/2017

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Julie Judson, a longtime admirer of Shelter Music Boston, is the events and communications manager at the GreenLight Fund, a company that invests in causes that help transform the lives of children and families in need.​ She is committed to the local art scene and recently has her first volunteer experience with us at SMB’s concert at the Pine Street Women’s Inn. After the concert, Julie emailed us with her reaction to witnessing SMB’s work in homeless shelters first-hand - her message is too beautiful not to share and we didn’t change a word! We’re so grateful for her time as a volunteer and this incredible testimonial. If Julie’s message inspires you to volunteer, please email erin@sheltermusicboston.org.
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I have to tell you that finally getting to see SMB in action at a concert last night was truly one of the most moving things I've experienced in recent memory. I expected the music to be beautiful, of course (I had seen Julie and a few other musicians perform at an SMB event a few years back, but it wasn't located at a shelter).  But watching them play at the shelter, and observing the women at the shelter experience the music was another thing entirely.  

First, I want to mention that the generosity of spirit of Julie and the two other performers was really wonderful, and more than I expected. Not only were they eager to perform the best concert possible for the women, but it was clear that they wanted to interact with the concert attendees. They encouraged questions and conversation in between pieces (which were also carefully considered and well-placed). They wanted the women to learn something about the pieces and respond in whichever way was best for them. So many people talked about feeling relaxed, or shared positive memories of learning an instrument when they were young. Other women talked about the tone and feeling of each piece and asked questions about what the composer might have been going through at the time. No matter the feedback, the musicians responded with graciousness and open hearts, and a willingness to engage in a dialogue. It was really beautiful.

Something that I always tend to notice is body language, and what was so striking about many of the audience members last night was how their bodies changed as they listened to the music. Although there were constant interruptions and traffic in and out of the lobby (which the musicians also handled with a lot of grace and patience), most of the audience members regarded the musicians with rapt attention. They were often leaning in their seats, watching them very closely, reacting with delight when the viola player plucked strings in a funky, unexpected way, or smiling widely. Everyone seemed to settle into their seats with comfort. Many women thanked me and the other musicians very sincerely for coming.  

As you know, in the non-profit industry we talk a lot about measuring impact, and in my organization, we talk a lot about scalable solutions to systemic problems. I've been part of a lot of organizations as a staff member and as a volunteer that have left the term "impact" with a lot to be desired, and in general "scalable solutions" are always tricky, because people are nuanced, communities and neighborhoods are nuanced, and you can't always package a solution with a bow and hope it works. Last night, I was struck by the realization that what SMB does for people is immediate impact in action. There are no frills, no flourishes and no overtures about the work that y'all do. There's no need to reach for data points or ways to phrase your mission in a way that funders will respond to. Y'all get right down to the fundamentals, and you make an impact, and you make it with the universal language of music. It took me 10 minutes to see it for myself. 

Seeing SMB in action last night was an incredibly emotional experience for me.  It did more than compel me to give money (though I know that always helps) or volunteer more often - it made me believe in something, in an organization's ability to affect change. In this over-saturated philanthropic climate, it is so easy to feel like organizations are doing whatever they can to frame their work in a certain way and to jockey for the same dollars. Maybe that's how it feels to you and your team sometimes, and I totally get that.  But I just wanted you to know that all it takes is one night watching a concert to see that what SMB does is vital for a population of people who have basic human needs that aren't being met, that are critical for their survival. Not only is SMB providing a service that is good for the soul, but you're doing it with dignity and grace too.  In Judaism, there is a word for it: "mitzvah" or good deed, with no other agenda or hope for something in return.  What y'all do each time you visit a shelter is truly a mitzvah. 

Anyway, thank you so much for letting me be part of last night's concert. I hope that you'll let me know of future volunteer opportunities and other ways to get involved. I always thought it sounded wonderful before, but now I'm a believer.  
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Women Composer's Project: Part 4

