Ohio students are giving a piece of their minds to the state’s three biggest orchestras.
The Columbus Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra teamed up with composer Brian Raphael Nabors and the Mindful Music Moments program to perform a four-part work inspired by students in the program beginning this month.
Mindful Music Moments, a K-12 school program started in 2016 by wellness nonprofit organization The Well, seeks to provide students, teachers and administrators a daily moment to practice mindfulness techniques and listen to world-class music supplemented by local performing arts organizations, says Stacy Sims, founder and director of The Well.
“Schools are very aware of what children need in order to feel better, to be more connected to themselves and to the learning opportunities. But the demands on a school day are intense,” Sims says. “Mindful Music provides powerful, social-emotional content daily without having to stress out an already busy system.”
A new piece of music is presented each week and is repeated for five days with a new mindfulness prompt, Sims says. The idea is to play the prompt during morning announcements to connect the entire student body and staff, giving them all the same experience.
“In a perfect world, one person presses a button and the whole school gets to have the same mindful moment together,” she says.
After enduring what has been a difficult school year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Sims says The Well wanted to do something special for the students during their last four weeks of school in May.
Sims brought up the idea of a collaboration between Nabors, a board member for The Well who helps curate the daily playlists, and the three biggest Ohio orchestras. Instead of just presenting the final product to the students, The Well decided it would be better to present them a chance to give feedback.
Nabors says they made a video asking students what they liked about Mindful Music Moments and if they had anything about their particular city that they’d like to hear in the piece.
“It’s been a really incredible experience seeing the spectrum of different thought processes about music and life,” Nabors says. “Most of the younger students say something like, ‘I want something extremely fast and colorful and exciting,’ and then when you get to high school, it’s like, ‘I want something that informs the rock ’n’ roll history of our city or this aspect of where I’m from.’”
Nabors then met with some of the students who sent in ideas and worked to try and represent all of their thoughts in the music. He says he worked on the piece for three weeks, hunkering down for eight to 10 hours a day to complete it.
The piece is a four-part work, with each orchestra having its own individual movement for the first three parts before joining together for the fourth movement. The orchestras performed and filmed its movements from its own respective locations. The recordings are being pieced together to form a short film directed by filmmaker Asa Featherstone, which is set to debut on Facebook on June 10.
Nabors says it was a real joy to be a part of the piece, and he hopes something even bigger can form in the future because of this project.
“To see it come full circle has been a blessing,” Nabors says. “Just to see how music can still invigorate the best out of us in these trying times.”
The four-part work has begun to be shown in participating Mindful Music Moments schools this month. The short film will premiere on the orchestras’ Facebook pages on June 10 at 7 p.m.
Trevor Simpson is an editorial assistant. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
