Past Residencies
Quad City / Alaska / Duluth / Des Moines / Fargo-Moorhead / Albuquerque / South Dakota / Vermont / Montana / Winston-Salem / Elgin / Mobile
Mobile, Alabama: 31 March - 5 April 2009
In the first week of April 2009, Midori visited the Gulf Coast of Alabama for an Orchestra Residency with the Mobile Symphony and Youth Orchestra. One of the foremost goals of the residency was to bring classical music to the forefront of local attention. The first event of the week was the City Council meeting, where Mobile Mayor Samuel T. Jones proclaimed it to be "Midori Week" and presented Midori with a key to the city.
Midori and her student Moni Simeonov (see his essay below) performed as a duo and worked with students of all ages in local schools, providing insight in how to improve their playing abilities and encouraging them to embrace music in their lives. This point was further emphasized by Moni's presentation about his own musical background, which he gave to local elementary school principals as well as to the youth orchestra members. MSO friends, Board and concert sponsors were all treated to intimate personalized events with Midori.
The Youth Orchestra gave the first concert of the week, with Midori as soloist in the first movement of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. Conducted by Robert Seebacher, the program also included works by Berlioz, Vaughan Williams, Elgar, and Beethoven. Maestro Seebacher called it the "pinnacle performance" by the orchestra. At the end of the week, Midori performed the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Mobile Symphony and Music Director Scott Speck, making for a mighty musical finale to the residency.
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Photo by Ben Harper.
Moni Simeonov studies with Midori at the Thornton School of Music at USC. In Spring 2009, he accompanied Midori to Mobile to participate and assist in ORP activities. Moni contributed this essay about his experience.
The red eye flight felt much shorter than the itinerary predicted and just an hour after dawn, Midori and I picked up our suitcases at a station below the right wing of the airplane. The air was damp and the sky was heavily overcast - a refreshing departure from the usual morning in LA.
Sarah Wright, the Education Director of the Mobile Symphony Orchestra, greeted us and while going over the daily schedule, helped us secure our instruments on the back seat of her car. Midori was returning a few minutes worth of voice messages that had accumulated over the past hours, as Sarah gave me a brief summary of Mobile, its musical tradition, and the current developments.
Our first stop was City Hall. Mayor Sam Jones and his team were expecting us. The Mayor presented Midori with a Key to the City and since there were a few minutes until the weekly televised Council Meeting, he had a chance to share with Midori his vision of Mobile and the increasing importance of the music programs in schools across the city.
Before introducing Midori at the Council Meeting, Mayor Jones announced the beginning of *the Midori Week in Mobile*. This residency was long-expected and not only by musicians and regular concert-goers. I was pleasantly surprised to see a few busloads of high-school students entering the meeting. They listened attentively and many took notes.
During the following few hours we met with the Board of Directors of the Mobile Symphony Orchestra at the beautiful home of Dr. Bree Hayes, chair of the Board; gave an interview for Mr. Thomas Harrison and the Press Register newspaper, and at last had the chance to open our violin cases for the first time after the flight.
Upon entering our base - the Larkins Music Center, I realized how efficient of a team Ms. Sarah Wright had assembled. Everyone in the Music Center felt fortunate to be working there, and that benevolent chemistry helped keep the flow of information uninterrupted. With the ORP running at full speed, the staff had to put on hold their usual duties at the Mobile Symphony as well their normal scheduling and oversight of most of the private and chamber music lessons taking place in Mobile.
Taiwanese-born conductor and Mobile Symphony cellist Guo Sheng was one of the people Sarah had recently recruited to the ORP team. We got to see him conduct a small string orchestra that trains musicians in the skills of ensemble playing, and prepares them to enter the Mobile Youth Symphony. The kids were ten to twelve years of age, but their straight postures and sharp attention would suggest much older players. After Midori helped with a few instructions in Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus, she and I played amongst them for a run-through of the piece. We didn't say much more than a few inspirational words, but the smiles on the students' faces helped them play so much better together.
Later we visited the Rockwell Elementary school. I was immediately taken by all the beautiful paintings and sculptures around the hallways and in classrooms. As Sarah told us later, teachers make it their goal to involve the arts in every subject. Whether students are learning about a new animal or country, they complete individual art projects with the particular topic in mind. These same students and their teachers were waiting for our arrival in the large gymnasium. I wish every musician gets the chance to perform before such an audience. They were so exuberant after Midori and I were done playing, and all two hundred students waited politely between movements.
Over the course of the next few days, we got to hear and work with a few more ensembles, we played for some really excited audiences, and met the people who had paved a very difficult road and made it possible for music to become so easily accessible to every citizen of Mobile. One of Sarah's recruits on the ORP team was a terrific Chinese-born violinist by the name of Enen Yu. She is not only the Assistant Concertmaster of the Mobile Symphony, but also gives lessons to the more advanced students and directs a few of the ensembles. When she first met Midori, her voice was shaking with excitement. She told us later that she grew up listening to Midori`s recordings and had been waiting for this day since she was a little child. Enen Yu, Guo Sheng, and many other musicians from the Mobile Symphony Orchestra serve as role models to the aspiring musicians from the Youth Symphony and the other ensembles by teaching, performing, and simply being present. I was fortunate to find a free hour and read a few string quartets with them. Their energy and musicianship was undoubtedly at a world-class level.
Music Education and Performance in Mobile have been made much more personal than almost anywhere I have experienced them. Relationships between teachers, students, parents, performers, and volunteers seem strikingly family-like, which in turn helped the response to every instruction or musical phrase become immediate and genuine. This is exactly how a family with no background in classical music can grow to love it without the knowledge about the history and theory behind the repertoire, or the names of performers and the top symphony orchestras. It is impossible to paste this culture into the metropolitan environments of Los Angeles or New York, but I wish that more of my colleagues were able to experience it. The status of classical music in some large cities has been elevated to where the cost is now out of reach for many. It is the musicians' responsibility to keep their art in plain sight and let it speak with its own power. Being a part of Mobile's music community for a few days, I saw just how uncomplicated and natural this could be.
In Mobile, I got to know a lot of interesting people. Among them were Deans of the University of South Alabama; Mobile city officials; students' parents who knew more facts about classical music than some professional musicians; a Japanese exchange student who recently enrolled in the Film Scoring program right here at USC, a Bulgarian girl who went to school with a lot of my long-lost childhood friends; and of course, the woman who was most instrumental in developing the arts education programs in Mobile and found a way to get a whole city excited about its Symphony and Youth orchestras - Sarah Wright.
A few minutes before our departure the boy who was checking our suitcases paused while he was printing Midori's tag. He looked at her, then back at the tag, and blushed. He asked if he could take a picture with her. With that, we boarded our long flight back to Los Angeles, energetic about what we had observed and experienced during the week in Mobile, Alabama.