An ode to Chicago, a lament of war and the praise of woman’s beauty earned Burlington High School senior Claude Mumbere a second-place finish Tuesday night in the national Poetry Out Loud recitation competition in Washington, D.C.

After competing last year, Mumbere said, all he wanted to do this year was improve on that performance. He left that goal in the dust.

“I came in with the attitude that I was going to the top nine,” he said in a phone interview shortly after the results were announced at 9 p.m. “Making it to the top 3 was just, wow. I was so very excited. Then when they called the third person and it wasn’t me, I was just, like, whoa! I didn’t know what to think. And then when they said second place I was like — ”

His voice trailed off as he searched for the right words. Finally, he said, “Yeah!”

For someone as speechless as Mumbere said he was in the afterglow of the accomplishment, that was a pretty good articulation of his feelings.

Monday, Mumbere’s performances in the semifinals of “Chicago” by Carl Sandburg, “Strange Meeting” by Wilfred Owen and “She Walks in Beauty” by Lord Byron advanced him from the field of 53 state and territorial winners to the final nine.

Those nine met Tuesday night. Mumbere, with a deep voice, precise enunciation and emotional presentations of “Chicago” and “Strange Meeting,” moved on to the top three. A powerful performance of “She Walks in Beauty” landed him the second-place honor, behind Kristen Dupard of Mississippi and ahead of MarKaye Hassan of Utah.

After the results were announced following a competition broadcast live on the Internet, Mumbere, 18, smiled, held his trophy aloft and exchanged embraces with the first- and third-place finishers, including one big group hug. He also took home a medal and a $10,000 prize.

“I was thinking this was like a dream, like somebody was going to splash water on my face and I was going wake up,” Mumbere said. “I was just ecstatic. This has been an amazing, amazing day and an amazing, amazing year.”

Mumbere can trace his success to a great, deep voice and to his discipline, including rehearsing and going to bed early even after he arrived Sunday in Washington, said Erika Lowe, a Burlington High School English teacher who accompanied Mumbere. She helps run Poetry Out Loud at the school.

“He was really here to win it and not be distracted by socializing like most high-school kids are,” said Lowe, who praised her student as a natural talent whose hard work helped him advance through local, state and national levels in the competition. “When you think about the fact that there were 365,000 kids who participated in this, and he placed second, that’s pretty astounding.”

Mumbere said he focused on the dramatic levels in the poems he recited — noticing last year that some of the competitors were fairly subdued throughout their performances. Some sections of a poem are delicate, he said, “and other parts you have to be like a lion and attack.”

He used those louder moments to grab and hold the judges’ attention, he said.

In an interview before the finals, Mumbere said Byron’s 1814 poem in praise of a woman’s dazzling beauty and fine spirit went over especially well in the semifinals.

“It was short and sweet and delicate, and I think I made a very strong selection, so it sort of helped me out,” he said.

With just a few hours to go before the push for the title and the $20,000 prize that goes with first place, Mumbere said he was anticipating stiff competition.

“It’s the best nine in the country, so it’s going to be a very rough road,” he said. “I’ve been getting a lot of encouragement, a lot of support, so that should hopefully boost my confidence up a little bit.”

He said he appreciated texts from supporters at Burlington High School and was planning to complete his usual stress-reliever before the competition Tuesday night: “I do push-ups backstage.”

Mumbere was born in the Congo and came to the U.S. in 2004. After graduation, Mumbere plans to attend St. Lawrence University in New York in the fall.

Students from more than 2,000 high schools took part in the annual Poetry Out Loud contest this year — and Mumbere stood out.

“He has an incredible voice, and he’s also very confident and has a strong presence,” said Lowe, the BHS teacher. “He’s also really pushing himself to improve and work hard.”

Contestants are judged on physical presence, voice and articulation, evidence of understanding, level of difficulty, dramatic performance and overall performance. Poems must be selected from an anthology published as part of the contest. Finalists earn $1,000 and $500 for their high school toward the purchase of poetry.

