"Making music for captive audiences"

A chamber group wows detainees
by Colleen Walsh

The Boston Globe, February 12, 2006

A defining moment in the musical career of Cambridge resident Tim Merton came at an unlikely location: New York's Sing Sing Prison, in the midst of 40 muscular inmates.

The visiting cellist admits that at first he was a little uneasy. "It was like, 'Wow, what are we doing here?' " said Merton, who, accompanied by a pianist, was performing a

classical concert for the men.

But once the music began, he said, everything changed.

"It just melted away. There wasn't any fear at all," Merton said of his feelings about the prisoners, who were instantly engaged in the repertoire of composers including Leos Janacek and Bohuslav Martinu. "I'd never had an audience like that, [one] that was so really listening and focused on what we were doing," said Merton. ''They were not easily accessible pieces, but they sure got them."

For Merton, the experience was a lasting one. Two years later, when he formed his own group, he knew part of its mission would be bringing music to people who ''don't have access to it, for one reason or another."

Today, Merton's Sarasa Chamber Music Ensemble, a collection of about 60 professional musicians from around the country and Europe, focuses mainly on early classical music. Along with a traditional concert series in Cambridge and Concord, the group performs outreach concerts at adult and teenage correctional facilities, nursing homes, senior centers, and schools from New England to India.

Though he initially planned to do more work with adult prison programs, Merton said he hit a "brick wall" getting Massachusetts prisons to listen to him. "They just passed me off from one person to the next," he said. So he turned his focus to youth detention centers that were more than willing to have his group perform.

"They will change their whole schedule just to have us come," he said. Along with its outreach concerts, Sarasa offers three-week residency programs, in which a subset of the ensemble visits a youth facility several times to collaborate with the teens, who get to play percussion instruments

"I think music is very important for them," said Nancy Carter, director of the Spectrum Girls Program at the Metro Youth Services Center in Dorchester, a juvenile detention facility the ensemble visits regularly. "There's an environment that you can't make a mistake, and the girls become very confident in just trying."

On a recent bitter Tuesday morning, the atmosphere was electric at the Dorchester detention center. Tenor Ryan Turner and mezzo-soprano Krista River's version of Purcell's "Sound The Trumpet," accompanied by cello and keyboard, had heads nodding and feet tapping. Hands instantly shot up after the last note.

"You don't get like out of breath?" asked one young teen.

"You guys have a beautiful voice," said another.

"Can I get some free lessons?," one girl inquired.

After an aria from Mozart's "Don Giovanni" and a performance of Faure's "The Swan" with cello and keyboard that inspired an impromptu pas de deux by two teens, the girls performed a set of South African songs. Merton asked the 16 teens what they dreamed of becoming. One answered, "a social worker to help kids that are in places like these."

One soft-spoken teen with a beautiful singing voice, who dreams of making it on the TV show "American Idol," said the program helps her cope. "Being here is not the end of the world," she said after performing with them and singing two solos. "You can always bounce back from this."

Colleen Walsh can be reached at mailto:ciweek@globe.com

This story originally appeared in the Boston Globe, February 12, 2006