It is probably not love that makes the world go around, but rather those mutually supportive alliances through which partners recognize their dependence on each other for the achievement of shared and private goals.
Fred Allen

Over the past few years, The Music Settlement has reached out to like-minded organizations to develop partnerships that go beyond the traditional parameters of collaboration. We follow several principles in this process. We seek out grassroots organizations that connect to the same communities and people we serve with our own programming, we look for an artistic product that expands what is already offered here on our campus without duplicating it, and we search for partners whose artistic product and mission can align with or enhance ours. The expression I often use to describe this last notion is that we build a “creative cauldron” on Magnolia Drive - that is, an environment in which artists interested in collaboration can cross paths and new and interesting things can happen.

What makes our partnership offer a bit different is that we give these artistic organizations a home on our campus: an office space along with some basic support and resources, at a significantly reduced monthly fee. We help them with the back-office structure that is often one of the greatest challenges to survival that a small organization may face. They excel in their artistic, mission-based efforts, but their physical office space is often in someone’s kitchen, spare bedroom, or basement. Maintaining an office presence, administrative support, and all that goes with it is sometimes the straw that breaks the camel’s back in such situations, and what we offer can lighten that weight for them.

The latest addition to our list of affiliated partners is Inlet Dance Theatre, which has been producing contemporary dance since its founding in 2001 and has established a solid reputation for a significant artistic product, with a true commitment to arts education and community development at its core. It is the brainchild of Artistic Director Bill Wade, formerly a faculty member at the Cleveland School of the Arts and founder of YARD - Youth At Risk Dancing, and the former Director of Footpath Dance Company. Here’s a portion of Inlet’s mission statement:

Inlet utilizes the art form of dance to bring about personal development in the lives of individuals through training and mentoring, and to speak creatively about life and the issues we all face.

Bill Wade backs that up with a commitment to bring his vision to neighborhoods in and around the city of Cleveland, and he has dedicated his artistic life to enhancing the lives of young people of our community who are at-risk and underserved. As he says on the company’s website, www.inletdance.org:

In a community where people are often used to further dance, Inlet Dance Theatre is committed to using dance to further people.

We are very excited to be the new home of Inlet Dance Theatre, and welcome Bill, his staff and his company to their new office on the second floor of Burke Mansion, right next to the offices of another affiliated partner, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony.

Joining the qualities of two or more organizations to strengthen a whole is not unlike the act of making music together. I was reminded recently of the power of that effort within the walls of our very own recital hall. On Sunday, June 6^th, our performing ensemble-in-residence, the Almeda Trio, performed their final concert of the season here in Lester Glick Recital Hall, concluding an excellent inaugural concert series which was generously sponsored in part this year by BNY Mellon. The trio consists of faculty members Robert Cassidy, Ida Mercer, and Cara Tweed. Their performance on June 6^th included an exhilarating blend of works from Robert Schumann, Paul Schoenfield, and Dmitri Shostakovich, and culminated what has been a terrific year of accomplishment and challenge for this group of faculty from The Music Settlement, who have, amazingly enough, been playing together for less than three years. While those who attended the concert raved about the trio’s keenness to embrace challenging and eclectic selections with such thrilling success, one should also be aware of all the effort and dedication that went into this and all of their performances to date. I thought I could best capture that by reproducing a letter in its entirety that the trio included in the event’s program to their audience:

Dear Friends-

With today's concert we conclude our first season as an ensemble-in-residence at The Music Settlement. It's been a busy year for us not only on this campus, but in the Cleveland area, with concerts at the Solon Center for the Arts, Cleveland State University, and educational concerts at numerous schools of Northeast Ohio. Our performance at CSU was broadcast live on WCLV, and we were featured guests on Around Noon with Dee Perry on WCPN. In mid-May we hosted a Chamber Music Invitational, at which student chamber ensembles performed and were coached by us. We also went beyond the Ohio state line, performing in Bloomington, Illinois and Indianapolis, Indiana, and played some "friend-raiser" house-concerts in February and May, which were great fun.

