Sponsor Spotlight: Harlow Russell & Awesome 3D Cards
We’re super grateful to Harlow Russell of Awesome 3D Cards for his generous sponsorship of our UpClose Series concert featuring Mateusz Kowalski at the home of Chaya Rao on Sunday, February 2nd at 6pm (tickets). Guests will enjoy Chaya’s delicious homemade vegetarian Indian Food, and they'll also get to take home one of Harlow’s awesome cards! Harlow has a neat story, and we asked him to share some of it.
ACG: How did the idea of 3D cards come to you?
HR: I lived and worked in Asia for the last 25 years, most of my adult life. The last 4 years were in Vietnam. So, I was very familiar with the Vietnamese artform of "Kirigami". It’s like Japanese Origami, but distinctly different. Kirigami always takes the form of a pop-up gift or thank you card. It contains a 3D paper model inside the card that "folds." For many years I would always bring back the cool cards when I came home to visit my mother in Austin. In fact, she kept all those cards over the years and would frequently show guests at her house because they were so unique. Real paper art.
I moved back to the USA in 2018 and among other things I had to buy insurance. Once I finally settled on an agent he sent me a thank you card and said I was a VIP customer. The card was a plain white generic card. You know, the kind that come in a stack of 100 at the Dollar stores. I didn’t feel like a VIP with this card. Then it hit me! What if he had a custom cool Kirigami card! That would be amazing and make me feel special. And I knew everyone always keeps these handmade Kirigami cards because they are totally unique. Hence...Awesome 3D Cards was born!
ACG: What is something you wish everyone knew about the artistry?
HR: The art and skill is the 3D model inside each card. It’s like a Jack in the Box. When people open any of my cards, they smile. They are amazed. They play with the cards. Gen Z or Boomer, male or female, CEO or house sitter, every single person who has received one of my Awesome 3D cards in the last 12 months has had a moment of joy and fun. That’s the special artistry of these custom handmade cards.
ACG: You make a lot of custom designs for people in Austin. Why is it important to you to make special things for our community?
HR: I first lived and work in Austin in the 1980's. Then I moved west to LA and west again until it became "East"...Jakarta Indonesia, 1992. I always remembered how wonderful Austin was as a young person. My mother retired from Philly to Austin in 1994. So for 25 years, I've been coming back "home" to Austin once or twice a year. In early 2018, I came back home to take care of her in her final chapter of life. I loved being back, to the Live Music Capitol of the World, to the BBQ scene, to the "keep Austin Weird" scene.
When I decided to start my Custom 3D card business, I first produced two Austin-themed concept cards: our beloved, historic, State Capitol Building, and the “Bat Bridge” (Congress Ave. Bridge) - where people from all over the world come to watch our 2 million bats go out on the town every evening. These two cards also demonstrated the skill and fine detail of using Vietnamese Kirigami but in an "Austin" style. Now I create cards for companies and organizations in Austin and across the US and Canada. If you’d like to know more, email me anytime or call 512-571-1615.
'together' Artist Profile: Joe Williams - Artistic Director and Composer-in-Residence
We are thrilled to be collaborating with some incredible artists for our January 24-26 season centerpiece together. Over the past two weeks, we've been talking with the artists and composers - but today we talk with Joe Williams. Joe is ACG's Artistic Director and Composer-in-Residence. He has been shaping and conceptualizing 'together' from the very beginning.
In this interview, Joe updates us on how the production is going, the inspiration for the theme, and his hope for the audience.
Austin Classical Guitar: Tell us what’s going on with together?
Joe Williams: together is a beautiful community based concert project that has been developing over the past year. together is the third and final installment of a series of projects that we have created about deepening compassion and understanding of the people that make up our community. Ultimately, it is about how we connect and how we experience being here right now.
With together, we realized that one of the greatest challenges of our time is isolation. Some of the most terrible things that are happening in our world are due to isolation and loss of community. Because when we are isolated, our compassion for ourselves and others begins to slip away. The principal effort of this project is to disrupt isolation and foster belonging. The principal question of together is how can we promote the generosity and caring that allows belonging to grow?
Our conclusion was to listen. For the past year, Travis Marcum has interviewed people from all over our community, asking “how are you alone and how do you belong?” We invited our community to share and help us all remember that this is a universal experience.
John O'Donohue, the great philosopher and poet, talked about how belonging starts with with one’s desire for a sense of community and connection. Belonging begins with longing- longing for connection and we have a deep human desire for this. One of my favorite quotes of his is “There is a huge abyss within every mind. When we belong, we have an outside mooring to prevent us from falling into ourselves.” Everyone has a personal relationship with that continually flexing space that stretches between isolation and belonging. The circumstances are different for everyone, whether your 18 or 80, but the feeling of is the same. It’s a massive topic and it’s been inspiring to listen to people’s personal experiences.
I believe art, and music in particular, has this amazing ability to empower us to confront the harder things. To soothe the harder things, and to also celebrate the most joyous things. Ultimately, I think this concert is an opportunity to share. We can go into a space surrounded and empowered by art and music. We can be ourselves and we can listen to others - and hopefully hear ourselves in others.
ACG: How has isolation affected you?
JW: I struggle with it. I think we are most cruel to ourselves. Thats true for me and it is a constant practice to exercise compassion. I work on that. The stories that people have shared make it easier.
