ACG Blog

Music & Healing: Lullaby Project with Any Baby Can

ACG Music & Healing brings human connection, beauty, and expressivity to individuals facing isolation and challenge, through collaboration with a skilled and trained ACG Artist. These services are available to a wide variety of clients through partnerships with more than a dozen social service providers including hospitals, shelters, residential rehabilitation facilities, parental education and family health organizations, and veterans service providers. Learn more about ACG Music & Healing.

At ACG, we believe in the transformative power of music. Since 2014, we’ve worked with young parents in challenging circumstances to help them write personal songs for their children. To do this, we have partnered with several incredible community organizations, including Any Baby Can.

To help illuminate the power of this work, and our partnership, we’re really pleased to share the reflection below from Any Baby Can Program Supervisor, Kathryn Austin. 

At Any Baby Can, we provide services for low income families that have children at risk of developing a developmental disorder or experiencing the impacts of chronic stress and poverty. We are so grateful for the Lullaby Project for helping our moms find the comfort and joy of raising a baby amidst so many societal barriers and stressors. This program empowers parents through the gift of creativity. Many moms walk into the session not feeling confident about their own ability to write a song or even express themselves creatively at all! However, each artist prioritizes helping the mom feel comfortable and interpreting their words and stories into such meaningful songs. More often than not, the moms leave the experience so surprised at what they have been able to create with the artist who “interprets” their love into something tangible that they can take home. It is through this partnership that moms grow in their confidence of themselves as parents and also in their skill sets to nurture and bond with their babies. The lullaby comforts and calms the infants, but also reflects back to the parents their own strength, creativity, and ability as a parent. Many of our moms become parents unexpectedly and experience a lot of stress around not feeling ready or knowledgeable about how to parent a newborn. The lullaby acts also as a tool for parents lost in the overwhelm of how to comfort their baby! They can always use this special lullaby that brings mom and baby back together when they are feeling disconnected. 

It has been so important for our families to experience these fleeting moments of calm and joy in the hectic process of becoming a parent to a new baby. Seeing moms leave their session with their artist feeling relaxed and so in love with their baby demonstrates this program has a deep impact on families and deserves to be supported financially and promoted nationally. Thank you for your consideration in funding this important project!

 

Kathryn Austin, M.Ed., LPC-S, NCC

Program Supervisor- No Estás Solo Counseling Program

Any Baby Can

Listen to a recent lullaby from this project, Love Will Live In You by Sydney with Daniel here.

by Angelica Campbell

Music & Healing: Water Child by Crea with Arnold Yzaguirre

ACG Music & Healing brings human connection, beauty, and expressivity to individuals facing isolation and challenge, through collaboration with a skilled and trained ACG Artist. These services are available to a wide variety of clients through partnerships with more than a dozen social service providers including hospitals, shelters, residential rehabilitation facilities, parental education and family health organizations, and veterans service providers. Learn more about ACG Music & Healing.

Since 2014 we have partnered with Carnegie Hall to create the Lullaby Project, a collaboration through which our Music & Healing artists are paired with a mom (mostly), in a shelter, hospital, prison, or with a social service partner, to write a personal song for her child or children.

The artist and mom spend hours together, usually over the course of about a month, talking and writing about hopes, dreams, and fears. The resulting ideas are distilled into lyrics, and the song is made.

Water Child was made by Crea with Arnold Yzaguirre as part of the Lullaby Project. Vocals by Crea. Listen below:

https://soundcloud.com/austinclassicalguitar/water-child-by-crea-with-arnold?si=962fa00464754e41b0c90a657c98013f&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

by Angelica Campbell

Music & Healing: Love Will Live In You by Sydney with Daniel Fears

by Angelica Campbell

Music & Healing: Life Never Ends by Liz with Shayna Sands

ACG Music & Healing brings human connection, beauty, and expressivity to individuals facing isolation and challenge, through collaboration with a skilled and trained ACG Artist. These services are available to a wide variety of clients through partnerships with more than a dozen social service providers including hospitals, shelters, residential rehabilitation facilities, parental education and family health organizations, and veterans service providers. Learn more about ACG Music & Healing.

 

One of our Music & Healing artists, Shayna Sands, recently completed a song with a wonderful woman named Liz and we’re so excited to share it with you! 

Shayna shared,

“Life Never Ends formed in an organic way as Liz shared some of her recent findings from her journey. She talked about scenes and moments of revelation; moments of presence that captivated her, and the lessons each experience taught her. I learned so much from Liz’s wisdom and insight. She was inspired and found a talent within herself for the art of song. I am so grateful to have been a part of it and even more thrilled that she sang lead vocals on the recording!”

Listen here:

by Angelica Campbell

New! ACG Music Library at The Rosette

Guitar is the world’s most popular instrument, and the results have been new students engaging in school-based performing arts by the tens of thousands. We learned this year that enrollment in our partner guitar classes is now second only to band amongst all AISD middle and high school music classes. We now have partner teachers in 45 Texas school districts and 40 states. Education has been our largest budget area at ACG since 2004. And it’s all possible thanks to friends like you. So, as we reach the end of another record-breaking school year, we’d like to thank you for helping make it all possible, and thank you for your belief in ACG, and in the power of music to do good in the world. Learn more about ACG Education here. Support ACG Education here. 

