Community Music School Celebrates 10 Years

The Community Music School (CMS) at the Oberlin Conservatory will present a “Mega Musical Mash-up: A Festival of Community Music” on June 2. It will be the culminating event in a series of ten concerts and musical events put on to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the CMS.

The event will include performances by a variety of ensembles from Oberlin, including the Community Music School, the Oberlin Choristers, the Oberlin High School Concert Choir, and many others. There will also be family-friendly participatory music-making activities, such as a chance to make your own instrument, the opportunity to try your own hand at playing an instrument in the instrument petting zoo, and free ice cream. This free event will be from 3:00 pm to 5:30 p.m. in Tappan Square (or Warner Concert Hall if it rains) and is open to the public.

The Community Music School, recently selected as Lorain County’s “Best Music Instruction” by Pulse magazine, serves as a major outreach program for the conservatory, and is successful partly due to its accessibility. Music lessons can be quite expensive, but at the CMS students can get scholarships to fund their lessons and lending programs help students obtain instruments. The school has expanded greatly from its start with a few dozen students in 2002. About 240 students now receive instruction from 20 professional teachers from the Oberlin area.

For the 2013-14 year, the Community Music School plans to add adult chamber music instruction to its program. Also in the fall, the school is planning to begin a class on technology in music for middle school and high school students, especially geared toward girls. Students would learn electronic composition and how to use synthesizers, microphones, and mixing techniques in cooperation with Oberlin Conservatory’s TIMARA department and professor Tom Lopez. On similar lines, the school is exploring the option of creating a radio DJ workshop in collaboration with WOBC.

All of this is made possible in part by the valuable support the CMS has received from the Kulas Foundation and the Nord Foundation. In addition, this coming year, an anonymous donor will match contributions to the CMS up to $7,500 with the goal of reaching this amount by May 2014.

In addition to the focus on outreach and accessibility, the Community Music School is committed to “music as a vehicle of social activism,” as director Louise Zeitlin describes it—using the social connections provided by music and music education to work for the benefit of society. This year’s program raised money to support local service organizations, and in previous years the school has supported such worthy causes as tsunami relief in Japan, Harvest for Hunger and earthquake relief in Haiti. At the Mega Musical Mash-up, the CMS will ask for donations to aid Oberlin Community Services.

For more information about the Community Music School, visit the school’s webpage.