Marcia Wood, here with Trenton Community Music School students Kiarah Valverde, left, and Zyveonia McClees, says that music is fundamental to all learning.
Editor’s Note: When Trenton Community Music School founder Marcia Wood announced her retirement after 15 years of service, she decided to share the story of a school that started with a hope and now shifts its focus from one-on-one individual instrumental lessons to partnerships with public and private schools.
While Wood calls the piece “Memories,” it is also a story that gives a voice to others who share a similar love of art and community. With their life lessons, her thoughts serve as a primer for making the capital city a better and more caring place.
By Marcia Wood
I remember the afternoon I first thought about creating a community music school for Trenton children and youth. It was 1998 and I was a volunteer driving a rickety church van around the streets of the city, picking up choir members of the Trenton Children’s Chorus (TCC) which I had helped to start eight years previously along with Sue Ellen Page. It was Tuesday and I needed to get them to rehearsal. I became aware of how few children were climbing into my van and how many were on the sidewalks or sitting on doorsteps. I said to myself — and I said over the ensuing years to others who asked me how I had decided to start a music school: “I got tired of driving past 300 children to pick up the 30 in the chorus. Surely I could do something more.”
It seemed to me that the chorus could get along without me, and indeed, the TCC grew and developed in new and wonderful ways which I could not have imagined; it is still growing and thriving today, and celebrating its 25th anniversary.
Lesson No. 1: Retiring and getting out of the way of fresh energy and ideas is a good thing for an organization.
I grew up in Princeton and graduated from Princeton High School in 1961. My dad taught religion at Princeton University; my mother played the piano (she had a masters in music from Yale) and was a homemaker. The older I get the more I realize that I breathed in their influence without really being aware of it, and it made me the person who felt “called” to do something worthwhile for music, kids, and Trenton.
In the 1950s Trenton was an enticing place to a provincial Princeton kid. It was where we shopped at Sears & Roebuck for back-to-school clothes; it was where Randolph Scott westerns played in the movie theaters; it was where we took class trips to the serious State House and the glamorous War Memorial. Anyone who lived through those days has a deep nostalgia for them.
Musical talent I inherited from my mother. My father sang lustily but out of tune. It was my dad’s sense of a purpose-filled life that taught me the rewards of service to others. I was fortunate to sing in the PHS Choir under Thomas Hilbish, which was a life-changing experience.
Later I graduated from Westminster Choir College with a masters of voice pedagogy and performance. The first person I turned to as I began to explore the idea of a music school in Trenton was Scott Hoerl, the director of the Westminster Conservatory. He was so encouraging of the idea, and so dismissive of my reservations, that he should claim part of the credit for the existence of the school.
Lesson No. 2: No, you don’t need a degree in arts administration; no, you don’t need to be a fundraising professional — just do it. And so I did.
I was joined by Ellen Saxon, who overheard me talking about the tantalizing possibility and asked if she could help. We hired teachers of piano, drums, woodwinds, and voice, and in September 1999, TCMS opened its doors with 27 students, eventually offering instrumental lessons in afternoon and evening sessions, in schools during the weekdays and sometimes on Saturdays.
Over the next months, the school quickly grew to 54 students, and then lost its lease (which was in a parochial school that closed its doors). Little did we know at the time, that was only the beginning of a long string of exhausting moves from one location to the next — which led my husband to dub TCMS the “hermit crab music school.”
Settling next into Holland Middle School, the school grew to 200 students, open three days a week and on Saturdays. But in 2004 the number of students plateaued at 200 and did not increase for the first time in our history. This was puzzling. For the next three years, although some students stopped taking lessons and others enrolled for the first time, the actual number of students did not increase.
With a grant from the New Jersey Cultural Trust, TCMS hired a market researcher to determine if the school could grow to be a 600 student school — a number that the experience of other community music schools showed could keep a building, and a teaching staff, and an administrative staff, occupied six days a week. A home of our own was a dream! However, it turned out that the market for individual music lessons in Trenton was not strong enough for TCMS to expect to grow much bigger than the 200 students we had already acquired. This was very hard news to hear.
That’s not all. Once again, the hermit crab had to find a new shell, as Holland Middle School was needed for a branch high school. Relocating across town, to a former parochial school on Grant Street, kept TCMS open for business, but decimated the student population. To our surprise, the majority of students did not re-enroll at our new location.
Meanwhile, after one year, we lost the lease again! and moved to the Emily Fisher Charter School on Chambers Street. Soon afterwards, we were forced to shift to the church basement of Blessed Sacrament Church on Bellevue Avenue, and after several more years to the Ewing Presbyterian Church on Scotch Road, and then finally creeping gratefully into the shell of the Foundation Academy Charter School on West State Street, where the school is currently located.
Lesson No. 3: Nothing goes according to plan! Remain flexible!
Almost from the moment TCMS opened its doors, another opportunity to deliver our mission of “providing high quality, accessible, and affordable music instruction” arrived on our doorstep. Schools contacted us asking “what can you do for us?” As our first community partnership, we provided a classroom music teacher for the Trenton Community Charter School. Next we taught drumming for the Trenton Public Schools in their “21st Century” afterschool program.
Then, when the New Jersey Supreme Court decided in the Abbott case that 31 school districts in the state (including Trenton) must provide preschool education, we were in the right place at the right time to make sure that those preschools included music in their curriculum.
Ronnie Ragen joined the administrative staff of TCMS to oversee all the community partnership programs of the school, and to develop a preschool childhood music program, created in collaboration with Music Together of Hopewell. The “Music for the Very Young: Music, Movement and Literacy”(MVY) program that TCMS has provided for 15 years to preschool children in Trenton and Ewing has been hugely successful, both for the music school and for the families involved.
