FRIDAY MUSICALE NEWS

New festival at Friday Musicale fills a gap for young classical musicians

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 23:59:52 -0400

BY: Charlie Patton
Florida Times-Union

For young classical musicians, summer in Jacksonville has traditionally been a dead period, offering few opportunities to perform.

To fill that gap, Friday Musicale has launched an Emerging Young Artists festival, which consists of four concerts featuring 14 musicians over two weekends.

It begins Friday night with a program of chamber music. Sunday there will be a jazz concert. The following weekend, there will be a chamber music performance on Friday, Aug. 5, and performances by four soloists on Sunday, Aug. 7.
In addition to providing the participating musicians a chance to perform, the festival will match the musicians with mentors. The mentors will not only coach them as they prepare to play, but will also offer counseling on how to build careers as professional musicians.

Friday Musicale's President Henson Markham said he has been gratified by the enthusiasm the musicians have shown. At a recent meeting, "the excitement was just incredible," he said.

One of the young musicians is Likai He, a 16-year-old violinist who won the Marian Waterman Caldwell Scholarship from Friday Musicale and also won the Jacksonville Symphony Youth Orchestra's Young Artists Competition. He will perform in the chamber music concert on Friday, Aug. 5, and will be one of the soloists on Sunday, Aug. 7.

He will work with Timothy Edwards, who plays and teaches violin and is co-director of the festival. Edwards said that until recently most college music programs offered little in the way of career counseling, though that is changing.

As the son of two musicians, He perhaps has more of a sense of how to build a career than some of the other young musicians in the festival. His father, Jianjun He, teaches composition and music theory at Jacksonville University, and his mother, Lan Zhang, sings opera.

But He said he is looking forward to working with Edwards as he rehearses for the chamber music concert.
"I have no experience in chamber music," He said.

Although He has not yet graduated from The Bolles School, he will enroll at Columbus State University in Georgia in the fall and study under violin professor Sergiu Schwartz.

Edwards said he only recently met He but knows him by reputation as a very promising musician.

"I know you are a talented musician," Edwards told He at a recent meeting. "I know you are very dedicated. You know how to practice."

Markham and Christopher Heacox, Friday Musicale's director, both praised He as a gifted musician with a bright future. Heacox said that Christine Clark, who preceded Markham as president, often spoke of her wish that Friday Musicale be a place where kids could start learning a love of classical music and then "eventually come back to perform as professional musicians."

The new festival "bridges that gap," he said. The performers selected for the festival are all "very talented kids," he said.

Other players are Joseph Engol, violoncello, Jacksonville University; Rebekah Morgan, violin, a Douglas Anderson School of the Arts graduate who will attend Florida State University; Ian Fell, violin, Creekside High School; Jake Tuttle, piano, a Douglas Anderson graduate who will attend FSU; Matthew Young, piano, Oberlin Conservatory of Music; Hannah Fell, flute, Creekside High; Leah Chappell, cello, FSU; Nickie Whaley, viola, Stetson University; Brent Pafford, piano, Stetson; Peter Dutilly, viola, JU; Joseph Henderson, violin, Douglas Anderson graduate who will attend the University of North Florida; Hannah Meloy, soprano, UNF; and Brittany L. Maroncy, cello, just graduated from UNF.

Both Sunday concerts are at 6 p.m. Both Friday concerts are at 7:30 p.m. All concerts are free to the public. Friday Musicale is at 645 Oak St.

charlie.patton@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4413

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Jacksonville classical music 'impresario' takes over at Friday Musicale

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 00:26:47 -0400

BY: Charlie Patton
Florida Times-Union

In the summer before he left Jacksonville to enroll in the University of the South, Henson Markham's long-time piano teacher made a prediction.

She said "that while I might not become a professional musician, I would always be in music," Markham, 75, remembered recently.

That made sense. Growing up in Jacksonville, Markham was immersed in music, studying the piano and even playing double bass during the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra's first season.

He did try briefly to be a professional musician when he came back from service in the Army after college, serving as an organist and choirmaster for a church in Boynton Beach. But he didn't enjoy it.

So, he headed for New York, "a timid little Southern boy in the Big Apple," and proved his piano teacher right. Markham spent about 30 years in New York and New England in the music business before returning to Jacksonville 20 years ago.