Last year, a dear friend of mine passed away from alcoholism. In the end, he was alone even when he wasn’t. I carry him around with me all the time. I miss him. I resolutely celebrate the time we spent together and I also think about the times that he had when he was so alone and so distant. I think that experience isn’t far away from any of us. We are so much more delicate than we believe.
ACG: How does together navigate these topics?
JW: At the very beginning of this, I struggled to understand how we could make this tangible. Almost immediately I arrived at the idea of a forest. Where there’s all these trees, and scrubs, and dirt, and rocks - and all these things that are existing within an ecosystem. They all thrive and fail within that place, but there is an amazing interconnectedness that is part of that.
So from the beginning, a forest has been the metaphor that made complete sense because there is an ecological support system. Sometimes it fails, and sometimes it thrives.
I have to read this piece for you. We excerpted it from Peter Wohlleben’s Hidden Life of Trees: A tree is not a forest.
On its own, a tree cannot establish a consistent local climate. It is at the mercy of wind and weather. But together, many trees create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores a great deal of water, and generates a great deal of humidity.
...
If every tree were looking out only for itself, then quite a few of them would never reach old age. Regular fatalities would result in many large gaps in the tree canopy, making it easier for storms to get inside the forest and uproot trees.
Every tree would suffer.
...
And that is why even sick individuals are supported and nourished until they recover. Next time, perhaps it will be the other way round, and the supporting tree might be the one in need of assistance.
A tree can be only as strong as the forest that surrounds it.
That helps me understand how we need each other and why sometimes we carry the person next to us. The ecology of forests has become the main organizing element that draws the entire concert together.
ACG: As an artist, as the person that has conceptualized this triptych from the beginning, does this feel like a satisfying resolution to you artistically?
JW: I think there is no end to these types of work. I personally believe that art is a way to understand ourselves. All of my music is inspired by narrative, people, and experience. So for me, it is endless.
What is fascinating about this triptych, is how it expands. i/we was about the experience of small group of people on a journey: refugees from Syria and Irag that had settled here in Austin in their first 90 days. Dream was about young people in Austin and their hopes, fears and dreams of the future. Finally, together is everybody. Everybody has a relationship with this. In that aspect artistically, in terms of a narrative, it has grown and opened up to include all of us.
And so that feels right and it feels good.
ACG: How do you hope to impact the community beyond this concert?
JW: This is a call to action for all of us to savor the relationships we cherish. To nurture. To look for opportunities where we can positively impact someone's life, and also to have some deep and sincere compassion for ourselves when we are suffering. To break that cycle of suffering.
Ultimately, I think when a person comes into this space and they hear all these stories, these different composers and the music we created that was inspired by these interviews - that they will see the incredibly rich landscape or forest scape that we inhabit. That they listen to any of it and recognize that a piece or a story might mirror their own experience or discover that someone they know carries this experience with them. That is what I hope for.
ACG: Would you like to add anything?
JW: Yes! This concert is a celebration. These topics are heavy and there is heaviness here, but there is so much joy and lift in it too. I am overwhelmingly filled with hope and astounded by the beauty we have created here. The interviews Travis put together are gorgeous. The music Russell Pinkston, Celil Refik Kaya and I have made is so deeply connected to those interviews
I hope people will allow themselves to go on this journey. By seeing ourselves in others, we all become stronger.
If you would like to know more about the inspiration of ‘together,’ we invite you to read this article by Artistic Director, Joe Williams, and Education Director, Travis Marcum.
Fall 2019 Education Report
Dear Friends,
It has been a truly remarkable year in ACG Education. As you’ll read in this report two of our national partners have hit major milestones in their organizations, proving that mentorship and modeling from ACG combined with time and effort from faraway partners can turn into sustainable programming with wide-ranging positive community benefit. This is extremely encouraging, and will impact our strategy going forward as we actively seek more willing and capable institutional partners.
Another of our most significant developments is the creation of a second daily juvenile justice system program, this time in Williamson County. This new program is going beautifully, students have performed in public three times, and the staff and community are responding with tremendous enthusiasm. This means that the program we started nine years ago in juvenile detention in Travis County is replicable, and we’re already in talks with another county to the south about starting a third program.
In these reports I often focus on program growth and demonstrable change in our systems and resources. It is slightly more difficult to capture the direct impact we’re having on hearts and minds, on individual students, parents and teachers. I have so many stories! So many parents have come up to me at concerts with statements of gratitude, so many teachers around the world send us videos of their students playing music from our curriculum. It can be overwhelming in a good way. As one example, here is an excerpt from a student’s college essay we were invited to share this fall:
Music has been a love of mine since I started in middle school. I have progressed from taking it as an elective, to private lessons, to an Austin-wide youth ensemble…When I play, I feel lost in myself and I have benefited greatly from the transferable skills I’ve learned from my music education thus far. I feel I have a gift, which allows me to live through my life with a purpose.
Sometimes I feel anxious and agitated and am not sure how to manage my emotions…I had an intense period of hardship and needed to get some focused help for a few days. I was in an environment that had other adolescents with all sorts of various hardships regarding mental and emotional health…Instead of staying quiet and removing myself…I actually surprised myself by stepping up to help. I played the guitar they had on hand. I made acquaintances in the short time I was there…When I left, the social workers indicated how proud they were of me, of my openness, and willingness to share my music. To me, that experience demonstrated leadership under difficult circumstances.
