There is often a very special high energy about startups — all types of startups. That’s what I felt when I arrived at the RESONANZ opening gala. A non-profit organization, RESONANZ is starting its first year as a new three-weeks program for young singers in Albany, N.Y.

How do you start something in the midst of recession times, in a domain that’s not the most popular genre on the planet, in a city that’s not a destination for tourists, in a Summer season where the town has been emptied from its regular students and retinues of the State’s elected officials? How can you even think of doing this when performing arts in the region essentially means the Tanglewood Festival in the Berkshires, the Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, the Bard College Summerscape… to name just a few famous centrifugal forces? “Well, when you want to do something,” says Heidi Skok, the founder and Artistic Director of RESONANZ, “you don’t sit on all the reasons not to do something, you look at all the reasons to do it, and for me, all these reasons boil down to one: I live in this community, I am happy to live here, and I want to contribute to the life of this community as meaningfully as I can. My thing is music, and more specifically opera. So, I can do two things: bring people to Albany, both students and faculty, who would have never known how great this town is on the one hand, and bring opera through young voices to people who don’t know they could enjoy it. After years of performing in various places, years of teaching voices, I have come to the conclusion that the vast majority of people don’t like opera simply because they know nothing about it, but the minute you bring it to them, they readily admit that they didn’t realize they could enjoy it. If every classically trained singer were to bring opera back to his/her community, the performing arts wouldn’t be in any form of crisis whatsoever. I completely agree with what Russell Willis Taylor said in an interview you posted on your blog earlier this year. Just as any professional, we have to do a better job of showing the unique value we add, and reach out to our own communities if we want them to come to us.”

The project started as a an idea in Heidi’s kitchen, in Glenmont, just seven miles away from downtown Albany, as she was speaking with a student, Katherine McDaniel who had come from Texas for private lessons last Summer. The idea matured quickly and by February, the company was incorporated as a non-profit, had a Board of Directors, an Executive Director, Diana Hernandez, a budget and a fully-fledged program, and a Web site — created by another student, Jessica Utset. Think of the rush to get students, build up a faculty, find a place and a few grants to be up and running on July 19^th! The result is that students signed up from various parts of the country (and not simply students Heidi knew from before, as was the case for my daughter, Sophie, whom she taught at the New England Conservatory). Heidi and Diana found a great location: The College of Saint Rose (how many voice programs have access to an Olympic swimming pool?), and were able to attract the interest of the Albany community on a definitely short notice. What I saw at the gala is that the donors had already made the program theirs. Heidi has assembled a remarkable faculty, including Susan Harwood, Sheryl Woods, Bill Neill, Jeremy Frank, Martin Hennessy, Roger Malouf, Arlene Shrut, as well a meditation guru, Lance Brunner (also Associate Professor of Musicology), MaryBeth D. Smith from the Feldenkrais Center of Houston, and local yoga instructor Susan Hoffman. Incidentally, William (Bill) Neill, who has traveled the world, taught and coached many well-known singers (including Ben Heppner), a Don José who spoke to Carmen in multiple languages, did admit to me that he had never visited Albany… and not yet its most famous restaurant, Angelo’s 677!

A few students backstage (photo MaryBeth Smith)

The program, coupled with a Concert Series of seven performances open to the public, is noticeably different from what is most customarily offered to young singers. “Young singers, singers altogether, aren’t just machines that you crank up and bang! they sing. They have a body, they have a soul, they are human beings, and the voice is the expression of who they are as a person. It’s unfortunate that schools and conservatories rarely include meditation, yoga, Feldenkrais, and sports as part of the curriculum as I believe they should. I want the students to be in a situation where they can give the best of themselves at any stage of their personal development. It’s just as hard to be a singer as it is to be an athlete. We have to help them build a personal discipline, care for them.” And it’s clear that RESONANZ cares. In fact, I was very surprised to find out that the site doesn’t only provide bios for the Faculty, but also for the students! In short, they are not simply anonymous entities paying for tuition fees.

Heidi Skok and Diana Hernandez are already outlining their strategy for the months to come and definitely plan to continue this Summer program.

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

For more information:

About RESONANZ: http://resonanz-rasif.com/Home.html

About Heidi Skok: http://www.heidiskok.com

Heidi refers to a post that I wrote in March 2009. Russell Willis Taylor is the CEO of National Arts Strategies: http://delbourg-delphis.com/2009/03/the-recession-an-awakening-experience-conversation-with-russell-willis-taylor/

Update Sept. 3, 2009: Cory Pesaturo is the first American to win a World Accordion Championship for the United States in 25 years. The competition, called the 62^nd Coupe Mondiale World Accordion Championships, is the most prestigious International Accordion competition in the world, and this year, was held on August 25-29, 2009 in Auckland, New Zealand. Below is my original February post: 

Cory Pesaturo, 22, is the only student who ever graduated as an accordionist (2008) from the New England Conservatory (NEC), the oldest conservatory in this country, located in Boston. “I didn’t go to NEC to study accordion,” Cory says. “I had had fabulous teachers, such as Tulio Gasperini, and later, Lou Ludovico. I was 17, and I had already won several competitions. At that point, what I was looking for, was to become a powerful musician. NEC’s Contemporary Improvisation and Jazz departments are among the best in the world; they’re quite open about accordion and know that it’s becoming cool again, and they gave me fantastic training in multiple musical genres from folk styles to classical and, of course, jazz. Now, I am out there to help people enjoy the multiple facets of this instrument.”