Since coming back, he has become what his friend Jeanne Huebner calls the "impresario" of Jacksonville's classical music scene, a man with a gift for finding classically trained musicians and putting them together.
"When a new musician crosses the Duval County line, he seems to know it," she said. "He brings them together and lets the chemistry work."

"His knowledge of chamber music is so vast," said Christine Clark, immediate past president of Friday Musicale, that he has been able to "expand the repertoire" of the musicians with whom he works. And that's quite a few musicians.
Markham organizes the Chamber Music Society of the Good Shepherd, a monthly gathering of classical players that now performs in Riverside's Church of the Good Shepherd, but that began in Markham's San Marco living room.
For the past seven years, he has served as music director of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Jacksonville, arranging for short concerts before Sunday services and occasionally performing in them (these days he plays the harpsichord).

His latest venture is serving as the first male president of Friday Musicale, the 121-year-old group that presents free weekly concerts each Friday from October through May in its auditorium in the Brooklyn section of Jacksonville.
In recent years, Friday Musicale's leadership has transformed the organization from a social group organized around classical music into a successful professional music organization.

Christopher Heacox was hired as the first executive director, a second staffer was hired to organize rentals, and Friday evening concerts were added after decades of presenting most concerts only at 11 a.m. Fridays.
Clark, Markham's predecessor as president, said she "conferred with Henson every step of the way." She called him "uniquely gifted and experienced for this job."

Heacox, a former executive director of the Riverside Fine Arts Festival, said one of the reasons he agreed to become the first executive director of Friday Musicale last year was because Markham was on the board.

He knew Markham as a successful organizer of music events. What he didn't realize, Heacox said, was that Markham was also an experienced administrator who knew the business side of the music world.

Markham worked for the New York City Opera, New York's second largest opera company, from 1980 to 1984, eventually taking over as the company's director of business and finance. When Markham resigned in 1984, the company's artistic director Beverly Sills credited him with reorganizing the financial department, which she told The New York Times had hardly existed before he arrived.

Markham was running a summer music festival in Binghamton, N.Y., when the declining health of his mother, Wilma, a former Friday Musicale president, prompted him to move back to Jacksonville in 1990. She died in 1995.
Markham, who took over as Friday Musicale president in June, said he has two major goals for his two-year term.
One is to complete the professionalization of the organization, which owns both its auditorium and several adjacent buildings and properties. Friday Musicale generates a lot of income from renting its auditorium, which was rebuilt after a 1995 fire destroyed the building it had occupied since 1923, and the adjacent L'Engle Hall.

He would also like to institute a summer season that would present weekly concerts in July and August, filling a gap in the classical musical calendar in Jacksonville. This summer, Friday Musicale scheduled two summer concerts. The second, which takes place at 7:30 p.m. Friday, will include three classical pieces and two jazz performances. The concluding piece will feature Jahan Sweet and Jamaar Woods doing "Jazz Improvisations for Two Steinways." That will show off what Markham considers one of Friday Musicale's signature strengths: its ownership of two Steinway concert grand pianos.

Markham, a grandfather of two, says the city's classical music scene has changed greatly since he left for college.
Today Jacksonville has a "resident body of wonderful musicians," thanks to the presence of the symphony. In his boyhood, he said, there were only a handful of really good classical players in town.

But that older Jacksonville was full of people who appreciated classical music. Every school in town had a strong music program. He worries that today's audience for classical music is rapidly graying, a situation made steadily worse by "the lack of music programs in the public schools."

charlie.patton@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4413

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Jacksonville musician brings largely unknown 'black Mozart' to life

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 15:02:11 -0400

BY: Tonyaa Weathersbee
Florida Times-Union

When Tyrone Tidwell hops in his car and heads off to do a concert, other drivers almost always do a double-take.
It's not every day that they see a guy dressed in ruffles and a glittery coat, reminiscent of 18th-century France. And for those who happen to know a thing or two about the garb of that period, chances are they'd expect the wearer to top that costume off with a powdered wig.

Not shoulder-length dreadlocks.

"When I do the black Mozart, I roll them up," said Tidwell, who for the past year has performed in schools and other venues as Chevalier de Saint-Georges — the son of a French planter and a slave who became known as a swordsman and one of the most important European classical composers.

"I've driven down the road in my costume, and they all look. ... To tell you the truth, I don't think they know what to think."