Guitarists! ACG is thrilled to announce the opening of our sheet music library at The Rosette. If you’re in Austin, make an appointment to visit and stop by. Wanna know if we have what you’re looking for? Click the link below and try a keyword search. Special thanks to the many donors over the years who have contributed scores to make this resource possible, and extra special thanks to Norma Hawes on our team, our tireless librarian, who has built our database and archived the collection.

https://austinclassicalguitar.org/music-library/

by Angelica Campbell

Notes from Nepal

Guitar Foundation Nepal is made possible thanks to a generous sustaining gift from Rick Reeder at Layer 3 Real Estate, who shares our belief that music can do good in the world. We’re so grateful for our many opportunities to work with teachers near and far who bring their passion into the classroom every day. If you’d like to join Rick and many others as an ACG sustaining donor, click here! Thanks to all our friends who make our programs possible.

 

We received something beautiful from Nepal this morning.

Ravindra is an EMS professional in Kathmandu. For five years his dream has been to work with ACG to create guitar classes for his community. While the pandemic slowed progress, it has been an incredible joy to work beside him as Ravindra has done the hard work to begin his program. He is now President of the newly formed Guitar Foundation Nepal, he’s got a space to teach, and classes began in March.

Today he wrote, “I am teaching ACG’s curriculum to our students at no cost thanks to our partnership. I believe music can be used for social welfare, and I believe this aligns with your vision at ACG.”

Ravindra sent us a video of one of his new classes! They’re playing Kasaya, by our Education Director Travis Marcum. “Kasaya is like a meditation in music with many dimensions,” Ravindra wrote. “It drew our attention immediately. The students were immersed right away. I honestly did not have to teach very much, because of their admiration for the music and the composer. It’s wonderful seeing their confidence build so quickly. When we play it, we don’t want the music to stop.”

Listen to them play here:

by Angelica Campbell

PLAY Finale: A Chat with Matthew Lyons

Join us this Wednesday, April 12 at Soundspace at Captain Quackenbush or Thursday, April 13 at The Rosette for a charming concert dedicated to Home as our PLAY series finale. Matthew Lyons and Stephen Krishnan come together as the MoonTower Duo with James Tabata to bring us new and original works of music that represent life, our home, and our community in its present form. Learn more and find tickets here. 

 

This week we had the chance to connect with a very special friend of ACG and a member of the MoonTower Duo, Matthew Lyons. 

Matthew’s journey with ACG started when he was 11 years old, performing at a student recital. He shared, 

“I remember messing up the end of whatever study I had poorly prepared and compensating for it by ending the piece with an AC/DC lick (and the look of bemusement on Matt Hinsley’s face afterwards). In the 20 years since then, I’ve grown to see ACG as an artistic home and supportive community. I’ve attended countless performances, arranged and composed works for numerous projects, and grown as a musician thanks to the educational and creative opportunities provided by ACG”

Not only is Matthew a beautiful guitar player, he also is a very talented composer! He finds inspiration in bringing joy to his listeners through his music the same way music brings joy to him. 

“I’m obsessed with colorful harmonies, infectious grooves, direct melodies, and the ways in which these elements can interact to stage an emotional journey for the listener. I view performing – especially performing my own music – as attempting to create a space in which an audience can feel connected through their shared experience of (hopefully) enjoying the music.”

Matthew first collaborated with his duo partner, Stephen Krishnan, for the first time in 2019 when Stephen performed a guitar concerto Matthew dedicated to him. Three years later, they reconnected to play duos they had written! Matthew shared,

“I love working with Stephen because he’s an incredibly flexible musician who’s down to experiment to discover new things about the music we play.”

The MoonTower Duo’s upcoming performance as part of our PLAY series finale promises variety. They will stretch the boundaries of what a classical guitar can be, playing a range of styles from delicate jazz waltzes to belligerent Tom Waits-inspired musical thrashings. Their music will showcase different sounds from the soft twinkling of guitar harmonics to resonant depth of the upright bass played by James Tabata!  

“We love stretching the notion of what a classical guitar concert can be, as the music we play is largely written by us or by musicians who aren’t part of the canon.”

by Angelica Campbell

ACG Originals: We've Always Known, Song Descriptions

by Angelica Campbell

From Matt Hinsley: The Space Music Creates

Throughout the month of March we will be shining a light on ACG Music & Healing. On March 25-26, we will present a concert of some of the most memorable songs created by Music & Healing artists and participants over the years. The concert is called We’ve Always Known, and we’ve never done anything like it. We hope you’ll join us! Learn more about ACG Music & Healing here.