Death and Transfiguration: There is a better way…
In music, just as in any domain, the entrepreneurial fearlessness starts with the strong conviction that “there is a better way…” Entrepreneurs innovate by bringing new ideas but also, and more often, by revisiting, challenging, or reframing established concepts, methods, or products. “I am kind of a rebel in the accordion world. Part of the tradition hampers the perception of what you can do with an accordion.” Cory says. “Some accordionists play the same tunes over and over again; worse, they play it the same way. The end result is that preservationists have almost killed what they loved most. I have to fight an old image of the accordion that’s ingrained in the mind of my parents’ generation – not my parents, thank God! This middle generation sometimes looks down upon the instrument. Their parents and grandparents liked accordion, but by the end of the 1960s, what people sometimes call the “Golden Age of the Accordion” was dying quickly. Although, to be fair to the middle generation in this country, their disaffection wasn’t completely unjustified because of the advent of rock and roll. The silver lining, though, is that my generation did not have the chance to hate the accordion since it was already dead, and, to us, it’s a new thing almost.” Because of this “death,” blinders are removed for Cory’s generation. “I tend to do all of the genres,” he says. “I play French. I play Italian. Spanish. Jazz. Classical. Romanian. Klezmer. Funk stuff. Zydeco and Cajun music, and I love to try anything. One day, Dick Contino, a accordion legend, told me that I had what was needed to bring back the accordion. It’s quite a task. But my mission is to do it, or at least significantly contribute to doing this in this country. I owe this to Dick, to my other role models, my friend Eddie Monteiro, extraordinary players of the past such as Charles Magnante or of the present, such as Ionica Minune, who is able to play at supersonic speed innovatively for ten consecutive minutes, and of course to the man who was the first to play jazz on the accordion Art Van Damme. My musical education at NEC in Jazz has enabled me to look at the whole accordion world with a different perspective.” There, Cory is also very passionate when he speaks of his three main role models in Jazz, Arthur Tatum (1909 –1956), Sten Getz (1927 –1991), and Bill Evans (1929-1980). “Basically, when you get into the Jazz world, you learn all the tools you need to do most anything…”

A glimpse at Cory’s talents: you can navigate inside and through as well as zoom-in/out the pictures and videos – and also in full screen.

“…And the digital world helps it’s image to become cool as well.”
Like many accordionists, Cory owns several accordions. “We tend to collect a lot,” he says, “because each one has a different sound. My dad has become good at fixing them. One of my favorites used to belong to Charles Nunzio, one of the great pioneers of the instrument. He had studied with Pietro Frosini. It has a beautiful “wet” musette kind of sound – as opposed to a “dry” sound that is more for classical music. I love my Sonola, and, of course, my Roland. It’s a brand new innovation that came up a couple of years ago. A completely digital accordion. They have developed a new technology for the bellows, so it stays realistic for players. I can go back and forth from the acoustic to the Roland and it doesn’t affect my playing. The Roland has 800 accordion sounds on it. So you have anything you want. It’s MIDI capabilities open up limitless doors for any sound on the planet. But know that at Roland, they are not trying to take over the accordion world. They just want to give accordionists an accordion that they can do anything with, to sit next to the ones they already have. Guys in my age group love it and I can see that people of all generations relate very well to it. I am one of their US demonstrators so I currently travel around for them and participate in various trade-shows, and demonstrate the instrument to the accordion world. For example, I was at the NAMM fair in Annaheim.”

Hard work
In addition to practicing his accordion everyday, transcribing and arranging, Cory works like crazy. Taking care of business means building an audience, getting known by the people in the business of innovation who like music, by all sorts of players in the entertainment industry, the video game world – any world in fact. He plays everywhere, for an amazingly diverse audience, and he participates in a large number of festivals. He has recently recorded two CDs with George Garzone and his band “The Fringe”, and has been performing with them in the Boston and Providence region. He is an absolute fan of Formula 1 that he has watched since he was 2 years old. He is currently working on a Formula1 book/statistics that, he believes, will change the way people look upon the sports history and its champions – and his music is regularly played on Formula 1 broadcasts. And he has another hobby, also work-intensive. He is known to many as “The Snowman” for his meteorological work (he may be the only non-formally trained meteorologist TV guy in Rhode Island). His 2005 Atlantic Hurricane Season compilation (http://www.weathermatrix.net/tropical/2005records.htm) has been used by virtually everybody. He likes applied statistics “almost” as much as Accordion.