But Tidwell, who plays his violin as the black Mozart as part of Friday Musicale's ongoing initiative to bolster music education and an appreciation for classical music in Jacksonville, said he decided to perform as Chevalier de Saint-Georges not just because he enjoys playing the instrument, but because it gives him a chance to introduce youths and others in Jacksonville to a black trailblazer history almost forgot.

"Kids these days would never guess that there was a black composer who was known as the black Mozart," Tidwell said. "They ask about my upbringing, and how I was brought up in terms of music. But most are impressed that there was a black Mozart."

One of the first people to become impressed with Chevalier de Saint-Georges' life was Henson Markham. Markham, artistic director of the Chamber Music Society of the Church of the Good Shepherd, said he had known about the black Mozart for 40 or 50 years, but after reading a recent biography of him, began to look for ways to introduce the public to his music and contributions.

So Markham began culling together a group of people to put a show together and asked Tidwell, a member of the chamber society, to re-enact Chevalier de Saint-Georges' life on stage. Tidwell agreed - so far this year, he's done three performances.

"He [Chevalier de Saint-Georges] was the first person of African descent involved in classical music," Markham said. "He was incredible, and he's not recognized in music history or in French Revolution history. The only ones who remember him are the fencers.

"Chevalier wrote nine or 10 operas ... only one has survived."

That's one reason Tidwell, who works as a bank teller manager during the day, relishes doing the part of Chevalier de Saint-Georges. He wants to see his musical legacy survive - as well as ensure his own creative survival.

And when it comes to surviving, the 30-year-old Tidwell has met many challenges - starting from the day he was born.
Tidwell was born prematurely in Denver. His mother, who was an Army nurse, was ultimately sent to Italy, where he lived until he was 5. After that, they moved back to the United States, to Charlotte, N.C., where he grew up.
It was there, while he was in fifth grade, he had to learn an instrument.

"I wanted to play the flute, but everyone else wanted to play wind instruments," Tidwell said. "So they asked, 'Do you want to play the viola?' I'm like, 'Yeah, whatever.'

"I hated it. They would pull me out of class to go to the music room to orchestra rehearsal. I wouldn't go. It got to the point where I got an incomplete on my report card."

Tidwell's mother, however, wasn't pleased with him receiving an incomplete grade in orchestra. After some chewing out, he and his mother struck a deal in which she urged him to give the viola a chance for at least two years. He did - and wound up loving it.

In fact, Tidwell loved it so much he majored in music at Ithaca College in Ithaca, N.Y. He was working on his master's at the Irish World Music Center at the University of Limerick in Ireland when, in 2003, he was in an accident that left him paralyzed.

"I couldn't speak, and I lost my memory," he said. "It was tough. ... It was very, very tough."

After three months in an Irish hospital, Tidwell returned to Charlotte, where he received physical therapy and worried whether he'd ever be able to play again.

"Because of the head injury, it caused a difference in my love for music," he said. "I called my mom and I said: 'That's it. I don't want to play anymore.' I started crying, because this was what I had been doing since I was 10.
"I gave it all up to God."

Still, Tidwell's stubborn desire to continue to make music helped him recover, and when his mother was transferred to Jacksonville, Tidwell began playing again. He began teaching private violin lessons - today he has 10 students - and he even plays his viola and violin in a local rock band called Something to Yield.

But his performances as Chevalier de Saint-Georges are particularly fulfilling, he said, because of the challenges Chevalier had to overcome in his life being of mixed-race ancestry at a time when slavery was alive and ideas about black inferiority were in full force.

"Chevalier de Saint-Georges was born [in 1745] in the French colony of Guadeloupe, where his father saw to it that he had private tutors and other advantages. Eventually, they all moved to Paris, where he became an expert fencer. He got the title chevalier, which means knight, bestowed upon him by King Louis XV after winning a fencing match with a famous swordsman, Picard.

He became a classical composer and violinist whose audiences filled concert halls, and he also started a movement in France to try and end slavery.

"Since he was mixed, it gave him some benefits, but even still, he got a lot of flak. ... He had to work twice as hard," Tidwell said. "The divas at the Paris Opera House didn't want to take orders from a black man. ... He went through all these trials and tribulations because he was black, and he still managed to do all these great things. ... He became the first black colonel of the infantry in France.

"It's a very cool history to go through."

And, Markham said, Tidwell is the ideal person to bring that history to life.