In 2014 we were talking with Carnegie Hall. Our work each day in Austin’s Juvenile Justice Center was unique in America – it still is – and they wanted to know more. In the course of our conversations, they mentioned a new pilot they’d started, called Lullaby Project, and they invited us to become one of their first national partners. 

Caseworkers had approached Carnegie Hall for help with a problem. 

New and expecting mothers in two New York maternity shelters and at Rikers Island were facing high levels of stress and anxiety due to trauma and isolation, and it was having negative health outcomes for both mother and baby. The acute medical care and other treatments available in the facilities did not seem to be reaching the social and emotional levels that the caseworkers believed were critical factors.

Could music help?

Carnegie Hall came up with a simple and brilliant idea: pair highly-skilled, empathic, teaching musicians with each mom to visit, talk through hopes, dreams, and fears, write out feelings and letters to loved ones, distill those thoughts into lyrics for a song, compose, perform, and record that song, and then share and celebrate it with others. The results had been amazing. Not only were beautiful songs being written, the act of expressive creation itself had become a powerful medium for human connection, bridging isolation, meeting trauma with listening, and developing new narratives for the future.

We’ve been doing this work through ACG Music & Healing ever since, and it’s changed us.

We learned quickly that the space music creates is profound and unusual. Two people who don’t know each other can meet and connect deeply in the context of creation and expression. The music itself is a kind of emotional sandbox we can play in together, develop friendship, and create and experience beauty in a way that’s beyond words.

Over time we realized the same thing is happening in our education programs. Thousands of young people across our community are coming together each day to learn and make beautiful music and in those special moments are opportunities for belonging and kindness to nurture responsibility and perseverance. We realized it’s what we do in our community ensembles, in our concerts, and in our work together as volunteers and staff members.

I’m sharing this with you today for a couple of reasons. 

The first is at the end of this month we’re presenting We’ve Always Known at The Rosette, our first concert featuring songs composed in the course of our Music & Healing work. Please come! 

Second is that we’re in the midst of a March fund drive to support this work. We’ll invest over $800,000 this year in education and healing, most of which goes to artists in our community. A shift in government funding priorities has meant the loss of about $150,000 for ACG this year. To help bridge that gap we need help. Our board member Shannon Belcher made a matching pledge of $10,000 in honor of her parents which friends like you have helped us to meet. Inspired by Shannon, another amazing board member, Carson McKowen, has added an additional $10,000 in honor of his mother who recently passed away. Thank you Shannon, thank you Carson, and thanks to everyone who has contributed so far. 

If this is work you might like to support, I’ll place a link to donate below.

Thank you so much for your support, and for your belief in the power of music to do good in the world.

Matt Hinsley

ACG Music & Healing March Fund Drive

by Matt Hinsley

We've Always Known: About Our Music & Healing Artists

Throughout the month of March we will be shining a light on ACG Music & Healing. On March 25-26, we will present a concert of some of the most memorable songs created by Music & Healing artists and participants over the years. The concert is called We’ve Always Known, and we’ve never done anything like it. We hope you’ll join us! Learn more about ACG Music & Healing here. 

We are so excited to share ten stories and songs from our Music & Healing program in concert for the first time ever in a program called on We’ve Always Known March 25-26.

The concert will feature local superstars, Claire Puckett, Camille Sheiss, Daniel Fears, and our very own Travis Marcum. 

We wanted to take a moment to dive a little bit into the amazing things these artists do not only for ACG, but in their personal lives as part of the music community in Austin, TX. 

Claire Puckett was one of our first students in our Education programs here at ACG, just down the road at McCallum High School! We’ve been connected for many years now and we are continuously so blown away by everything she accomplishes as a musician and artist. 

Claire is a member of the chamber-rock band Mother Falcon – a collective of more than twenty musicians playing strings, horns, guitars, and percussion – as well as the band Hikes! 

Check out this incredible Tiny Desk performance by Mother Falcon:

https://youtu.be/JaoUMbHvsc0?t=513

Camille Sheiss is a very talented violinist, caring teacher, and a member of Magnolia Kids and American Dreamer! 

Their sounds fit in the space between indie, bedroom pop, jazz, and R&B. They found their sound by blending their classical, soul, and folk origins and being playful in their expression. 

Listen to Magnolia Kids here:

https://youtu.be/6zEyHsA0XhY

Singer-songwriter Daniel Fears graduated from the University of Texas and went on to get a masters degree from Yale with the intention of being a professional classical musician. However, life led him down the path of R&B and he went for it. 

This month he was nominated as KUTX’s Artist of the Month! You can read his interview here and listen to some of the magic he creates here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjVmJ4v_l0E

And last but certainly not least, ACG Director of Education and Music & Healing, Travis Marcum has helped build hundreds of classroom guitar programs worldwide. He is also the founder of ACG’s Music & Healing initiative, providing unique music programming for Austin community members experiencing significant challenges or trauma.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhI0wYH-BvI

We could not be more excited and grateful to be able to connect with such beautiful human beings and share what they create with you, our community. 

Thank you.

by Angelica Campbell