Boston Foundation Awards $50,000 for New Adult Education Program...

Cantata Singers may be best known for their breathtaking performances and highly acclaimed commissions, but our education and community outreach programs are abuzz with activity as well — and receiving rave reviews! So much so, in fact, that the prestigious Boston Foundation Arts Fund awarded a $50,000 grant to support our new Adult Outreach and Community programs. This highly competitive grant represents a very large feather in the Cantata Singers’ collective cap. Many thanks to The Boston Foundation for its wonderfully generous support!

While Adult Outreach has always been an important component of our audience development programs, Cantata Singers has stepped up such efforts for the 2001-2002 season. This new Adult Outreach program focuses upon the performance of Donald Sur’s Slavery Documents and the world premiere of T.J. Anderson’s Slavery Documents 2 – the Cantata Singers’ latest commission. Lectures and discussions – all of which will have a musical performance component – will delve deeply into the ideas and issues intrinsic to the Slavery Documents program, as well as explore the pieces themselves.

Four lectures form the core of this new program. Respected African American history scholar Robert Hayden kicks off the series on February 3 with a lecture focusing on Boston’s role in both freedom and slavery during the antebellum period of the American Civil War. David Hoose continues the series on February — with a lecture/discussion on the five-year composition and research project that ultimately became Donald Sur’s Slavery Documents. Specific topics will include the genesis of the work; Donald Sur’s explanation of why the plight of African slaves resonated so profoundly with a Korean American; and the struggle, passion and creative genius behind this monumental oratorio.

On February 26, T.J. Anderson will deliver a lecture at the Boston Public Library, hosted by The Boston Athenaeum and The Partnership, an organization of African American professionals in the Boston area. Mr. Anderson’s lecture focuses on the classical composer’s role in 21st century America. He will also deliver the pre-concert lecture at Symphony Hall before the world premiere of his Slavery Documents 2.

In addition to these structured lectures, Mr. Anderson will be available for an informal discussion/compositional workshop before the February 24 Cantata Singers Chamber Series Family concert, I, Too, Sing America, – a song recital exploring the influence of the African American experience on spirituals, gospel, art song, and poetry. This performance will include works of African American composers and poets Stephen Foster, Margaret Bonds, William Grant Still, and Langston Hughes. During the concert, the Chamber Series Music Director Kayo Iwama will also explain the musical and historical significance of each selection.

Surely, this is a must-hear series! Please click here for a listing of event dates and locations. For further information about our Community Outreach programs, contact Jennifer Hunter, Community Partnerships Coordinator, at (617) 267-6502, or jhunter@cantatasingers.org.

The Boston Foundation’s Arts Fund is a permanent endowment that provides funds to support projects and organizations that like artists, institutions, and communities in collaborative relationships to expand, deepen, and diversify cultural participation.

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...And Mabel Louise Riley Foundation Awards $50,000 for Classroom Cantatas

The Riley Foundation has, once again, provided a tremendous boost to Cantata Singers’ community efforts by awarding $50,000 for our "Classroom Cantatas" program. This foundation funded the Cantata Singers’ very first outreach program that accompanied the premiere of Sur’s Slavery Documents and involved 200 students from the Boston Public Schools. Since then, this extraordinary program has given thousands of inner-city schoolchildren an entirely new way to approach music: on their own terms, marching to their own beat. As creators and participants, they compose and perform their very own cantata under the guidance of professional singers and composers.

At the core of this program is the abiding sentiment that human beings often find their world transformed the moment they discover their own innate ability to create. However, in an age when the art of music-making has taken a backseat to record sales and slick marketing efforts, students are bombarded with products to buy, rather than experiences to share. Classroom Cantatas offers the students a safe, creative way to channel and express their emotions—that may range from rage to exhilaration—and gives them a sense of well-being and hope in an uncertain world.

Classroom Cantatas is a highly successful model of collaboration and music education that addresses this need for constructive, creative expression. The format is simple yet compelling: students in the elementary, middle and high school levels work with classroom teachers and Classroom Cantatas composers and singers to write poetry and prose that express both their individual and group reaction to their math, social studies or history subject matter. With the help of composers and singers, they then compose music to those words on subjects ranging from water conservation, to bravery in the context of war, to slavery.

In the decade since the program’s inception, we have found that using music to enhance classroom study is a deeply effective tool for learning and providing what educators call "teachable moments" – those powerful moments when the entire class converges upon a topic, listens intently, and participates vigorously in its discussion. These teachable moments are what Classroom Cantatas is all about. By the end of the 12-session residency, students with little or no prior musical background have composed and performed their own songs for an audience of students, teachers, parents, and community members. And in the end, they’ve also memorized and internalized their math, social studies and history lessons through hands-on activity!

This terrifically generous grant from the Riley Foundation has enabled us to expand Classroom Cantatas from three in-school residency programs to five, and develop a chorus enrichment program at the Boston Arts Academy. The more students and teachers we reach, the more families we reach, to whom we offer free concert tickets to our critically acclaimed performances. And, unlike most other enrichment programs, Classroom Cantatas is free of charge to our partner schools.

In addition to the Riley Foundation, Classroom Cantatas is supported, in part, by grants from the Boston Cultural Council (a municipal agency supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency); The Chase Foundation; Harvard Musical Association; New England Biolabs Foundation; The Parthenon Capital Foundation; A.C. Ratshesky Foundation; and State Street Corporation Global Philanthropy Program.

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