"Tyrone just has natural flair," he said.

tonyaa.weathersbee@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4251

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Young pianists from Jacksonville to perform at Friday Musicale

Fri, 8 Jan 2010 13:00:01 -0500

BY: The Sun
Florida Times-Union

The Friday Musicale, 645 Oak St. in Riverside, will have its annual Outstanding Young Pianists concert at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 29, as a part of its 120th concert season, according to a news release.  The musicale cultivates music through educational outreach, scholarship and concert performances. The piano performance, free to the public, will include compositions by Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, Billy Joel and more by exceptional piano students from the greater Jacksonville area.  Here's a look at the pianists: - Jacksonville Beach Elementary School fifth-grader Victoria Ge, winner for grades 5-6, started piano in August 2005 at age 6 with award-winning teacher Peggy Edwards.  - Fruit Cove Middle School eighth-grader Yuchen Wang, the winner for grades 7-8, started playing piano at age 8. He's been studying with Sandra Stewart for the past five years. Yuchen also plays trombone in the Fruit Cove Middle School jazz band and was recently selected to play in the 2010 All-State Honors band in Tampa.  - Stanton College Preparatory School freshman Woobin Han, the winner for grades 9-10, has been playing piano since he was 6. At 9, he began formal studies under the tutelage of Lisa Smith. For the past three years, he has been a private student of Mary Lou Wesley Krosnick.  - Douglas Anderson School of the Arts senior Juan Carlos Rogers, winner for grades 11-12, began playing at age 11 at LaVilla School of the Arts. He has been studying privately with pianist Aida Ribiero since 2004.

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Friday Musicale continues to rise with new executive director

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:59:10 -0400

BY: KAY DAY
JACKSONVILLE LIVE MUSIC EXAMINER

Friday Musicale, the oldest music organization in the state of Florida, is moving on up with new executive director Chris Heacox. The Jacksonville based music organization is well-known for offering the public more than 30 live performances free each year. In addition to the performances, the Riverside headquarters is a popular, budget friendly venue for recitals, weddings and other social functions. Heacox grew up in the Mandarin community in Jacksonville, and has worked in the arts all his life in different parts of the country. His firsthand knowledge of the community here gives him unique assets in managing the 120 year old organization.  The Florida Times Union interviewed Heacox who said, "I've taken on more of the financial operations of the company, which is something the operation has outsourced before, and bringing my expertise in presenting concerts here and elsewhere.”  Friday Musicale concert schedules are arranged conveniently. For music lovers working downtown or for those with flexible schedules, there are morning performances in addition to the traditional evening performances.   A sampling of upcoming events reflects diversity in instruments and styles. In November, Lauren Franklin’s cello meets Maria Salabasheva’s piano with favorites by Mendelssohn and other classical composers. Both women have won international recognition for their talents.   Another November treat arrives with a performance by Enhake. The Friday Musicale website says, “[E]nhake (in-HA-kee) is an emerging classical chamber ensemble comprised of members from South Korea and the United States. Drawing its name from the Seminole (Creek) word for sound or call, Enhake is committed to bringing sublime chamber music to its audience with a sincere respect and love for the score. Its distinctive instrumentation (clarinet-cello-violin-piano) allows its musicians the flexibility to perform repertoire from the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras to the most captivating contemporary works.”  In December the popular Christmas Concert features the Friday Musicale Chorus.  A full listing of events and descriptions through 2010 is available at the Friday Musicale website. All feature notable performers; one that offers a memory in the making is a performance by noted pianist Dr. Kevin Sharpe.  For those in search of a calm break from the frenetic pace of our times, Friday Musicale’s morning concerts are guaranteed to relieve the mind of conflict. The evening concerts give the feel of a night on the town in the big city. Area restaurants and eateries are nearby, making it easy to have a full leisurely entertainment experience following the concert.  Friday Musicale relies on members for key funding, and information about that option is also on the website.  Jacksonville is a hotbed of live music, with every style and genre represented. From reggae to rap to Southern rock and classical, the city serves up whatever your cup of listening might be. Friday Musicale is a bright note on a big colorful score, and the new executive director is a plus for the organization and the city.   Over the years Friday Musicale has featured world-class artists like Ignace Jan Paderewski, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Nellie Melba and Alma Gluck. Achievements like that mean the organization continues to rise to a level somewhere in the neighborhood of the stars. Literally.

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