Children don’t read to find their identity… They still believe in good, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation and

This will be my last blog of 2009, and it’s hard for me to believe that I’ve been at this for a year now; do I really have that much to write about? I guess I have to let you be the judge of that…

The end of the year in the journalism world means you get to use up an issue or two highlighting predictions for the year ahead, so I thought I would take a shot at it as well, but with a little twist. Instead of trying to identify random occurrences that happen outside of our influence or control, how about I suggest actions we all can take that will have real impact over the year, decade, and century ahead? I’m sure you can add many more as well. So, here goes - some simple, personal things we can do to shape the year 2010.

What can we do in the year ahead to make this world a better place?

Devote significant time to the well being of the children around you. Provide good examples to them in areas that will allow them to work towards a better world as they grow up.

• Show them responsible interactions with others, even those who make you see red on the road, cut ahead of you in line, or foul up your order at the checkout counter.
• Instill in them the importance of understanding money and financial issues that go beyond accumulating the most you can regardless of your resources.
• Give them a sense of personal responsibility for the world around them: help them question whether or not the quality of clothing is only defined by its label, the advertising budget, or the inflated price, and whether the conditions of manufacture were humane.
• Help them decide where they stand on the state of our environment and whether its condition matters enough to make personal sacrifices.
• Ask them questions about the world around them - its people, politics and history. True curiosity only comes when one seeks more than what they are comfortable with.
• Reinforce literacy and self-learning: read to them, and make it something a little challenging. Talk with them about it, or better yet, listen to their ideas as they spring up - the joy of a book is that it is uniquely shaped by each reader and they get to say what’s what.
• While you’re at it, let them read their favorite book to you. Close your eyes and remember the pleasure of hearing a story.

Lighten up! We’re all wound too tight nowadays, and I’m certainly no exception to this rule. Let go of the worry and go into glide mode. You’ll live longer and happier.

• Try not to talk on your cell phone while driving. Period.
• Turn off your cell phone when asked - don’t just set it to vibrate.
• Don’t “catastrophize” everyday inconveniences - it doesn’t make them go away any faster.
• Leave earlier for your appointments. You really cannot get there as fast as you think you can, even though you’ve been trying to for 25-plus years now.
• Find things to do that require more than 20 minutes of your time: weed your garden, stop e-mailing and write a real letter, play a round of golf and don’t keep score.
• Try watching one hour of TV without touching your remote. Betcha can’t do it!

Invite the arts into your life. It won’t hurt, I promise.

• Visit museums, galleries, theatres and other assorted venues in any city that you visit. Take the time and treat yourself and those around you to the creative process.
• Read a couple of the classics this year. Jane Austen will remind you of your in-laws, Chaucer will make you laugh, and Twain will surprise you with his modernity.
• Support an arts institution beyond the price of admission with your dollars, time, or leadership. I’m not writing this to be self-serving; the world would have only popular culture if all we did was to pay the going price.
• Try to see art in the making - attend open rehearsals, visit an artist’s studio, attend premieres of new work.
• Find a creative outlet at home. Write a journal, paint furniture, sing with your Wii game, have a poetry reading night, make a home action-movie with your kids. Sounds corny? So what? No one is keeping score!

And last but not least, as I have mentioned again and again this past year, invite celebration into the lives of you and your loved ones - loud, messy, contagious celebration that is spontaneous and non-judgmental. Invite everyone to the dance, and let them pick the steps. It doesn’t have to be in honor of anything important, just make it happen. Let the music be loud, and the energy real, and don’t worry if it doesn’t turn out exactly the way you planned. Life rarely does. The next time the whole gang is together, hand out the noisemakers and get everyone up and out of their chairs and identify a couple of important landmarks from the past year and run out on the lawn and “let the wild rumpus begin!”

2010 can’t help but be memorable if we all just give it a try.

Have wonderful holidays!

Music is one of those things that make us feel a little less alone in the world

As we near the end of another year and another decade (where do they go, anyway?), I want to take the time this week to remind everyone of the wonderful benefit we bring to our community through our offerings, staff and students. Let me cite some examples of recent happenings that reinforce the good work we do in our own unique way at The Music Settlement.

There are few experiences more moving than a roomful of children, ranging in age from preschooler to young adult, making beautiful music together. Last Saturday was one of those moments for The Music Settlement. It was then that our Suzuki Program and our Jazz Prep Program performed at Eaton Collection in Beachwood, as part of a week-long sponsorship opportunity with Northeastern Ohio’s Barnes & Noble bookstores.