We have a guiding question at Austin Classical Guitar: “What good can music do in the world today?” To be sure one of the best answers to that question is to take any steps necessary to ensure as many young people as possible have an opportunity to find joy and satisfaction through music education in their schools. That is the purpose of our work in ACG Education, and that is the subject of this report. There are other answers, however, answers like raising money for charity, reaching people facing profound challenge or isolation, or international cultural exchange to help foster understanding and empathy. If you’re curious about some of the work ACG does in those arenas, I’d like to invite you to take a look at our Top Ten Moments of 2019 that includes glimpses of our other service areas.
Thank you.
If you are reading this report it is because you care. You have given to ACG Education, you believe in the importance of quality music education in young people’s lives, and you have helped make everything we do possible. As a team we have never been more convinced of the gentle power of music to welcome all people, to help individuals build their identities in pro-social ways, and to help nourish the spirit. We are deeply grateful to you, and we hope what you find in this report will make you proud.
Matt Hinsley, Executive Director
Austin Classical Guitar
Central Texas
Our deep partnership with Austin ISD continues. With dozens of schools perhaps our most common challenge is teacher turnover or changes in school structure leading to class disruption or large or unstable class sizes. We have added one new middle school program this fall (O. Henry), are working actively to stabilize personnel in one high school campus currently, and are looking at the prospect of three new middle school programs in fall 2020.
Recent successes include the placement and multi-year intensive support of a teacher at LBJ/LASA, and the addition of two support instructors for growing programs at Lively, Covington, and Akins. Both instructors, incidentally, are former ACG students who are now full-time employees of AISD teaching guitar in ACG programs. You can read more about Mr. Saucedo and Mr. Hernandez in this article about ACG alumni: Where Are They Now?
ACG Education can be summarized as including four main elements: Curriculum, Teacher Training, Special Support Services, and Standards and Systems Building. In this final category, one example is our development of the Austin ISD Concert and Sight Reading Contest (CS&R). This is a standard element of orchestra and band programs, but until we developed the event for Austin ISD six years ago, it did not exist for guitar in the state of Texas. This kind of event is critical when building large education systems as it is the evaluative measure for districts to communicate standards and expectations for all programs. ACG Education staff has run this contest for AISD for six years, continually develops materials and processes, and has also assisted four other districts to develop similar contests around the state. More than 700 students from over 40 ensembles participated in CS&R in spring 2019 (contest results, rules, procedures, and sight reading examples available upon request).
Surrounding Communities: San Marcos High School under the direction of Juan Carlos Cavasos continues to be very impressive. They participated in our 2019 CS&R, and there are plans to expand guitar into the middle school levels in San Marcos soon. Mr. Cavasos also had one student selected for the All Region High School Ensemble in November 2019. Del Valle’s after school for-credit program is run by ACG’s Arnold Yzaguirre, and received straight superior ratings in the 2019 CS&R. Manor’s Decker Middle School program is thriving under the direction of Victor Longoria, and though there has been administrative change in MISD, January will see the reinstatement of elementary programs at both Oak Meadows and Decker Elementary Schools run by ACG alumni Angelica Campbell and Alex Lew. We are in current talks about the expansion of the Dripping Springs High School guitar program as well.
Free Lessons Initiative
ACG Education began in 2001 as an initiative to provide free lessons for low-income students. Our mission quickly expanded to curriculum development and program building, but the free lessons program has continued and expanded. ACG has six teachers: Jeffrey Fratus, Douglas Stefaniak, Tony Mariano, Angelica Campbell, Tom Clippinger and Javier Saucedo providing individual lesson support primarily in Title 1 Schools.
We are particularly proud to report that 8 out of 21 students selected for the All Region High School ensemble in November, are participants in the ACG Free Lesson Initiative.
Some of our most dramatic examples of personal growth and success over the years have come about through these special and intensive mentor relationships. When a student is identified as both qualifying for the program and showing special interest to avidly pursue music, they are paired with a teacher for 30- or 60-minute lessons every week for the entire school year. All students in ACG Free Lessons are expected to perform publicly as soloists on a regular basis.
This year we established a special scholarship fund in the name of former Free Lesson participant, Javier Niño, whose life was tragically cut short by an impaired driver in February. You can learn more about this remarkable young man, his scholarship, and the scholarship’s first recipient, Elijah Flores, online here.
Mr. Flores wrote: “Classical guitar has changed my life and will always be valuable to me…I’m proud to call myself a classical guitarist.”
Juvenile Justice System
ACG’s Jeremy Osborne runs our Juvenile Justice programs. One of the most significant developments of 2019 is the addition of our second such program in Williamson County (WilCo). Instruction at WilCo began June 3rd, and the students performed July 8th, August 10th, and December 10th.
Our programs in juvenile justice are highly unusual. They are the only for-credit, daily, performing arts elective programs we know of in the United States. While there are many shorter-term enrichment or activity-based arts programs, the opportunity we have to make deep and lasting change through relationship-building and significant skills development is unusual. We’re thrilled, then, to have had the opportunity to build a second program in a neighboring county. We’re also very pleased to report that we are in talks to build a third program in Hays County in the year to come.
In September the Austin American Statesman published the largest print article ever written about ACG, over 3,000 words! The article includes special focus on our work in juvenile justice and a brief video feature shot in part at WilCo. You can view both the article and video feature online here.
