BY COLIN O'BRIAN
Seated next to a baby grand in a Morningside Heights apartment
that seems to breathe music from every corner, Vita Wallace
divulges a bit of history.
"It's a legend in our family that [George] Gershwin
wrote 'Porky and Bess' at our relatives' summer house
in Westport, Conn.," says the 30-year-old violinist,
who is one-half of the Orfeo Duo.
The relatives are her great-uncle and aunt, Abraham and
Rochelle Garbat, who invited newly arrived Russian Jewish
musicians to play in their apartment during the 1920s.
Today, Vita and her brother Ishmael Wallace, 34, a pianist/composer
and the other half of the Orfeo Duo, carry on their family
tradition of bringing musicians and their neighbors together.
Partnering with churches, libraries and civic associations,
they promote a series of workshops and performances throughout
their neighborhood, which the soft-spoken Ishmael modestly
describes as "anywhere we can get to by foot."
Vita quickly adds, "One of the nice things about
that is that it avoids the really common phenomenon of
delineating your neighborhood by race. By defining our
neighborhood by where we can walk to -and we are strong
walkers- we can include a lot of different cultures and
a lot of wonderful music the wouldn't be on our program
otherwise."
Ishmael and Vita started playing music at age 8 and 4
respectively, both on the piano; Vita began playing violin
at 6. |
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This year, they plan not only to continue leading composition
workshops. but also to experiment with new performance venues
and styles, incorporating gospel and Latin influences into
their work. With the assistance of a grant they received
from the D'Addario Foundation, they recently produced a
program along with El Taller Latino Americano, a neighborhood
Latino cultural center. It included El Taller's founder,
guitarist Bernado Palombo, performing Latin music by neighborhood
composers.
One of the more unusual programs the Wallaces have planned
for this year is a collaboration with Elizabeth Adams: in
a community garden on their block, they will perform music
written for instruments made from things one would find
in a garden - like gourds and bits of trees.
Adams, 27, has worked on five different organic farms over
the years, and her love of gardening inspired her to compose
music for performances in the neighborhood patch of green.
The idea of the concerts, Adams says, is "to introduce
the gardners to each other, and to the musicians."
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They
started the Orfeo Duo (The name was inspired by the
film "Black Orpheus") in 1984, when Ishmael
was 13 and Vita was 9, and they have been performing
together ever since.
They studied music at Mannes College of Music, on
W. 85th St.;Vita received a diploma in performance
and Ishmael received a master's degree in performance
and composition. |
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It
marks the residences of such notables of the
past as Gershwin, Bela Bartok and Billy Strayhorn,
as well as present-day composers such as the
Wallaces' neighbor around the corner, Mark
Ettinger, and Elizabeth Adams, whose music
they will be performing March 19 at the Nicholas
Roerich Museum. |
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"We
are going to use invented instruments," she adds,
"some of which will be made out of vegetables,
and others which will be made out of found objects
such as tin cans. Some of the music will be fully
composed and rehearsed beforehand, while others pieces
will be improvisational, where people can just walk
in and perform with us."
Adams, who studied music at Columbia University and
lives on the Wallaces' street, says that the siblings'
work makes a tangible impact on the people of Morningside
Heights. |
Today. between their work the Orfeo Duo and other
ensembles, as well as Ishmael's teaching private students,
they are able to practice their craft full time.
In 2003, the siblings started their neighborhood music
program, called What a Neighborhood!,
not only to introduce their music and that of other
composers to the people of the neighborhood, but to
tell the story of the neighborhood itself. "We
started out by celebrating our community through the
work of living, local composers," Ishmael says.
"Later on, in the last few years, we have expanded
what we do slightly. We're celebrating the human richness
of our neighbors, even the ones who aren't composers.
We've been adding oral history, inviting neighbors
to tell their stories to our audience."
Vita goes into an adjacent room in the cheerful apartment
apartment they share and comes back with a map indicating
the residences of over 100 composers in the area from
94th St. to 145th St. and from the Hudson River to
Lenox Ave. She and Ishmael display it at all of their
performances. The map bristles with red pennants on
pins indicating where each composer lives.
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That same performance will feature parts of a new
cantata that Ishmael is composing based on interviews
he conducted of some of the neighborhood's homeless.
He explains:" I thought, why not celebrate the
neighborhood, especially the neighborhood's most vulnerable,
through our neighbors' own words?"
In addition to performing. the Orfeo Duo has been
conducting composition workshops and improvisational
jam sessions for neighborhood children. Last summer,
they conducted a workshop for five composers whose
ages ranged from 6 to 13. The children wrote pieces
for piano and violin that Ishmael and Vita later performed.
"It was such a joy!" Ishmael exclaims.
"The music was really. really fresh."
Vita agrees. "What was wonderful about it was
that everyone in the audience was inspired by it.
They had the feeling that if these kids could write
beautiful music, 'I could do it too!" |
"Whenever I walk on the street with them, somebody
always says hello to them," she says. "There
are many musicians and composers in the neighborhood,
but the Orfeo Duo are the only ones who are making
connections between the musicians, composers, and
the neighborhood as a whole. They are so generous
with their time and their talents."
Through What a Neighborhood!, the
Wallaces have discovered that bringing out the joy
of music in others is the most meaningful part of
their work as musicians.
"Composers can get lonely," Ishmael notes,
"and we sometimes ask ourselves, 'Is our music
making the world a better place?' ... What we realized,
above all is the good, creative work comes about,
not in a vacuum, not in the desert, but in the context
of a community." |
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