3/16/2017

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Our final composer featured during our March concerts is Florence Beatrice Price.
​(9 April 1887-3 June 1953)
Price was born to Florence Gulliver and James H. Smith in Little Rock, Arkansas, one of three children in a mixed-race family. Despite racial issues of the era, her family was well respected within their community. Her father was a dentist and her mother was a music teacher who guided Florence's early musical training. By the time she was 14, Price was enrolled in Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music, with a major in piano and organ. Initially, she pretended to be Mexican to avoid the stigma people had towards African Americans at the time. She graduated in 1906 with honors. In 1912, she married Thomas J. Price, an attorney, and moved back to Little Rock. After a series of racial incidents in Little Rock, particularly a lynching that took place in 1927, the family moved to Chicago, where Price began a new and fulfilling period in her compositional career. Financial struggles led to a divorce in 1931, and Florence became a single mother to her two daughters. To make ends meet, she worked as an organist for silent film screenings and composed songs for radio ads under a pen name. During this time, Price lived with friends and eventually moved in with her student and friend, Margaret Bonds, also a black pianist and composer. This friendship connected Price with writer Langston Hughes and contralto Marian Anderson, both prominent figures in the art world who aided in Price's future success as a composer. Though her training was steeped in European tradition, her melodies were often blues-inspired.  Her compositions reveal her Southern roots and, at the urging of her Boston mentor George Whitefield Chadwick, she incorporated elements of African-American spirituals.   Her music was widely performed during her life but her output, comprising of over 300 compositions, remains largely unpublished. The critical edition of the work on our concert was compiled by Anthony R. Green. 

Shelter Music Boston will play Florence's composition titled Shortnin' Bread. Click below to hear an arrangement of the piece. 
Shortnin' Bread. Allegro
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Women Composer's Project: Part 3

3/16/2017

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Our next featured composer is Germaine (Marcelle) Tailleferre.  
​(19 April 1892-7 Nov 1983)
Germaine Tailleferre was the only female member of the important post-World War I group of French composers known as Les Six.  She remained a prominent musician long after the disintegration of that group, during the middle and late 1920s. Tailleferre was born Marcelle Taillefesse to a family living in the outskirts of Paris. Despite having exposed her to music from an early age, Marcelle’s parents considered music to be an inappropriate activity for a young lady, and it was not until her twelfth year that she convinced them to allow her to pursue serious studies at the Paris Conservatoire. There she studied accompaniment, harmony, and counterpoint, eventually taking first prizes in each. Upon reaching adulthood, she changed her name to Germaine Tailleferre, partly to spite her father’s prohibition of her artistic pursuits. During the years following her graduation she received a few informal lessons in orchestration from Maurice Ravel, one of the most prominent French composers of the time.  The work on our concert, written in 1919, emulates the musical style of Ravel, particularly in the second movement. Tailleferre had two unhappy marriages that proved a considerable drain on her creative energies. Her natural modesty and unjustified sense of artistic insecurity prevented her from promoting herself properly, and she regarded herself primarily as an artisan who wrote optimistic, accessible music as ‘a release’ from the difficulties of her private life. Even so, she left behind, at her death in 1983 at the age of 91, a large number of successful musical works and numerous film scores representing almost 70 years of active composition.

Shelter Music Boston will perform three movements from her string quartet. Click below to hear the second movement,  Intermede.
String Quartet: II. Intermede

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Women Composer's Project: Part 2

3/16/2017

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Our next featured composer is Ethel Mary Smyth. (22 April 1858-8 May 1944)
Born into a military upper middle-class family in London, Smyth was educated at home and at a London boarding school. In 1877, despite her father's opposition to the idea of women studying music as a professional career, she entered the Leipzig Conservatory.  In 1878 she left the school but remained in Leipzig, taking lessons and receiving encouragement for her musical ambitions from the most important musicians of the city and time: Brahms, Grieg, Joachim and Clara Schumann. Upon her return to England in the 1890’s, she found that the British musical establishment did not welcome an unconventional, German-educated female composer, and Smyth faced difficulties in obtaining public performances of her music. Her opera Der Wold, (The Forest) mounted in 1903, was until 2016 the only opera by a woman composer ever produced at New York's Metropolitan Opera. In 1911, when Smyth had attached herself to the suffragette cause she produced the anthem March of the Women.  She was arrested in London in 1912, along with 100 other suffragettes, for throwing stones at the houses of suffrage opponents. While in Holloway prison, Smyth led the women in a rousing rendition of The March of Women, conducting them with her toothbrush, in what would become the most famous performance of the song. During World War I she worked as a radiologist in France, realized she was losing her hearing and after the war, turned her creative energy to writing memoirs and essays. This provided a source of income when hearing loss prevented her from composing. Later in life, she used her celebrity and campaigning abilities to fight for causes that included opportunities for British composers and women's right to play in mainstream professional orchestras. Smyth became a feminist icon.  The piece performed on our concert was published in 1912, the year Smyth was arrested.