Let’s Play: Braille Music Learning Resource
ACG began a guitar program at Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (TSBVI) in 2010. In 2012 we supported a Braille adaptation of our GuitarCurriculum.com resource that has led to a full-scale literacy-based guitar program there ever since led by Jeremy Coleman. In 2016 we became aware of the need for a lifelong learning pathway for Braille music readers on the classical guitar. No such pathway existed, and we had TSBVI graduates leaving school with skills for whom there was no supported lifelong learning sequence.
With the goal of addressing that need, we created LetsPlayGuitar.org, a free online resource pairing graded pieces of solo music in Braille and print formats with audio instruction guides for both guitar proficiency and Braille reading. The site launched in July 2018 and so far has had over 8,500 unique visitors and the Braille score packet (.brf) has been downloaded more than 1,500 times.
The site contained only beginning level material, however, and as soon as it launched we began a second phase of development. Phase 2 includes a site redesign, and significant content additions that should allow users at least 3-5 years of study material yielding successful students who are fluent music readers in first position on the guitar, who possess a full compliment of basic guitar techniques, and who can play dozens of beautiful solo pieces. We’re pleased to report that content is now complete for Phase 2, and the new site will launch in January 2020.
We’re also extremely excited to announce that Rados Malidzan, a world-class guitarist and educator in Montenegro, has asked to translate and adapt the materials for use in the Balkan Peninsula. After a nationwide fundraising campaign including multiple televised appearances, he has raised the funds necessary for the project. Our new website will be capable of supporting multiple languages from a single database.
GuitarCurriculum.com
GuitarCurriculum.com is the core of ACG Education. The philosophy, curriculum, and vast support materials within it have allowed us not only to advance the quality of classroom guitar education, but also to replicate success across the US and beyond. One of our top strategic goals has been to redevelop the site for superior functionality in terms of content, data, functionality, and appearance. It was a huge job and it took us years to complete, but we’re thrilled to report that the new site became fully functional in August, 2019.
We would love to take you on a personalized tour! Reach out any time.
We are also constantly adding and improving content within the site from new music, to new video and audio tutorials and guides. For example, we’ve recently added ten new ensemble pieces by Celil Refik Kaya representing music of central Asia. We also now have the capability to embed videos on the landing page of every piece in the teaching library so that ensembles around the world can be featured as models when other ensembles are learning a selection.
National Highlights
We now have over 800 curriculum users across the United States. Each week we hear about successes and challenges from our teaching partners far and wide. Our online Teacher Forum, email newsletter, GuitarCurriculum blog, webinar series, and social media channels are all ways we seek to stay in touch, and provide support for our many partner teachers. Of course we also have direct contact with teachers who attend our Teacher Training Summits (2019 Summits were in Austin and St. Louis), through in-service training (we visited New Mexico in 2019), and by individual email and telephone support.
Two places our team has spent the most time in person, on the phone, and online, have been St. Louis and Cleveland. We have enthusiastically invested a lot of resources in both areas because the leaders there have reflected back such tremendous energy, and such willingness to do the hard work of growth and community development, while at the same time always putting the needs of their communities first.
Cleveland Classical Guitar under the direction of Erik Mann has been so incredibly beautiful to watch. They have produced innovative programming, been in the local and national news a bunch (like this beautiful CBS Sunday Morning Broadcast), and this year won a $150,000 grant from the Cleveland Foundation to grow their programming to reach 500 students each week.
St. Louis Classical Guitar, run for many years by Bill Ash, and now led by super-talented Executive Director Kevin Ginty, has built more than twenty beautiful school programs. Our team has been in St. Louis training teachers every summer for seven years. The reach of their services has been a beautiful thing to watch first-hand. So you can imagine how happy we were when Bill Ash was recognized this year by the Missouri Arts Council as Arts Education Hero of The Year!
You have to imagine with us a time ten years ago when we had no sister organizations building education programs of this caliber anywhere in the country. Or twenty years ago when school-based guitar education was rarely found anywhere at all, few resources or standards existed, and our ideas were met with skepticism. Fast-forward to today when so many thousands of kids are finding joy and identity in school through participation in guitar, and partner organizations are winning major grants and awards, it’s like jet fuel for the ACG engine!
International Highlights
Who would have thought that a nonprofit music service organization in Austin, Texas, could help inspire kids in Mexico, could help put guitars in the hands of students in Cambodia, could train teachers in Nicaragua, or help build and fund a music education program in an orphanage in Kathmandu, Nepal? Who would have thought that the same organization could develop a Braille and audio guide lifelong learning resource that people as far away as Montenegro would want to raise funds to translate and bring to serve blind and visually impaired students in the Balkan Peninsula?
Not us! Yet here we are.
We’ve been overjoyed this year by our many wonderful connections across the globe. Some of our partnerships are well-established, like our work with Ravindra Paudyal at the Early Childhood Development Center in Kathmandu, Nepal. Ravindra regularly sends us videos of kids playing beautifully and confidently, and has plans to grow the program in Nepal soon.
Other initiatives are bubbling rapidly, like Rados Malidzan’s plan – mentioned earlier - to bring our LetsPlayGuitar.org Braille lifelong learning resource to Montenegro.
And still more programs, like our new partnership with the Caring For Cambodia network of schools, are just getting started. With our friends at Calido Guitars we’re just now sending twenty new guitars to Cambodia, and will begin teacher training soon.