That describes our public presence. However, we thought our "behind the scenes" activities might be of interest to our audience as well, as they are what make it possible for these performances to take place. So, this year found us meeting for rehearsal every Tuesday and Thursday from 9:30 am till noon at The Music Settlement (and additionally in the weeks immediately before concerts). We studied piano trios by Beethoven, Copland, Mendelssohn, Piazzolla, Schoenfield, and Schumann, as well as maintained the works by Brahms, Haydn, and Shostakovitch that we had learned last season. Exploring these pieces together for five hours each week is a pretty thrilling experience. We have grown tremendously through this shared effort and feel so lucky to be making music together. As Philip Ball says in his book The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can't Do Without It, "Music is a mystery. It is unique to the human race: no other species produces elaborate sound for no particular reason. It has been, and remains, part of every known civilization on Earth ... It engages people's attention more comprehensively than almost anything else: scans show that when people listen to music, virtually every area of their brain becomes more active."

Thanks so much for your support. We are honored to be sharing this marvelous, intangible, uniquely human art form with you.

We are truly blessed to have such focused and talented faculty and musicians here at The Music Settlement. Please make an effort to catch the Almeda Trio’s 2010-11 season, beginning next fall at The Music Settlement, where great artists are gathering every day!

Have a great week!

In Flanders fields the poppies blow, between the crosses, row on row.

“In Flanders fields the poppies blow, between the crosses, row on row.” John McCrae

Wasn’t that a great Memorial Day weekend we just had? I can’t remember when the weather was quite as enjoyable, as May slipped into June. Now those of you who know what a lousy memory I have may comment that you’re not surprised I can’t remember, since I barely can recall what I had for dinner yesterday let alone what the weather has been like on a certain weekend of any year. But the truth is that I have a special mnemonic device that keeps this weekend fresh in my mind through the years - muscle memory.

Every year since I don’t know when, my family has celebrated Memorial Day with a handful of rituals. Sure, we have a picnic and a gathering at the old homestead on Chautauqua Lake, and we even gather on Monday morning to watch the Bemus Point Memorial Day parade (don’t blink or you’ll miss it!), but there are a couple of other rituals that are less anticipated: taking down the storm windows and putting in the dock.

The less said about the storm windows, the better, except to mention that the process involves balancing on a shaky old ladder, manhandling crumbling old storm windows the size of a sports car, and enduring the sensation experienced when your life flashes before your eyes 14 times in one day. But this isn’t the real killer; that experience is reserved for putting in the dock.

Living on the lake requires having a dock. It’s as American as apple pie, and few places are more pleasant at the end of a long summer day than one-third of a football field stretching out over the water. However, like sausage making, the installation of the dock is a sight best left unseen. First of all, the sections of the dock are all back-breakingly heavy, the lakeshore is foot-breakingly rocky, and the water in late May is inevitably a spirit-breaking few degrees above freezing. I promise myself three things after I help complete the task each year: that before next year I will buy a wetsuit, hand off the really brutal jobs to the next generation, and plan to take out the dock in the fall in a systematic and easily replicated fashion. Then the pages of the calendar turn, another May rolls around and I find myself doing the heavy lifting, unable to figure out which section goes next and feeling numb from my chest down as my leaky waders slosh with icy water. Maybe this is just the inevitability of the human experience, but so often this is what first comes to mind when I think of Memorial Day.

But in the last 20 years or so, my point of view has broadened beyond my own narrow definitions. As a youth, I was growing up in a country struggling with a very unpopular war and that seemed to have no idea how to reconcile that with the sacrifice young men and women were making far overseas in our name. As I watched the Memorial Day parade in my 20’s, I admit that I didn’t connect the men at the front of the procession in their once well-fitted uniforms with their compatriots’ sacrifice through the years. I was the son of a World War II veteran and the friend and relative of several others who served in Korea and Viet Nam, but by the fortune of time, I did not face the option of national service myself. But as I grew older, the realization strengthened in me that they occupied a strata of humankind that deserved my highest level of respect. Whether or not you agreed with the reason a conflict started or intensified, the sacrifice others made for each of us was undeniable. Perhaps the fact that most cemented my growing respect for these individuals was that I was named after my mother’s cousin, who died in the service during World War II and is buried in France. In some small way he lives in me, and I am proud to bear witness to his legacy.

So when that parade comes my way each year, I stand and I applaud the folks up front, and I forget my aches and pains and disappointments and frustrations, and I say a quiet thanks for my cousin and all his fellow soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice.