From left -- violist Rebecca Strauss, composer Danielle Williams, violinist Julie Leven, and myself. We presented each shelter with a score of their composition. Last year I wrote about the composition workshops that Shelter Music Boston brought into homeless shelters. Each shelter created a wealth of musical ideas, and we gathered those ideas -- as well as beautiful poems and comments from the guests -- and sent them to composers to commission chamber works.
This year we returned to the shelters to perform these works, now grouped into a suite called “Water For My Soul.”
When I started preparing the music, I immediately started smiling. Danielle Williams composed “Shells From the Sea” for baritone voice, viola, marimba, and cello. The first melody, sung stunningly by baritone RaShaun Campbell, was the melody the women at the Dimock Center had composed with violist Rebecca Strauss and me last June. More importantly, I remembered they loved their melody so much they all left singing it together.
Later in her piece, Danielle wrote a little fugue between myself, the viola, and the cello (played beautifully by Javier Caballero). In that fugue was a melody we had begun writing with a shelter in Lowell and had presented down to the Pine Street Women’s Inn to complete. When we played the first part of the melody, a woman at Pine Street immediately started singing a second part to the melody, essentially finishing its sentence. To hear that melody finalized as a fugue was the perfect treatment to a melodic line composed across the city by different shelter guests!
This year we returned to the shelters to perform these works, now grouped into a suite called “Water For My Soul.”
When I started preparing the music, I immediately started smiling. Danielle Williams composed “Shells From the Sea” for baritone voice, viola, marimba, and cello. The first melody, sung stunningly by baritone RaShaun Campbell, was the melody the women at the Dimock Center had composed with violist Rebecca Strauss and me last June. More importantly, I remembered they loved their melody so much they all left singing it together.
Later in her piece, Danielle wrote a little fugue between myself, the viola, and the cello (played beautifully by Javier Caballero). In that fugue was a melody we had begun writing with a shelter in Lowell and had presented down to the Pine Street Women’s Inn to complete. When we played the first part of the melody, a woman at Pine Street immediately started singing a second part to the melody, essentially finishing its sentence. To hear that melody finalized as a fugue was the perfect treatment to a melodic line composed across the city by different shelter guests!