Pro-Social Ecosystem
From time to time we like to share some of the theories behind the work we do. Several years ago, for example, we shared the Five Elements Theory of Deep Personal Significance that is the basis of our Teacher Behavior training and evaluation. While these theories can seem esoteric, we believe they are at the heart of what has made ACG successful overall because they guide and focus our work.
Pro-Social Ecosystem is the top concept to emerge from our 2018 Strategic Planning Process. It is the acknowledgement that our work does not happen in a vacuum, and the significance of an experience someone has with us is different based on who they are, and on what levels that experience resonates. In an effort to be the very best, most positively impactful service organization we can be, we have begun the development of a Pro-Social Ecosystem Playbook, and so far have defined three vectors: Breadth, Depth, and Interrelation.
Breadth refers to who we have the opportunity to impact at ACG. Our implicit goal is to have the widest breadth of impact possible. So along this vector are discussions of diversity in terms of ethnicity, culture, age, artistry, geography, economics, etc.
Depth refers to the impact itself. Not just the how, but the quality, relevance, resonance, value, transformative power, taking into account especially that what might make deep impact for one individual, can be quite different than what might make deep impact for another. This involves, then, investigation of personal significance (ACG Mission), and personal relevance (see Eric Booth’s Red Wheelbarrow video).
Interrelation refers to the mixing of both elements, potentially even in the absence of ACG involvement. An example might be a peer mentor program where students are coaching other students. Another example would be a student service project where students perform in retirement facilities. By mixing training, learning, performing, and production, with multiple populations, ACG sets in motion through Interrelation programming that expands both Breadth and Depth.
This year’s overall theme at ACG is Together. Together (see the poster image at the bottom of this report) is a direct outgrowth, of our Pro-Social Ecosystem Theory. We look forward to reporting on the progress of this theory and the various ways in which it will impact ACG Education in the months and years to come.
Thank You!
The programs and services described in this report are made possible through the generous support of many individual and institutional donors, including:
City of Austin Cultural Arts Division, Augustine Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Kaman Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Webber Family Foundation, Still Water Foundation, Lucy & Bill Farland, Rea Charitable Trust, Texas Commission on the Arts, HEB Tournament of Champions Charitable Trust, Tingari-Silverton Foundation, Kodosky Foundation, Long Foundation, The Skeel/Baldauf Family, Louise Epstein & John Henry McDonald, Bill Metz, MFS Foundation, University Area Rotary Club, Meyer Levy Charitable Foundation, Applied Materials Foundation, Shield-Ayres Foundation, Seawell Elam Foundation, Sue L. Nguyen Management Trust, Dr. Michael Froehls, Sarah & Ernest Butler, Mercedes-Benz of Austin, Carl Caricari & Margaret Murray Miller, Burdine Johnson Foundation, Rich & Caryn Puccio, Wright Family Foundation, 3M Foundation, Karrie & Tim League, Kendal & Ken Gladish, Jack & Vanessa Wolfe, D'Addario Foundation, Kerry & Carole Price, Rixen Law, Bank of America, Elaine & Michael Kasper, IBC Bank Austin, Strait Music, Urban Betty, Inc, PwC, Tesoros Trading Company, Calido Guitars, Ted Held & Nuria Zaragoza, Reverb Gives & Reverb.com, Chelle & David Neff, Lazan & Bill Pargaman, and many, many others.
If you would like to make a contribution to support ACG Education, click here, or call us at 512-300-2247.
Top Ten Moments of 2019!
The year is almost over, and that means it’s time for the ACG Top Ten! As always, we wracked our brains and then lobbied hard for our favorites, but because this list is brimming with so much beauty and gratitude, we’re all still smiling at the results.
We hope you love perusing these as much as we do. We hope our services make you proud. If you find something that inspires you, and it’s the right time to support our work, we hope you’ll consider making a year-end gift to help our Top Ten list a year from now sparkle even more!
And as always, if we forgot your favorite, by all means let us know. From all of us at ACG, Happy Holidays!
#10 National Guild for Community Arts Education
For more than fifty years the National Guild has been a leader in community arts education, bringing together educators and community servants from around the US and beyond, sharing ideas, and establishing best practices. So it was a big deal when they decided to have their 2019 conference at the JW Mariott Hotel in Austin, Texas this fall! It was an especially big deal for us for four reasons:
We gave a talk! Long-time board member, and current Nominating/Governance Chair Kendal Gladish, joined Director of Education Travis Marcum, and Executive Director Matt Hinsley to give a featured 90-minute presentation called Board and Staff Engagement: Service with a Purpose. It was a translation of our Five Elements education theory into a board, staff, and volunteer engagement strategic framework (you can learn more about the Five Elements here). Ask us about it – it’s actually really cool! And people seemed to like it.
We got a grant! Led by our operations Director Karen Gallant, along with Travis, ACG became one of twenty organizations nation-wide to be selected for a National Guild Catalyzing Creative Aging Grant. Look to out Top Ten of 2020 for something related to our roll out of new service for older adults!
Matt got an award! They give out “Milestone” awards for arts leaders who’ve made a difference for more than twenty years. Our Director of Development, James Fidlon, along with Travis, nominated Matt for the award and he was selected along with five others from around the nation. It was a nice moment.