Shelter Music Boston will perform a movement from her String Quartet in E Minor. Click below to listen!
String Quartet in E Minor: I. Allegretto lirico

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Women Composer's Project

3/16/2017

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SMB presents concert featuring all women composers

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March is Women’s History Month!  In honor and celebration of women past and present, Shelter Music Boston is thrilled to announce our Women Composers Project. This artistic program brings the often unfamiliar work of women composers to our shelter audiences this month. We can’t wait to share this program, along with educational information about each composer and each piece, with listeners at each of our partner programs, and especially at the Pine Street Women’s Inn, Women’s Renewal, and My Sister’s House.  These audiences have been particularly interested in repertoire by women composers. We are grateful to the Good People Fund and the Harvard Musical Association for their support of this project. 

During the next week, we will share information about each composer featured on our March concerts, along with the pieces being performed. 


Our first composer is Maddalena Laura Lombardini Sirmen.  (9 Dec 1745-18 May 1818)  
Maddalena Lombardini Sirmen was the only musician to emerge from her family and she became famous entirely through her own efforts. She was born in Venice and in 1753 was admitted to the Ospedale dei Mendicanti, a school for orphans. Though she was not an orphan, her impoverished parents could no longer care for her and the school sought her musical talent. She was an outstanding violinist and in 1760 was allowed to go to Padua to study with Tartini, the most important violinist of the time. In 1766, after 13 years at the Ospedale, she wanted to leave. Tartini tried unsuccessfully to find her a husband; in the next year she married the violinist and composer Lodovico Sirmen. In 1768 the couple started a highly successful European tour, playing in Turin and Paris, where six of her string quartets were published in 1769. Two of these works will be performed on our concert. In January 1771, Lodovico was settled in Ravenna with their daughter and Maddalena was in London, advertised as ‘the celebrated Mrs Lombardini Sirmen’. She had two very successful seasons there as a violinist, playing in various concert series and at the theatres, then a third season as a singer. Following her time in London she played or sang in various Italian cities, in Paris, Dresden and as a principal singer at St Petersburg (1783). After 1785 she settled in Venice and Ravenna, where she spent the rest of her life.  Sirmen's music was well-known and widely published in Paris, the Netherlands, Germany and London during her lifetime. One of her violin concertos was performed in Sweden in 1774, and Leopold Mozart wrote of ‘a beautifully written concerto by Sirmen’ in a letter to his wife and son Wolfgang. ​   

Shelter Music Boston will be performing movements from two of her celebrated string quartets. Click the links below to hear a sample of this beautiful music!

String Quartet No.2 in B flat Major: ii. Allegro
String Quartet No. 4 in B-Flat Major: I. Cantabile

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SMB and the NEA

12/14/2016

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​Shelter Music Boston to Receive $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts

Boston, MA—National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Jane Chu has approved more than $30 million in grants as part of the NEA’s first major funding announcement for fiscal year 2017.  Included in this announcement is a Challenge America grant of $10,000 to Shelter Music Boston for monthly chamber music concerts in Boston area homeless shelters. The Challenge America category supports primarily small and mid-sized organizations for projects that extend the reach of the arts to underserved populations—those whose opportunities to experience the arts are limited by geography, ethnicity, economics, or disability.


“The arts are for all of us, and by supporting organizations such as Shelter Music Boston, the National Endowment for the Arts is providing more opportunities for the public to engage with the arts,” said NEA Chairman Jane Chu. “Whether in a theater, a town square, a museum, or a hospital, the arts are everywhere and make our lives richer.”


This grant will provide homeless individuals the opportunity to experience classical music concerts by musicians such as Julie Leven, Javier Caballero, Rebecca Strauss, and Joyce Alper. Many of the individuals in the homeless shelters suffer from poverty, mental health issues, substance use, and social isolation. Following each performance, extensive conversations about music and related topics among shelter guests, staff, and the musicians will occur.


“It is rare for a homeless person to be asked their opinion about anything, let alone something as complex as classical music” says SMB Founder and Artistic Director Julie Leven. “Our audience members learn that they can connect with themselves and others via this music; they can express their ideas and opinions and be treated with respect as a result. This interaction turns concerts into a vital social service tool. This is the work of 21st century artists, and SMB musicians lead the way.”

For more information on projects included in the NEA grant announcement, visit arts.gov/news.​

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