Poetry Out Loud is a partnership between the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. Judges for Tuesday’s finals included poets Marilyn Chin and Major Jackson, who also is a University of Vermont professor, and “Prairie Home Companion” host Garrison Keillor.

All nine finalists competed in the first two rounds Tuesday, and three were chosen for the last round.

After the finals, Mumbere was beside himself: “I have never been so happy in my whole life.”

Riding the wave of interest in poetry recitation and performance, students from 33 Vermont high schools will be competing in a national competition called Poetry Out Loud. The program builds on the rising interest in poetry as an oral art form, as seen in the slam poetry movement and the popularity of rap music. Students learn about great poetry while mastering public speaking skills and building self-confidence.

One of last year’s students has this to say about the program, “I really enjoy the unique things that Poetry Out Loud brings to schools around the state. For the past two years I have enjoyed watching shy and quiet students in my school get up and recite poems in front of all their peers all because of Poetry Out Loud.”

Vermont’s state finals will take place on Wednesday, March 28th at the Barre Opera House. The two regional semi-finals are at 10 AM and 1PM, and the state final will be held at 4:00 PM. The winner will represent Vermont at the National competition in Washington, DC on May 13-15, 2012. (Participating schools listed below)

The program was created by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, and is administered by the Vermont Arts Council. Now in its sixth year in Vermont, Poetry Out Loud has inspired hundreds of thousands of high school students to discover classic and contemporary poetry.

Poetry Out Loud uses a pyramid structure that begins at the classroom level. Teachers organize contests involving one class or a whole school with the winners advancing to the state finals. Contestants can choose poems from an extensive anthology of classical and contemporary poetry. Vermont’s champion will receive a cash prize of $200 and an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington to compete for the national championship. Their school will receive a $500 stipend for the purchase of poetry books. The runner-up will receive $100, with $200 for their school library.

Students from 53 high schools – champions from every state, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands – will compete for a total of $50,000 in scholarship awards and school stipends at the National Finals. Judges will evaluate student performances on physical presence, articulation, evidence of understanding, level of difficulty, and accuracy. The National Champion will receive a $20,000 college scholarship.

For more information about Vermont’s State Finals, visit www.vermontartscouncil.org.

2012 Participating Schools:

Addison County:
Mt. Abraham Union High School, Bristol
Middlebury Union High School

Bennington County:
Arlington Memorial High School
Burr and Burton Academy, Manchester
Mt. Anthony Union High School, Bennington

Caledonia County:
Lyndon Institute
St. Johnsbury Academy

Chittenden County:
Burlington High School
Champlain Valley Union High School, Hinesburg
Essex High School
Milton High School
Mt. Mansfield Union High School, Jericho
Rice Memorial High School, S. Burlington
South Burlington High School

Franklin County:
Bellows Free Academy, Fairfax
Bellows Free Academy, St. Albans

Lamoille County:
People’s Academy, Morrisville

Orange County:
Blue Mountain Union High School, Wells River
Oxbow Union High School, Bradford
Randolph Union High School
Thetford Academy

Orleans County:
Lake Region Union High, Orleans
North Country UHS, Newport

Rutland County:
Fair Haven Union High School
Mill River Union High School, No. Clarendon
Otter Valley Union High School, Brandon
Rutland High School

Washington County:
Spaulding High School, Barre

Windham County:
Brattleboro Union High School
Twin Valley High School, Wilmington

Windsor County:
Black River High School, Ludlow
Green Mountain Union High School, Chester
The Sharon Academy

MONTGOMERY — I found the remnants of artist Maggie Sherman’s “Mask Montgomery” project piled into a plastic bin, sharing storage space with hockey sticks, skates, and coiled hoses in a chilly log building next to the town ice rink.

Sherman made national news in 1981 when she convinced 403 of Montgomery’s 681 residents to allow her to make plaster casts of their faces which the models then painted and otherwise embellished.