Margaret Perry was honored. Margaret was a personal advisor to Matt, an ACG board member, an Austin arts icon, and a long-time member of the guild. She encouraged ACG for years to get involved with the guild. Her spirit was strong at this conference, and among many beautiful moments, the standout tribute was ACG board member, and Director of Armstrong Community Music School’s Liz Cass performing in her honor at the trustee’s reception.
#9 Heroes & Role Models
Great artists have great impact. Three artists in particular lifted us this year.
Berta Rojas inspired everyone with her soulful performance at our February gala. The evening’s student performers were from Crockett High School. The students met Berta after the show, but for the seniors in the group it was a special reunion, since they all remembered Berta’s visit to their school four years earlier. In fact, they told us they’d been fired up from the moment they learned they would be sharing the stage with her.
Xuefei Yang opened our season in October. She prepared a special program of music from China and Spain representing her two greatest cultural influences. It was divine. But that’s not all she did here! Xuefei also gave a special interview and performance with the Austin Chinese American Network, taught talented students at UT Austin, visited with season ticket holders at our Gusto season opening dinner, and performed a private concert at Karrie and Tim League’s home in support of ACG Music & Healing.
Raphaël Feuillâtre gave a wide-ranging virtuosic performance on our International Series in November. He was mind-blowing. But while he was here he also visited Bedicheck, Travis, McCallum, and LBJ schools. Perhaps his deepest impact was felt at the Gardner Betts Juvenile Justice Center where the young people connected quickly and deeply to his warm presence and beautiful playing. We’d never witnessed anything quite so powerful in a guest artist visit to the facility.
#8 Tickets for Good
In early September 2017, we joined forces with our friends in the Miro Quartet, Conspirare, and Austin Chamber Music Center to raise disaster relief funds in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. Hope After Harvey, as the fundraiser concert was called, raised $37,500, two car-loads of donated goods, and 200 clean-up volunteer names, in four days.
When things settled down at the ACG office and we reflected on the experience of running an event and sending 100% of the proceeds away to charity, we realized that we wanted our efforts to continue to benefit area nonprofit organizations doing vital work in our community. ACG Tickets For Good was born.
Since then we’ve raised thousands of dollars allowing supporters of local nonprofits to designate partner organizations to be recipients of 100% of their ticket purchase to our major events. One fun story we heard was from David Conger, Director of the guitar program at Lamar Middle School. He used ACG Tickets For Good to raise money to buy a new bass guitar for their school program. When we sent Lamar their check for $1,582 we were delighted to get David’s reply that the bass guitar they were purchasing was going to cost $1,595 – just $13 away!
Perhaps our most memorable fundraiser in 2019 was at the home of Mai Barazi and Hachem Dadouch. The concert featured UK-based Syrian guitarist Ayman Jarjour, and raised more than $7,500 for a scholarship fund for Syrian refugees.
#7 Music & Healing
Travis Marcum, ACG Director of Education, has been leading the way in ACG’s Music & Healing initiative for the past five years. It all began with our Lullaby Project in partnership with Carnegie Hall. Since then Travis has developed programming and worked directly with individuals facing a range of challenges from incarceration, to hospitalization, to homelessness.
Here’s a bit of a story from Dell Children’s Hospital Travis shared in May:
In early April, I met with a teenage girl – I’ll call her Anna – who expressed interest in taking guitar lessons during the three months she was hospitalized for a major procedure. We met every few days to have a lesson, play guitar, and talk about life and music.
Within moments of our first meeting, I learned that Anna had lived in Spain, and was a huge fan of flamenco music. Soon after, I found out that ACG’s good friend and world-class flamenco guitarist, Grisha, would be in Houston for a concert in May. I had an idea.
You can read the whole story online here.
#6 Kids Being Awesome Together
Kids got together in awesomeness a lot this year. Like, literally thousands of them, thousands of times! But a few of those times standout as particularly noteworthy.
In The Schools: In November, ACG Executive Director Matt Hinsley and ACG Artistic Director Joseph Williams conducted Austin ISD All Region Middle and High School ensembles with students from all over town, and in April nearly 1,000 kids in over 40 ensembles participated in Austin ISD’s Concert and Sight Reading Contest. These events are a big deal any way you look at it, but for us they’re particular pride points because the overall level is high, and because ACG has literally created these events for the district from inception, to design, to execution over the course of the past decade. Now we help other districts make similar standard-setting celebratory events around Texas and beyond.
In The Studio: Long time ACG Youth Orchestra (ACGYO) member Lennox Kolics is interested in recording tech and asked to be a summer intern, ACGYO has awesome players, and the ACG curriculum used around the world (GuitarCurriculum.com) is hungry for model recordings of the vast number of pieces in its teaching library. So a match was made! Thanks to some willing ACGYO colleagues, and generous support form Shay Brown and Chez Boom Audio here in town, ten (that’s right, ten!) new recordings were made for the curriculum with ACGYO artists and Lennox at the board.
ACG Trio: Can’t believe it took this long for something like this to happen, but this summer three amazing ACG alumni got together to form the ACG Trio! The players are Justice Phillips (UT composition graduate, and current full-time ACG Operations Associate who we’ve known since Lively Middle School), Angelica Campbell (UT guitar major, junior, who we met at Crockett High School), and Alex Lew (UT guitar major, senior, who we first met at Lamar Middle School). They’ve been super busy performing all over town including two appearances at UT’s James Turrell Skyspace where they gave the premiere performances of the ACG-commissioned new work by Matthew Lyons called Skyspace, written for the occasion (Matthew is an alum too, who went on to San Francisco Conservatory, before a composition degree at UT!!).