The Suzuki group filled a section of the lobby with nearly fifty performers and an equal number of audience members, and featured nearly 90 minutes of selections ranging from the classical canon to holiday favorites. Nearly all of our Suzuki students in violin, viola, cello, and bass were represented. Each section and age group made contributions to the performance, with several pieces (notably Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star) played by the entire ensemble. It was quite a sight to see this group of children, aged from 5 to 17, playing beautiful music together with discipline and feeling. The Music Settlement’s Suzuki faculty is doing terrific work with their students and, as is traditional in the Suzuki Method, was also making great music that day as they played along with the group. My hat is off to Rachel Schultz-Zeithamel, Nicole Castleberry, Callista Koh, Rachel Bernstein, Kate Homer, Kim Lauritsen, Lisa Whitfield, Rei Sakurai-Cohen, and any other instructor who helped to make the day so special for everyone.

The Jazz Prep Progam combo wrapped up the day in their usual stellar style. Under the guidance of Eric Gould and Glenn Holmes, they mixed a variety of instrumentation around a selection of jazz classics that were delivered with their usual high level of musicianship and interpretation. The young people who have sharpened their talents through this relatively new program at The Music Settlement have become highly sought after to perform at various functions throughout our area. Catch them if you can!

One of The Music Settlement’s most distinguished faculty members, Ida Mercer, Chair of the Strings Department in our Department of Music, and founding member of the Almeda Trio, an ensemble-in-residence at The Music Settlement, was singled out for a very special honor this past week. She was awarded a $20,000 Creative Workforce Fellowship from Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, the cigarette tax-funded cultural arts initiative for Cuyahoga County. She was one of 20 individual artists chosen from an applicant pool of over 160 to receive the honor, which consists of undesignated support to be used to strengthen both her personal artistic vision and the region’s arts in general. All of us who know Ida are not surprised she received such a prestigious award. She embodies a life dedicated to the arts and to the creative possibilities inherent in self expression, collaboration, and experimentation. She has brought great energy and ideas to our campus, and infuses her individual art with an imagination and verve that captivates those of us who experience it. Bravo, Ida - this is a very well-deserved honor.

This is just a hint of the kind of value we provide every day in our efforts to spread the joy of a music-based educational or therapeutic experience. If you don’t already enjoy the benefit of our many talents, please join us in the new year ahead!

One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, 'What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?

“One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, 'What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?’” Rachel Carson

As I walked onto the campus of The Music Settlement today, I was startled to see a large red-tailed hawk sitting on the rearview mirror of a station wagon parked in our Mistletoe Drive parking lot. It allowed me to get to within about 10 feet of it, then made a casual leap to a low tree limb not 15 feet away. While this sighting was momentarily surprising, it occurred to me that it was far from unusual nowadays. Just yesterday, I saw a similar sized red-tail in my backyard in Cleveland Heights, hopefully taking care of a pesky chipmunk infestation for me. Now, many of the younger folks out there will be thinking to themselves at this point, “so what?” But therein lies the impact of this experience.

When I was young and growing up in the wilds of Western New York (this sounds like the opening to a Gilbert & Sullivan tune…), where there were more woods than houses and more open spaces than congestion, the sight of a hawk of any kind was rare. In truth, aside from skunks, raccoons and squirrels, nature seemed to be in distinct remission, not only in New York but across the country. In particular, there were few raptor-type birds aside from turkey buzzards circling in the sky overhead.

I distinctly remember a period in my 20’s when I began to notice signs of change. I remember vividly the shock of seeing a beaver building a dam in a water retention pond along the Southern Tier Expressway between Erie, Pennsylvania and Jamestown, New York. Zipping by at 60 mph, I would note the progress of its efforts and the change in the environment that ensued. I even stopped along the highway once to get a better look, hoping a highway patrol car didn’t sidle up and ask me what the heck I thought I was doing.

Since that time, I have paid close attention to the comeback of top-of-the-food-chain animals to the northeast, and have seen very encouraging signs. Common sightings of large birds of prey and a larger variety of songbirds, increases in sport fish species in lakes and rivers, and the uptick in bear, bobcat, and beaver populations give testimony to a reversal of a trend that is hard to deny. There is little doubt that efforts for environmental improvement, beginning with the Clean Air Act of 1970, have had a profound impact on our region and the country as a whole. Our area used to be known for high levels of ground and air pollution and biologically dead lakes and rivers, but things have begun to change, and the results are all around us.

Now, I know we have a long way to go environmentally and that, for some, the re-emergence of nature has meant deer eating their shrubs, beavers changing their drainage pathways and, worst of all, the appearance of coyotes in our area. But you can’t possibly argue that a barren, toxic, grey world is preferable. A more fully-populated animal environment in which to live is certainly a wonderful option, reminding us daily of our place in the greater scheme of things, and allowing us those breathtaking moments of observation and interaction which I, as a young person, thought were lost forever.