We like to joke that we can walk up to any high school student in Trenton and start singing the MVY “Hello” song and they will join` in. (This has happened more than once.) To date MVY has educated thousands of 3 and 4-year-olds across the city, and at the Katzenbach School for the Deaf; has provided professional training to over 200 preschool classroom teachers as they learn to incorporate musical activities into their daily routine; and has encouraged parents of preschoolers to get involved in their child’s early education. Our goal for MVY is to build music education into the fabric of Trenton’s pre-schools in order to ensure the district’s youngest children have the social and academic benefits inherent in high quality music education.
TCMS is fortunate that there is funding available for early childhood music education; this is because of the shared conviction, supported by neurological and pedagogical research, that music is fundamental to all learning. Just as we all learned our ABCs to a musical pattern, children learn easily when music and rhythmic movement are part of their daily routine. MVY was funded for three years by a federal research grant from the Department of Education, and continues to be funded in Trenton preschools by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, PNC Bank’s “Grow up Great” initiative, Nordson Inc., the Albin Family Foundation, and private contributions.
Lesson No. 4: Mission stays strong, but visions can and should change.
This seems an appropriate place to pause and reflect, as I have often said in astonishment: “At first, I just thought I was going to teach 8-year-olds to play the piano. Nobody told me I was starting a small business.” It might have been smarter to begin with a business degree! Everything I needed to know about payroll, invoices, bookkeeping, contracts, and so on, I had to learn as the school grew and changed. Importantly, I also discovered that a nonprofit is a different animal. The legal and financial requirements, the state and federal oversight, as well as the constant fundraising, were a revelation, and have only gotten more complex over the past 15 years. Fortunately, nobody told me I was starting a small business, because I might not have pursued my passion.
It seems obvious that the community partnership programs are the core of the music school. Although we continued to offer individual lessons through the years, we were reaching so many more families by teaching classes and by traveling to where the children were, rather than sitting and waiting for them to come to us, one at a time. When we compared the two halves of TCMS — classroom music we could provide free (i.e., grant-funded) on one hand and individual music lessons (which we subsidized to keep tuition costs affordable) on the other — the future direction of TCMS seemed pretty clear. But a focus on preschool alone was too narrow for our mission. What about K-12?
A solution has recently presented itself in the form of a music program that is sweeping the country, known as El Sistema. Created 40 years ago in the barrios of Venezuela, El Sistema is more than music education; simply teaching an instrument to any child of any age without regard to talent or experience, and placing them immediately in an ensemble where they perform with their peers, has proved life-changing. El Sistema now reaches over 400,000 children and youth in Venezuela alone, and millions around the world, as other countries are embracing “the system.”
Arts education in this country is less available to children with the most need. Access to music learning and performance is important for every child, but especially for poor children. El Sistema was born among these children. Its founder knew all about the poverty, the gang influence, the dropout rate, the chaotic lives of the students, but really believed that El Sistema was the solution. He calls it “social justice through music,” not just a music program, but a means of improving school engagement, fostering social bonds, preventing gang involvement, and closing the achievement gap. The most famous graduate of El Sistema — Venezuela is Gustavo Dudamel, currently the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Fortunately, the Trenton Public School District is currently led by a board, a superintendent, Francisco Duran, and a supervisor of fine and performing arts, Norberto Diaz, who agree that arts education is absolutely essential to improve the education they are offering. Working in partnership with the school district, TCMS is currently trying out an El Sistema-Trenton pilot project in one elementary school in Trenton, meeting third and fourth graders afterschool three days a week and teaching them how to play the violin.
Our goal is to spread across the city, growing organically, one grade level, one school, one additional instrument at a time, until we change schools into rich musical environments and change students’ lives.
This is the future which is calling TCMS. And once again, it is time for fresh energy and new ideas to propel the music school forward. As I retire and pass the baton to whoever will be the next CEO, it couldn’t be a more exciting time for the school; and maybe, my successor will have a business degree as well!
As for myself, I anticipate that another challenge will call to me. A recent edition of AARP magazine reports that people working into their 70s, 80s, and beyond are the hottest demographic in the labor market, so I’ll have a lot of company.
Lesson No. 5: You’re never too old to change your tune.
Artworks Hosting Visiting Artists throughout May
The Princeton-area based arts group Movis takes up residence at Artworks in Trenton with a new exhibition running May 6 through June 13.
The show “Maverick Parallels” uses a wide variety of medium including handmade paper, paint, photography, bronze, sound pieces, video, and more.
Movis is a group of well established Central New Jersey artists who began meeting weekly in 2006 to ideas and develop art projects. The core members are John Goodyear, Margaret Kennard Johnson, Susan Hockaday, Berendina Buist, Marsha Levin-Rojer, Eve Ingalls, Frank Magalhaes, and Rita Asch.
The exhibition includes guest artists Dana Stewart, whose carefully positioned animal sculptures create strong visual parallels; Jim Perry, whose tall wood totems gracefully and elegantly carry the parallel concept vertically from floor to ceiling; and Jerry Hirniak, whose photographic assemblages and video presentation offer parallel views of an historic 10 day period involving the civil rights movement.
An opening reception is set for Saturday, May 9, 6 to 8 p.m. Admission is free.
Also on view in the Community Gallery is Art Par Excellence, a statewide touring art exhibition sponsored by Very Special Arts of New Jersey and featuring two dimensional artwork by students through age 21 with disabilities.
Artworks is located at 19 Everett Alley, Trenton, for hours and more information call (609) 394-9436 or visit artworkstrenton.org.
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