ACGYO San Francisco: It was our first ACGYO tour, and it was awesome. Members and parents worked alongside ACG Artistic Director Joseph Williams to plan, raise money, and elevate their level of playing to “sublime,” before heading out to San Francisco where they joined other amazing young people at San Francisco Conservatory of Music, performed to open an Omi Foundation Dynamite Guitars series event, and then played at the Alamo Drafthouse San Francisco to open a sold-out screening of Back To The Future. Why? Because when kids play guitar, the future gets better!
#5 A Whole New GuitarCurriculum.com
It may seem like a website redesign doesn’t belong in fifth place in a Top Ten list but trust us, this place is hard-earned!
First, it’s important to know that GuitarCurriculum.com is at the center of all our education program building. The shortest version of the story? We started in school-based guitar education in 1 school with 15 students in 2001. By 2004 we were in 2 schools with 100 students, and while we’d had good times, and 6 kids that had gone to college with music scholarships, we’d also come to realize that the world lacked the resources we needed to build the guitar programs of our dreams. So we worked like crazy from 2004 to 2008, invested about $250,000 in the early development, launched GuitarCurriculum.com in October 2008, and now it’s used in our 60 central Texas programs, across the state, in forty other US states, and in about 20 countries. Whew!
Second, about the redesign. Let’s just say it’s a process we started in 2012, it includes work in multiple countries, multiple languages, many web developers, firms, and consultants, several notable power outages, one car accident, one particularly disruptive invasion, a reunion across the world, and loads of good, old-fashioned elbow grease.
What’s new? Lots of things you can’t see, but make updating, data management, and functionality all superior in the backend. Then there’s the new logo, the appearance, and tons of awesome new content from video, to news, forum, and plenty of marvelous music. Now we’re cookin’, and wildly excited about the future of ACG Education now that we’ve got a shiny new machine in the garage!
#4 Javier Niño Scholarship
In February 2019 the world lost a marvelous young man long before his time. An impaired driver took Javier Niño’s life on the way home from the gym partway through his first year at St. Edward’s University.
Javi was a beautiful human being, warm, talented, and generous. We first met him as a high school freshman at Eastside Memorial High School. He fell in love with guitar, worked with ACG’s Jeremy Osborne to win a scholarship to attend McCallum High School. There he worked with McCallum’s Andrew Clark and would proceed to take lessons with ACG’s Performance Engagement Artist Joseph Palmer. Javi distinguished himself as a soloist and in ensemble. His many performances and competitions with his McCallum Quartet were particularly notable. As part of a college essay, Javi wrote this about Joseph Palmer:
After seeing Joseph play, I was inspired to pick up the guitar. I decided to give it my all and be just as cool as him. I even started taking guitar classes in high school. I ended up coming in contact with Joseph later, and he took me under his wing as one of his students.
Becoming his student taught me how to be disciplined. It was hard, but I had so much enthusiasm to become a better guitarist that over time I was able to develop discipline. I also applied the strict discipline of practicing guitar to my schoolwork.
I always strived to be as good as him. I admired how amazing Joseph played and how easy he made it seem. It helped me understand what determination is and how to pursue it. Have you ever wanted something so badly that you are willing to set everything aside just to accomplish that goal? That’s exactly how much I wanted to become a great player, and I established my determination to do so.
It was later in the spring that Diane Skeel, the mother of one of Javi’s McCallum Quartet partners Aaron Baldauf, approached us about beginning a scholarship fund in Javi’s honor. Through Diane’s hard work and the generosity of many including the Skeel/Baldauf family, the scholarship was begun. We awarded the first scholarship in October to Elijah Flores, a terrific guitarist from Crockett High School. You can read more about Elijah online here, and learn more about the Javier Niño Scholarship Fund online here.
#3 St. Louis & Cleveland
As ACG Education has grown many service-minded educators and organization leaders around the US and beyond have approached us to collaborate for training, strategy, or just plain-old advice. Two places our team has spent the most time in person, on the phone, and online, have been St. Louis and Cleveland. We have enthusiastically invested a lot of resources in both areas because the leaders have reflected back such tremendous energy, and such willingness to do the hard work of growth and community development, while at the same time always putting the needs of their communities first.
Cleveland Classical Guitar under the direction of Erik Mann has been so incredibly beautiful to watch. They have produced innovative programming, been in the local and national news a bunch (like this beautiful CBS Sunday Morning Broadcast), and this year won a $150,000 grant from the Cleveland Foundation to grow their programming to reach 500 students each week.
St. Louis Classical Guitar, run for many years by Bill Ash, and now led by super-talented Executive Director Kevin Ginty, has built more than twenty beautiful school programs. Out team has been in St. Louis training teachers every summer for seven years. The reach of their services has been a beautiful thing to watch first-hand. So you can imagine how happy we were when Bill Ash was recognized this year by the Missouri Arts Council as Arts Education Hero of The Year!
