Growing up, percussionist and composer Paul Frucht thought every town in Connecticut had its own version of the Danbury Music Centre.
“I just thought, ‘OK, this is the Danbury Music Centre. There’s probably a Wilton Music Centre, a Ridgefield Music Centre. … Every town in America has one,'” he says.
Not so. The nonprofit, which was founded in 1935, attracts aspiring musicians of all ages. There are three different orchestras, a chorus, a madrigal singing group and a long-running Nutcracker ballet production. The Centre stages public concerts (most of which are free), relies on membership fees, individual grants and donations to survive, and doesn’t offer private lessons.
“Some people describe it as church without the religion,” says Executive Director Mary E. Larew. “It’s about the fellowship of making music together.”
There’s another reason the Danbury Music Centre stands out: the weeklong Charles Ives Concert Series, which kicks off Aug. 6 and stretches across four intimate chamber music recitals in various locations.
Concerts include “Folk Music in the Era of Ives” (Sunday, Aug. 6, 3 p.m. at a private home in Ridgefield); “Enduring Traditions” (Tuesday, Aug. 8, 7 p.m., Danbury Music Centre); “Harmony” (Thursday, Aug. 10, 7 p.m. CityCenter Green on Ives Street); and “The Ives Legacy: Today’s American Music” (Saturday, Aug. 12, 7 p.m., Danbury Music Centre). They’re all free and open to the public.
Calling it the Chamber Music Initiative, Frucht, its artistic director, Larew and associate director Barbara Adams Jaeger launched the series in 2015, luring recent conservatory graduates and emerging artists from New York to Danbury to lead chamber music rehearsals, masterclasses, lessons and concerts with community musicians.
The hunch paid off.
“I’d never seen such enthusiastic audiences for concerts of modern music,” Larew says. “Teenagers were going crazy for it. Older folks who come to our concerts of Beethoven and Mozart were loving it, too. I don’t know what their expectations were, but they came with an openness. At the end, they loved music they didn’t know they could love.”
One concert, “Charles Ives and His Living Legacy,” programmed the music of the modernist composer and Danbury resident, whose house Frucht often passed on his way to middle school, along music by living American composers. “We did that for a couple of years,” Frucht says. “That seemed to work really well thematically.”
It soon became clear that Ives’ holistic philosophy of music was informing the entire week.
“It wasn’t just about the music of Ives. There’s an interaction with aspiring musicians, which is very Ives-ian.”
Ives (1874-1954) died more than a half-century ago, but his music still sounds futuristic, with clashing, dissonant textures, extreme dynamic shifts and novel approaches to musical form. It’s generally lacking in the sort of shiny, attractive surface that might draw curious listeners toward Mozart or Beethoven.
Larew sees an opportunity there. “I think there’s a lot of fear about music that might be dissonant or something we’re not used to hearing,” she says. “There’s fear and resistance if you’re not comfortable with it. I think this series makes people feel welcome and comfortable. Once they let their guard down, they realize there’s all this music out there that they’ve never heard before, that they actually love. Any time in life when you can have your mind and your experience opened to more things that you enjoy, it’s a wonderful thing. This is one of those opportunities.”
To rename the series, the directors approached the Charles Ives Society, who in turn consulted the American Academy of Arts and Letters and BMI for permission. Frucht, Larew and Jaeger, in a sense, were seeking an official blessing.
“It crystallized the artistic philosophy and programming of the series, which is obviously about the music of Ives, the music of living composers and also music that is polystylistic in nature, which really, in America, can be traced back to Charles Ives,” Frucht says.
Each concert is thematically tied to Ives. (“Harmony,” on Aug. 10, has a double-meaning: Ives’ wife was named Harmony, and the concert celebrates the idea of people playing music together.)
The idea, Frucht says, is to “create a narrative for a concert through contemporary works that create a narrative, so that the audience is brought in and meant to understand there’s a thread that runs all the way through.”
The concerts also present a fairly loose definition of polystylism; “Harmony,” which features guest artists Peter Dugan on piano and violinist Charles Yang, mingles original compositions with the music of the Beatles, and also works in participants in the Danbury Music Centre’s educational programming arm.
“These are devoted musicians from the area who get to collaborate with these world-class musicians,” Larew says. “It’s representing Danbury and surrounding towns: who’s making music today and right here?”
The artist-faculty roster for Ives week includes Isabel Hagen, viola; Hannah Ji, violin and viola; Ben Laude, piano; Mitchell Lyon, cello; Ariana Nelson, cello; Mika Sasaki, piano; Jacob Shack, viola; Caeli Smith, violin and viola; and Chelsea Starbuck Smith, violin. Max Grafe is a featured composer.
In addition to Dugan and Yang, guest artists Simon Boyar (percussion), Marika Bournaki (piano) and Julian Schwarz (cello) will all perform. Justin Dello Joio, the Ives Series composer-in-residence, will work with four budding composition students, who’ve all written works to be read and professionally recorded by the artist faculty.
To boost funding, Frucht and Larew launched an IndieGoGo campaign; two weeks after it went live, they’d raised $1,500 of an intended $5,000 goal.
“It’s a way to build a nest egg to allow us to plan effectively for the next few years, maybe to commission a new work, depending on how much we raise,” Frucht says.
Ives’ philosophy, as Frucht sees it, means presenting music that’s “wholly reflective of the community and the cultures that make up that community, whether that’s really wide-ranging, all of America or just very New England-based. Contemporary music needs to feel tied to American life. It needs to reflect our experiences. Ives’ music so deeply reflects the lives of people who lived during that time.”
Today that involves tying together Taylor Swift, Kanye West or concert music by Esa-Pekka Salonen.
“This is all music written right now. It’s a reflection of all of us. It’s about imparting that onto our audience and making them feel brought in, and also showing them: Hey, this all started right here.”
CHARLES IVES CONCERTS SERIES runs from Aug. 6 to 12 at the Danbury Music Centre and other locations. Admission is free. danburymusiccentre.org.