Thirty-one years later, Deanna-Dee Robitaille, a young woman who supervises afternoon activities in the log building, showed me the fate of about 40 of the masks.

“They used to be tacked to that beam up there,” she said, gesturing at the low ceiling. “No one knew what they were or why they were there. They were dusty and I was afraid of wasps, so I took them down.”

One by one, she pulled the masks from the plastic bin. Bits of plaster crumbled under our fingers.

Here was Ralph Grant, who was 63 in 1981 and a dairy farmer on the Jay road. His painted face is still ruddy but the big straw hat atop his mask is as crumpled as waste paper. Tucked into the hatband are a seed catalog picture of a tomato and another of a boy and his cow.

Here was Ralph Grant, who was 63 in 1981 and a dairy farmer on the Jay road. His painted face is still ruddy but the big straw hat atop his mask is as crumpled as waste paper. Tucked into the hatband are a seed catalog picture of a tomato and another of a boy and his cow.

Here were Caroline Daberer, then 59, who had given herself wide blue eyes and two precise little spit curls and Shelley Deuso, her mask a five-year-old’s riot of blue, red and yellow paint. Carlis Lumbra, 69, an asbestos mine worker, apparently declined to apply any color at all. After 30 years, his strong nose and unsmiling mouth still seem a portrait of New England rectitude.

I was fascinated by the mosaic of faces, by this evidence of the diverse workings of the human imagination. Some masks were an explosion of personality; others told literal stories about their makers. Some were ugly, some were minimalist, some were executed with painstaking care and aesthetic flair.

Is this the fate of art, I wondered, to be packed away in an obscure corner, all but forgotten? Is this the ultimate end of works not enshrined in museums?

Other questions quickly followed. Is each of these masks a work of art? Or were they “art” only when they formed a collective portrait of the town? Or perhaps the art was in the making, in the idea of engaging an entire community in a creative work?

And if the plaster faces are not art, what are they?

As I went in search of Montgomery’s masks, I asked those questions again and again, of the men and women who made them, as well as of art professors and working artists.

‘Yes, they are art’

Jeannette Sylvester, a diminutive grandmother, rummaged in the bottom of the coat closet by her front door, looking for her family’s masks.

I asked when she had last thought about them. “Oh my God, I don’t know,” she said. “I just put them in a bag and put them in the closet. Once in a while I see them and say, ‘oh my goodness sakes.’”

The Montgomery masks returned from their tour of New England in the late 1980s. Sherman gave the collection to the town, which stored them at the library. When the old library was to be torn down in 1999 to make way for a new building, the town decided the masks had to go.

Sherman invited townspeople to take their masks home. Many people did, and asked for the masks of departed relatives and former neighbors. The leftovers ended up in the log building at the town recreation center.

Almost no one put the masks on display at home. What hangs on the walls of Montgomery homes are photographs of children and grandchildren; watercolors of the family farm or the Green Mountains; homemade quilts and needlepoint family trees.

Instead, the painted faces are treated more like mementos or keepsakes, carefully — or carelessly — packed away in cardboard boxes in basements, in bottom bureau drawers, in grocery bags hanging on closet hooks.

Elsie Saborowski, who runs the service station in town with her husband and son, has happy memories of decorating her mask with other women at the Grange hall in 1981.

“We were laughing and giggling, we had a lot of fun,” she said.

But are her family’s masks works of art?

“I think they are, in their own way,” she said uncertainly. Her son Derek, who was masked as an 8-year-old boy and now is an auto mechanic, stuck his head in from the service bays.

“Yes, they’re art,” he said. “Anything can be art. Some people are very good at what they do, and they think of that as being artistic. I can create stuff with metal.”

Lawyer Barry Kade, who lost his mask years ago, said the Mask Montgomery project “made no sense” and described his own mask as “one of the least inspired” — although others might disagree. A photograph of the mask shows a face painted in swirls of brown and yellow, its blue eyes open in the spaced-out stare of someone enjoying a marijuana high.