You have to imagine with us for a moment a time ten years ago when we had no sister organizations building education programs of this caliber anywhere in the country. Or twenty years ago when school-based guitar education was rarely found anywhere at all, few resources or standards existed, and our ideas were met with skepticism. Fast-forward to today when so many thousands of kids are finding joy and identity in school through participation in guitar, and partner organizations are winning major grants and awards, it’s like jet fuel for the ACG engine!
#2 ACG Global Services
Who would have thought that a nonprofit music service organization in Austin, Texas, could help inspire kids in Mexico, could help put guitars in the hands of students in Cambodia, could train teachers in Nicaragua, or help build and fund a music education program in an orphanage in Kathmandu, Nepal? Who would have thought that the same organization could develop a Braille and audio guide lifelong learning resource that people as far away as Montenegro would want to raise funds to translate and bring to serve blind and visually impaired students in the Balkan Peninsula?
Not us! Yet here we are.
We’ve been overjoyed this year by our many wonderful connections across the globe. Some of our partnerships are well-established, like our work with Ravindra Paudyal at the Early Childhood Development Center in Kathmandu, Nepal. Ravindra regularly sends us videos of kids playing beautifully and confidently, and has plans to grow the program in Nepal soon.
Other initiatives are bubbling rapidly, like Rados Malidzan’s plan to bring our LetsPlayGuitar.org Braille lifelong learning resource to Montenegro. Among other things, Rados was on national TV shows raising money for the effort, which begins in January (seen to the left).
And still more programs, like our new partnership with the Caring For Cambodia network of schools, are just getting started. With our friends at Calido Guitars we’re just now sending twenty new guitars to Cambodia, and will begin teacher training soon.
A bonus item we’d like to mention here is the new KLRU PBS television special that came out the day after Thanksgiving on our April 2019 production of FlamencoIndia with Oliver Rajamani and Jeronimo Maya. We’re putting this here because it’s awesome. And also because we believe strongly in our role as an agent of positive international cultural exchange through arts, but that exchange can happen right here in Austin too, and there’s no better example than Rajamani’s FlamencoIndia. [Watch it here]
#1 ACG Juvenile Justice Services
We are coming up on ten years of ACG Education for incarcerated youth in Travis County. We made a commitment in 2010, and we’ve been teaching kids in the Gardner Betts Juvenile Justice Center virtually every school day ever since. It’s hard to encapsulate what this program means to us, and what we believe it means for the kids we serve. The best we can do, perhaps, is to invite you to come see them perform. The experience is life-changing.
But just loving a program is not enough to land it in first place on the ACG Top Ten list! We placed this program here for a few other reasons. First, 2019 saw the development of a second ACG Education program for incarcerated youth, this one in Williamson County. Instruction began there on June 3rd, and there have already been three beautiful public performances, and some amazing stories of courage and transformation.
Additionally, in September the Austin American Statesman published the most extensive article ever about Austin Classical Guitar (over 3,000 words!). Michael Barnes’ beautiful piece began with a story about a paper guitar made for ACG’s Jeremy Osborne by a grateful student in Gardner Betts, and the article online even includes a video feature about the new Williamson County program.
We are now in talks with yet another county judge about building a third program in 2020, so stay tuned! We truly believe that this program could bring indescribable benefits to court-involved youth across Texas and across our nation in the years to come.
Thank you for being together with us. For helping make the ACG family beautiful, vibrant, and loving. And we can't wait to see what the new year and decade has in store for us!
Happy Holidays and Happy New Year
Postcards: Loudoun County, Virginia
Postcards is an Austin Classical Guitar (ACG) and GuitarCurriculum.com series that explores the guitar programs around the nation and strives to bring the guitar teacher community together.
This week’s Postcards is written by Dr. Kevin Vigil, Guitar & Music Theory Director at Heritage High School, Chair of the Virginia Music Educators Association Guitar Council & All-Virginia Guitar Ensemble, and Member-At-Large of the NAfME Council for Guitar Education.
This week, Dr. Vigil focuses on a student in his county, Jack Osborne, excelling in the guitar world!
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Postcard from Loudoun County, VA - By Dr. Kevin Vigil
Meet Jack!
Jack Osborne is a senior at Briar Woods High School (BWHS) in Loudoun County Public Schools. He served as concertmaster for the 2019 NAfME All-National Honors Guitar Ensemble that took place from November 7 – 10. Not only was Jack selected for this honor, but also acted as concertmaster for the 2018 All-Virginia Guitar Ensemble (AVGE) and (again) for the 2019 AVGE; which performed on November 21. Oh yeah… he also won the Beatty Scholarship Competition in Washington, DC! Among the prizes was the opportunity to open up for classical guitar legend, David Russell.
So how did Jack get to this point?
One word - opportunity.
Jack has had the opportunity to learn guitar at BWHS under the direction of Dr. Michael Murphy, from his private instructor, Jamey Mann, and the PAVAN Regional Governor’s School to list a few. Jack has also, and perhaps more importantly, had opportunities to stumble along the way. He told me about a poor outcome from a competition; which damaged his spirit and passion to continue with guitar. However, a friend and fellow competitor, Ryan Robinson, gave him some sound advice, “performing is not about winning or losing, but about reaching your audience.”
Jack has certainly taken his friend’s advice and continues to strive to reach others with his musical performances. He is also planning definitely to continue his studies of the instrument in college as a performance major and potentially double major with computer science.
We’d love to hear about guitar in your part of the world next! Reach out to Jess Griggs anytime with your story and a photo or two.