Cory is kind, easy-going, charismatic and fun to be with. No wonder he has lots of fans… including Bill and Hillary Clinton: “I had won a National championship in my age group when I was 12. My uncle sent a tape to the White House because they had amateurs play at Christmas time; they saw the tape and they liked it. They called me to go in; my parents and I went down and I played in a hallway in the White House; my dad kept pushing to get me to play right near where Bill was and he ended up asking me to play for him privately during a break. We hit it off and we have been friends ever since basically. I went back three more times and I have played for him and Hillary on 10 different occasions since 1999 till now.”

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

To know more:

About Cory Pesaturo – and his impressive achievements: http://www.corypesaturo.com/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Pesaturo

About some of the big names in accordion and jazz that I mention in this post: it is easy to find extensive information about all of them via Google. I also suggest that you listen to the videos posted on YouTube.

A Jew Among the Indians: this year’s BMOP’s winning composition: The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), a major orchestra dedicated exclusively to performing, commissioning, and recording new music, presented its 11th annual Boston ConNECtion concert on January 17th at Jordan Hall (Gil Rose, conductor) featuring works by William Thomas McKinley, Michael Gandolfi, Peter Maxwell Davies, John Heiss, Kati Agócs, and Matti Kovler’s Cokboy – A Jew Among the Indians. Right after she saw this final version of Matti’s piece, my daughter, Sophie Delphis, sent me an enthusiastic email, of which this is an abstract:  “I have seen Matti’s piece in a number of transformations this past year: with piano, with a small group of non-classical musicians, and now with an orchestra. In this third version, the wider palette of sounds available to him has apotheosized his vision. The reaction I hear from the majority of people about him, and specifically this piece, is their surprise at the broad range of sources that find themselves into his music. It is certainly not every young, contemporary composer who has the knowledge and the courage to explore both “schmaltzy” and abstract motives, and incorporate them so easily into the same piece. It is only fitting then, perhaps, for Matti to work with a large ensemble, wherein the breadth of soundscape can corroborate the breadth of his material. Cokboy is in many ways an epitome of Matti, the man: sensitive, Romantic, part mystical, part comical.”

Meet with Matti Kovler: Matti Kovler, 28, was born in the Soviet Union and
 spent his childhood in Moscow, where he started to play the piano and write small
 pieces. When he was 10, 
his family emigrated to Jerusalem and he encountered the Hungarian-born composer Andre
 Hajdu (who studied at the Paris Conservatoire National de Musique under Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen). By his late teens, Matti was already a successful composer and had an opera already staged, Ami and
 Tammy, inspired by the story of Hansel and Gretel. Following his army service in Israel, he received his
 bachelor’s degree from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance (working with Menachem Wiesenberg and Michael Wolpe). He earned his master’s degree from the New England Conservatory (NEC), and is currently working towards his Ph.D., also at NEC.  His teachers and mentors in this country include John Heiss, Anthony Coleman, and Michael Gandolfi, to name a few. He was a 
Tanglewood Fellow in the composition program in Summer 2008.

Many high-tech entrepreneurs bootstrap their companies. Artists bootstrap their entire existence and live from their ability to express themselves – and can do this quite successfully. This is the case with Matti, who makes a living as the current director of the
 NEC Children’s Choirs, teaches privately piano and composition, receives scholarships and gets commissions for his compositions, the latest one being the commission of a large scale vocal orchestral work from Carnegie Hall for the Osvaldo Golijov and Dawn Upshaw Workshop (to be performed on May 9 &10). His goals? To work even more and be able to create a touring company one day.

Sophie Delphis & Marylene Delbourg-Delphis 

More about Matti Kovler:

http://www.myspace.com/mattikovler: This site offers an earlier version of A Jew Among the Indians as well as Shoresh Nishmat, performed at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall during a concert celebrating Israel’s
 60th anniversary, as well as his Clarinet Quintet. Upcoming performances include his
 string orchestra piece Nineveh, scheduled to premiere in Boston on
 January 31, 2009. 

http://www.mattikovler.com: More compositions are offered on this personal site, especially  Enosh, a rock opera, and the The Escape of Jonah, an oratorio that was performed at the
 Jerusalem Music Center in June 2008.

www.newenglandconservatory.edu/prep/ensembles/children_chorus.html

More about Jerome Rothenberg: Born in New York in 1931 from Polish-Jewish immigrants, Rothenberg is certainly one of the most prominent American poets, and an amazing translator and anthologist. He is the author over seventy books. For details see:

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/rothenberg/bio.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Rothenberg

Incidentally, for high-tech readers, he is the father of Matthew Rothenberg, who worked for Ziff Davis for a number of years and is now the Director for editorial and content at The Ladders (http://www.theladders.com).

More about Zoomorama: http://wla.zoomorama.com (Special thanks to Franklin Servan-Schreiber)