“It clearly was a work of art, but it was a work I didn’t understand,” he said.

‘Good art, bad art’

Kade’s criticism of his mask reminded me that not every Montgomery mask is interesting or a pleasure to look at. Some are ugly. Some of the masks done by adult men are slapdash, clearly the work of someone just trying to get the job over with.

But Nancy Dwyer, a sculptor and chairperson of the University of Vermont Art Department, pointed out that a work of art doesn’t have to be successful to be considered art.

“On the question of what is art, I pretty much go with, the artist gets to tell us,” she said. In this case, she said, “Maggie didn’t just have these people do the masks and then go home. She took the objects and organized them. She was interested in how they would represent her idea of the town.”

The project as a whole, thus, was a work of art.

Montgomery residents may see it differently, and may not display the masks, she said, because “they think, ‘I’m not an artist, how could this be art?’”

“The big misunderstanding about art is that people think the word means high quality. But art is just another thing. There is good art and bad art,” she said.

“If the stuff is valuable to you, keep it on the wall. I’m not sure there is an objective, inherent aesthetic value that can be measured by the god of art,” she said.

‘The story of me’

Richard Ross is one of the few mask project participants who displays his mask, sort of.

A commercial artist who draws delicate pen-and-ink illustrations to accompany patent applications, he surprises visitors who open the little metal door in his living room chimney and find his mask staring at them.

When the mask was made in 1981, Ross was working long hours to make a living from his art while trying to build his house. So his mask has wild hair, a watch dial in one eye (the other is bloodshot, from staying up late), a photo of a house pasted to one cheek, a mouthful of nails, and drawing pens behind one ear.

“It was the story of me,” he said.

“Is it a work of art?” I asked.

There was a long pause.

“I wouldn’t really ...” he paused again. “I had just graduated from art school back then, and I felt that crafts weren’t truly art. But now... yes, I would say it is art,” he said.

The little debate Ross had with himself as we talked reflects the decades-long debate among artists, curators and philosophers about just what constitutes a work of art.

Some of the artists I spoke with questioned whether each individual mask could be considered a work of art.

“I’d not sure I’d consider them art,” said Jan Van Fleet, a mixed media artist in Cabot. “How did painting the mask differ from keeping a diary? The project was created by Maggie, it was not an authentic upwelling of their own. ... Maggie’s art piece was the collection.”

At the Vermont Arts Council, artist Sonia Rae said her work as community services manager has shifted her perspective about whether each mask is a work of art.

“I’m very conscious that there are artists who spend a huge amount of their lives becoming experts. I’m wary of calling anybody who picks up a brush an artist, “ she said. “I might pick up a dentist’s drill, but that doesn’t make me a dentist.

Other artists were unequivocal.

“Oh yes, they’re art,” photographer Peter Miller of Waterbury said quickly. “They are almost post-modern.” Miller photographed all 403 masks, and many of the models, for a story about Mask Montgomery in Smithsonian magazine in 1983.

‘It’s not high art’

Sherman’s Mask Montgomery project happened at a time of particular ferment in the debate over what qualifies as art. It was a time when “outsider art,” the work of self-taught, unconventional artists began to be recognized — over the objections of some authorities — and when conceptual art burgeoned.

“In conceptual art, the idea is more important than the product,” said Christine Campbell, art education coordinator and a senior adjunct professor in the University of Vermont’s studio art program. “There are products, but they won’t be conventional. The art is more about the idea taking place.”

Sherman’s was just such a project.

Decades after the masks were made, she still sparkles with the infectious enthusiasm that helped her persuade the recalcitrant to lie down, be masked, and then create something on the mask’s plaster canvas.

It was people’s participation that was the central work of art, she said.

“It was introducing people to a process they would not normally encounter and encouraging them to keep going with it. They produced something totally unique to them, but taken as a whole, it creates a collective memory of the experience for the community,” she said.

