In this, the tenth annual edition of the Providence Phoenix’s “Best” issue, we highlight people and organizations who are doing exceptionally good work. These are local heroes who often labor behind the scenes. Yet they are changing the communities in which they’re based for the better. Regardless of what neighborhood you live in, all of us in Rhode Island are in their debt.
Sebastian Ruth + Minna Choi
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SEBASTIAN RUTH + MINNA CHOI
The power of music
Emerging from college as a classical musician, which option would you choose — performance, teaching, or giving free lessons to kids in an urban neighborhood? Sebastian Ruth and Minna Choi, founders of Community MusicWorks, chose all three.
In the process, their innovative Providence-based program has been nationally recognized for its success in building a community of professional musicians, teachers, students, and their families, all of whom learn from each other.
Ruth, 31, and Choi, 32,met in a chamber music ensemble at Brown University. She graduated in 1997 after studying philosophy and ethics; he in 1998 with concentrations in music and the philosophy of education (they married in 2004). While at Brown, Ruth encountered the writings of educational theorist Maxine Greene and was inspired by her emphasis on using the arts and the imagination to create social change. The idea, Ruth explains, was that an arts experience is “going to open up your imagination and open you to imagine more possibilities for your life.”
Ruth had already been teaching one violin student in South Providence, and he got a Swearer Center fellowship to do an individual residency on the South Side. Ruth’s idea was for a quartet, so he and Choi gathered two other friends and started performing at the West End Community Center, as a way of recruiting kids.
“The idea was to start this quartet residency where we could really experiment with what string teaching was all about,” notes Ruth, during an interview at Community MusicWorks’ storefront location on Westminster Street, near Central High and Classical High. “And try to build up a community of young people who were seeing this as a real creative outlet for them, seeing us as teachers, as mentors and friends, and as other people who were fired up about music. And to create a space where a community of young people could have discussions with each other about issues in the community and become a supportive network for each other.”
All that and more have come to pass during the 10 years in which Ruth, Choi, and several others have been offering free weekly music lessons (violin, viola, cello) to kids, ages 7-to-18, in Providence’s seven poorest neighborhoods. Enrollment stands at 100, with a waiting list of 50-plus young people. For a $10 registration fee, the students have instruments to take home throughout the school year. Many of them also attend monthly workshops with local or regional musicians.
Monthly concert trips for students and their families, such as outings to the Rhode Island Philharmonic or Boston Philharmonic, are an important component of the Community MusicWorks’ curriculum. The four “performance parties” put on by students throughout the year are another. Lastly, there are twice-monthly “Phase II” meetings, begun in 2002 with the hope of creating social and musical bonds among teenage students. The teens eat supper, watch films, play music together, and discuss community issues.
“Phase II feels like that’s where the crux of our work is,” reflects Choi. “The kids are now getting together in their own quartets or ensembles, and they are initiating performances within their community. Also this year, the discussions have developed the theme of responsibility — to each other, to their groups, and to their families.”
Less formal aspects of Community MusicWorks’ impact on the community are workshops in many schools, their own performances throughout the city as the Providence String Quartet, and the informal sidewalk concerts — rehearsals of the quartet — that are piped out onto Westminster Street. “The street is heavily trafficked around 3 pm, and we get a variety of reactions,” Ruth relates with a grin, including “teenaged boys getting excited and nodding their heads in approval of a Bartok piece we were rehearsing.”
Ruth has always had it in mind that his Community MusicWorks’ colleagues would draw as much energy and satisfaction from their performing as from their teaching and the enthusiasm of the kids. “The thing that comes back to me is just the valuable and long-lasting relationships I have with my students,” Choi affirms. “Working with these great kids and working within this supportive community and also playing chamber music — it’s just a really fulfilling career to have.”
Community Music Works celebrates its 10th season at the Regent Avenue School Building on April 29 with a gala dinner and a performance by hot young pianist Jonathan Biss.
_Johnette Rodriguez