The campus of The Music Settlement was jumping this past Sunday as we pulled out all the stops to get the season off to a merry start during Holiday CircleFest, a joint effort by many of the institutions of University Circle that offers a free, fun day for families in the Circle. University Circle, Incorporated manages the event, and institutions like The Music Settlement offer programming, activities and experiences for drop-in visitors of all ages and interests who seek to “find themselves in the Circle”.

Here at The Music Settlement, we put together a schedule of programming that went from 1pm to 5:30pm, showcasing the awesome talents and imagination of our teaching staff and some special guests. I want to extend my thanks to all who helped make the day so special for our guest families and friends, including many staff and faculty members who took on new roles for the day - greeting and informing, directing and path finding (always a necessity on our campus). We couldn’t have done it without you!

Have a great week!

No house should ever be built on any hill or on anything. It should be of that hill, so hill and house could live together each the happier for the o

While we were off for the Thanksgiving holiday, I ventured out among the hoards on "Black Friday" weekend, but not for any sales, and not at 5 in the morning! Instead, my wife and I paid a visit to the beautiful Laurel Highlands of southwestern Pennsylvania and visited one of my favorite places on earth - Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece, Fallingwater.

Fallingwater was built as a summer home for Edgar and Liliane Kaufmann and their son, Edgar Jr., on property they owned on Bear Run Creek, which they frequented as an escape from the rather oppressive industrial environment of their native Pittsburgh. They owned Kaufmann's department store - familiar to anyone who lived in our area and is now merged with Macy's. It must have come as a shock to the Kaufmanns when they first laid eyes on Wright's plans for the site; they had asked him to incorporate the vista of the 30-foot waterfalls on the property into the plan, but Wright took it a step further. Fitting perfectly with Wright's love for the synthesis of nature and design, he placed the home directly over the falls themselves!

His revolutionary approach was guided by his interest in incorporating the sound and the cooling nature of the waterfalls into the floor plan while building the structure using local materials and craftsmen (talk about a "green" approach to building!). Needless to say, the Kaufmanns were a bit put off by the concept, but to their credit they accepted it with little revision and lived on the site for almost thirty years. It was finished in 1936, a guesthouse was added in 1939, and it is preserved today in pristine condition, with much of the original furniture and artwork. In fact, it is the only publicly accessible original design by Wright that is preserved with its intended environment and interior completely intact.

Almost everyone knows the look of Fallingwater, with its emphasis on outdoor spaces enhanced by the use of gravity-defying cantilevers and the use of windows as walls in wide open floor plans that are designed to encourage residents to spend as much time as possible in the open air rather than in the somewhat cramped personal spaces. What you can't really understand without visiting it is the music-like presence of the sound of moving water throughout the space. Wright has created an aural masterpiece that one cannot help but find relaxing and meditative. In a time before the infusion of electronic stimulation and in a valley that was inaccessible to radio signals of the day, Fallingwater must have been the ultimate retreat and rejuvenation spot. It's no wonder that much of the wall space indoors is filled with bookshelves. If you add in the visual stimulus offered by the use of windows throughout the structure, it's almost like a temple to nature, with the entire focus on the gifts that are provided for us if we are quiet and wait with open ears and eyes.

As an added bonus, the few spaces that are taken up with natural stone walls rather than windows display original works by Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, and other famous artists of the period. The Kaufmann family felt it was critical that the art they selected for the house should remain for the public as well - a real treat for those of us who only get to see such works in the rarified air of a museum.

It's impossible to come away from Fallingwater without a sense of a time and a point of view lost to our modern world. Too often, the approach today is to make the structure the entire focus and to give little thought to a more holistic orientation. We build homes that feature "entertainment" in every room and sprawl across a landscape in a way that encourages us to stay indoors and pay little attention to our greater environment. I bet the first thing some folks think when seeing Wright's masterpiece is "the bedrooms are cramped, the living space is too open, and the pathways are too complicated." But step out on a patio, or open a window, or just sit quietly, and you'll get it. Nature is our original orchestra - it's a gift that can be given, but cannot truly be owned. But it sometimes takes real genius to point this out in such a sublime way.

I recommend you visit Fallingwater if you haven't already. It's less than a 4 hour drive from Cleveland, and there are many other wonders in the area to enjoy when you go, including another Frank Lloyd Wright house open to the public right up the street - Kentuck Knob. There is a great website you can visit to learn more - www.fallingwater.org. But don't forget to listen.