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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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.

​Blank-page performing 
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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. ​

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.  

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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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

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

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.​

Following every single one of our shelter concerts we ask our audience members, “What did you think of the concert?”  As a result, for almost seven years now, shelter audience members have graced us with their remarkable written responses.  The handwriting can vary from tiny printed letters in English to sprawling filigreed cursive in Spanish.  The sentiments expressed are sincere, soulful, and often song like.  In fact, I have long wanted to set the responses of our listeners to music and bring these settings back into the shelter as new music that would ultimately honor our audience members’ daily struggles with homelessness.

This past September Shelter Music Boston proudly delivered just such a new work of music to our shelter audiences. Danielle Williams, composer, conductor, educator, and musical entrepreneur, set one of our audience members’ words to music. Here is the inspiration, written by one SMB audience member in December 2012: 

“I love each time the violinists return here. The music gives me a chance to cease thinking about the stress and chaos. The pain, as it were, and the struggle. Each note lures my mind into a calm, and all I see is the path in front of me. The music reminds me that I am still human. And renews my ambition to resolve my circumstances. The debris of homelessness and past traumas are for a moment inconsequential and nonexistent. And I am eternally grateful to these beautiful, talented women for providing that release.”

Danielle and I met when, in 2013, I set up an internship program for SMB through the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra Crescendo! Education and Community Engagement program.  Danielle has followed our work since 2013 and as of August 2016 is teaching at three music schools in the Middle East.  Last summer when SMB announced the 2017 Women Composer's Project, funded by the Harvard Musical Association and The Good People Fund, Danielle reached out to me to see if she could be involved.  I could not commission a new piece due to budget constraints, but I asked her if she had already composed works for our small ensembles, as I would love to present her music.  She volunteered to write a new work and said it would be an honor to participate in the creative process to respect the citizens SMB serves. The resulting work, titled “Release”, is the collaboration between my idea and Danielle's musical setting of the words of one homeless individual we served at the Shattuck Shelter in 2012. Upon hearing the recording of our October 5, 2016 performance of “Release”, (linked HERE,) Danielle wrote this to me:

“I'm truly delighted that the piece was well received by the performers, audience, and especially shelter guests. I thought your performance of it was absolutely beautiful- it gave me chills at some point, and that certainly doesn't always happen for a composer. Thank you for performing it with such love and attention- I truly felt that the ideas coalesced as I had hoped-- even better, in fact! It was somewhat surreal to be composing it for you there when I was in the Middle East. I found that the daily calls to prayer from the surrounding mosques really inspired a lot of the musical ideas in it, subconsciously I believe! At one point I was composing at my music school and the call to prayer kicked on and I realized that I was more or less writing in the same mode as the call to prayer...crazy how it stuck in my ear like that.”

Our shelter audience members were extremely pleased to learn that the words of a young woman who had been homeless and sheltered at the Shattuck Shelter had inspired the creation of a new work of art. One young man at Lifebridge Salem told me that the shelter manager had convinced him to attend our September 18, 2016 concert, which was the world premier of “Release”. This young man, shown here, said he was feeling very, very depressed before the concert, and he had not been inclined to attend. Mike, the shelter manager, had gently insisted that he give the concert a try. Following the performance this young man said to me, “I’m so glad I came because now I feel happy, hopeful. The music had so many feelings in it. Thank you for coming here and providing us with an absolutely beautiful concert."
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