It would be up to someone else, the viewer, to decide whether the masks themselves were works of art, she said.

“It’s not high art — I’ve never gone after that,” she said. “High art is supposed to be museum quality, technically. Low art is primitive, it’s outsider art done by an untrained person with an untrained eye.

“These days, of course, there is a lot of low art in high art places. I wanted to show that this could be a body of work that people are moved by,” she said.

‘In them days...’

Sandie Cota, a Montgomery resident who works at an Enosburg cheese factory, has kept six masks representing four generations of her family.

She has wrapped the masks tenderly in tissue paper — in a box, in a closet. Her father has died since he was masked. Her husband, Bob, a former fire chief, died in January. His mask is in the box, too, its staid expression contrasting with geometric, Mondrian-like blocks of color he painted across his cheeks and forehead.

“My plan was to have a case made to put them in,” Sandie Cota said. “But I haven’t gotten to it.”

The most striking of Cota’s masks is an exquisite plaster portrait of her late grandmother, Virginia Gonyea, whose wrinkled, 85-year-old face stares at the world with sadly puzzled eyes. A fuzz of white hair tops the mask. Look closely and you’ll see an unexpected rhinestone sparkling in her hair.

Cota has kept the bit of oral history Gonyea wrote to accompany her mask when the collection was touring:

“I was born in this town and I’ve always lived here. We lived on a little farm,” it begins. “In them days we didn’t have not even a scatter rug, just softwood floors you’d have to mop two or three times a week ... Neighbors used to tell me I was cut out to be a man. I had worked like a man. I mowed my lawn until last August, but my age is against me.

“I’m old, so I look old. ... I know what life is,” she wrote.

It is stories like Virginia Gonyea’s that galvanize Greg Sharrow’s attention.

Sharrow, folklorist and director of education at the Vermont Folklife Center, said, “Absolutely! Are you kidding?” when I asked him if the masks were worth preserving and perhaps exhibiting.

“Art isn’t just about the object. It is the story it embodies and represents,” he told me. That is what the Folklife Center is after when it involves Vermonters in creating art.

“Part of our mission here is to provide people with the tools to tell stories about themselves. They can do that in different ways, in words, photographs, audio or visual arts,” he said.

“The Montgomery masks were a literal expression of the idea of community, in the way ‘community’ is easiest to define, as a piece of earth,” he said.

The fate of art

Sherman moved to Burlington in 1999. She runs a bed-and-breakfast at her home after a career as what she calls a community celebration artist. She sold her business, Hands-On Productions, two years ago but still does a kind of performance art, appearing as Honey the Waitress.

The mask project brought her national attention and commissions to carry out seven similar projects across the country. In 1986, the Tennessee State Museum commissioned her to create masks of 25 notable Tennesseans, including Gov. Lamar Alexander, musicians B.B. King and Loretta Lynn and NASCAR driver Darrell Waltrip.

“The Mask Montgomery project allowed me to become the artist I became,” she said this winter. “Montgomery is where I grew up.”

Making art has always interested her more than doing something with it afterwards, she said.

“I don’t keep my work, It is ephemeral. I don’t have a vision beyond making the art. I didn’t want to deal with curating it,” she said.

In the case of the masks, preserving the art may not be important, some artists told me.

If it was the idea of the project that was important, the masks themselves are artifacts — almost beside the point, they argued.

“The idea is over, so in a way, putting the masks in plastic bags and putting them away is kind of fitting,” said Campbell, the UVM teacher. “If you wanted your mask because you created it, that’s fine, As a document of this idea, it’s kind of pointless. Making the art was more important than keeping the product.”

‘What is all this junk?’

I understood the two women’s arguments, but it wasn’t entirely satisfying.

I didn’t take part in the Mask Montgomery project, but I still found many of the masks aesthetically pleasing. And as a collection, they seemed compelling to me — especially as I met the people behind the masks, heard their stories and saw how they had revealed themselves in painting their faces.

