Urban Strings to hit road in honor of anniversary
The Urban Strings Columbus Youth Orchestra plans to celebrate its 10th anniversary in a big way.
On Saturday, 26 AfricanAmerican musicians (along with about two dozen family members and friends) will board a bus and head south.
The violinists, violists, cellists and bass players ages 8 to 17 will spend a week touring and performing in Atlanta; New Orleans; and Huntsville and Birmingham, Alabama — where they will play traditional classical works and music by AfricanAmerican composers and artists.
The group, founded in 2007 by longtime central Ohio volunteer Catherine Willis, encourages underprivileged urban youths to perform orchestral music, with an African-American emphasis, on string instruments.
“This orchestra brings another face and viewpoint as to what music can be,” said 17-year-old Drew Collins, an accomplished double bass player for Urban Strings. “The African-American aspect of the music is very important to me. It’s so interesting to perform new takes on music.”
Much of the orchestra’s repertoire blends classical and contemporary, such as “Mozart Meets Miles,” a catchy merger of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik with Miles Davis jazz — a piece arranged by the orchestra's director, Stephen Spottswood.
Willis, a retired kindergarten teacher who has never
played a string instrument, conceived of Urban Strings when she was a volunteer at Champion Middle School, where she observed the strings-instruction program.
“It was one of the lowestperforming schools in Ohio, but it had a strings program,” she said.
Since its founding, Urban Strings has required that children have at least a year of lessons — typically acquired in a public-school program — and have an interest in performing with an ensemble. Willis promoted the group through word of mouth and a website.
Today, the orchestra consists of about 40 young musicians who rehearse three Saturdays a month at the Mount Vernon Avenue AME Church (a benefactor of the orchestra) and perform more than 30 concerts or outreach performances a year.
Spottswood and Atlanta resident David Robinson lead the group, which performed last summer in Washington, D.C.
In the early days of Urban Strings, Willis met Robinson in Atlanta — where she
discovered the Still Waters Sinfo-nia Youth Orchestra, a largely African-American group that Robinson founded and directs. She asked him for help with Urban Strings.
The energetic Robinson — who leads the Urban Strings summer camp and helped Willis arrange this trip — conducted several of the works at the recent concert, supplying context about the African-American composers and artists represented.
“We have to have more people of color in orchestras,” he said.
According to the League of American Orchestras, fewer than 5 percent of American orchestra musicians are of black or Latino descent. The Columbus Symphony, like many other orchestras nationwide, has no AfricanAmerican musicians.
Urban Strings, with an annual budget of about $65,000, is supported by grants, corporate and private contributions, and fundraisers. The musicians and their parents helped fund the trip through candy sales and other fundraisers.
In the decade since its founding, more than 50 students have played with the orchestra. Many of them, including Collins, play with other area groups, including the Columbus Symphony youth orchestras.
But he and others say that Urban Strings fills an important musical niche.
“It gives an aspect of music that we don’t usually see in our schools, where it’s all Western classical music,” said Joelius Porter, 17, a recent graduate of St. Charles Preparatory School, who has played the violin with Urban Strings for six years.
“This orchestra exposes you to a whole other side of the culture.”