But there are practical reasons the masks no longer exist as a collection: Sherman had no place to keep them and had moved on in her life. So had people in Montgomery, many of whom had never placed a high value on the project to begin with.

A number of artists told me they confront similar challenges all the time.

“It’s sad. I’m 57 years old. You’re moving around in life and you have all this work that didn’t sell or came back to you. You ask yourself, ‘What IS all this junk?” said Dwyer, the UVM Art Department head.

“Junk?” I exclaimed.

“It feels like that after a while,” she said. The fate of art works “is a huge question today. That’s what museum people are asking. How do we apply this tradition of archiving today? I err on the side of throwing it all out.”

Kathy Stark, an abstract artist who also works at GRACE, the nonprofit arts group in Hardwick that works with amateur artists, is looking for a different solution.

“It is such a big question for artists, one we struggle with all the time,” she said. “What happens to your art when it comes back to you. What happens to it when you are no longer alive?”

Like others I spoke with, she did not have an answer.

Neither did Sharrow, the folklorist, though he was clear that he saw value in the Montgomery masks.

“If we had the capacity, I would say let’s save them here in perpetuity, with lots of rich contextual information,” he said. “Please pass along to Maggie that we would like to house any materials she has relating to this project.”

‘It would be a sin’

Many of the participants in Mask Montgomery project are in their 70s and 80s now. Although they hadn’t thought about their masks in years, when I asked to see their masks, they began to consider the fate of their work.

“I thought it was kind of silly at the time,” said Lois Lumbra, 70. Then she recalled a conversation with her son Frank, who was 10 when Sherman applied the plaster to his face.

“Frank said, ‘It was just fun back then, but now at 40 I think it was amazing to be captured on that day and time of life.’”

Lumbra said she has begun to think her grandchildren might like the masks of her and her husband.

Therese and Gaston Begnoche ran a big dairy farm in Montgomery for nearly 50 years. Therese describes her husband as “not artistic.”

He describes the mask project as “silly from beginning to end.”

Yet the Begnoches claimed their masks when Sherman dispersed the collection. They can’t really say why. The masks are stored in a box.

“I get attached to things,” Therese said.

“It’s probably time to give them to the kids,” Gaston said.

I asked why they have kept the masks.

“You don’t throw them away,” Gaston said.

Why not?

“It would be a sin,” he said. “A teeny sin.”

A last word

I had intended that Gaston Begnoche would have the last word in this story because I, too, would regard throwing away the masks as at least a “teeny sin.”

And I, too, have a hard time expressing why this is so. Perhaps it is in part because many of the masks are so well executed and hint at the personality and life story of the creator. As Frank Lumbra told his mother, the masks also captured a moment in one small town’s history.

Then I saw in my notes something that Sonia Rae, an artist and a manager at the Vermont Arts Council said to me. She compared Mask Montgomery to a recent Arts Council project that distributed thousands of paper and wooden artist palettes to any Vermonter who wanted one to use as a canvas for painting.

Thousands of amateur artists — and non-artists — took the challenge, she said. The purpose was to introduce people to the idea of creativity and to demystify art, just as Maggie Sherman did 31 years ago.

“People didn’t know they had it in them,” I said to Rae, thinking of all the people in Montgomery who had never picked up an artist’s brush before Sherman came calling.

“The key is that creativity exists in all of us,” she responded. “That is a really, really important thing not to lose sight of.”

Greg Sharrow had said much the same thing as he argued for the value of the aging masks.

“These masks are the result of a creative act. They bear the fingerprint of the maker. They are expressive of the people who made them, which is why they are so marvelous,” he said.

On Friday, Feb. 24 the Vermont Arts Council will convene Vermont’s creative community in a day-long event at the State House and Pavilion in Montpelier. Arts Advocacy Day provides professional development workshops for artists and arts administrators, offers networking and idea sharing opportunities and encourages arts advocates to meet with legislators to discuss the important role the arts play in their communities.

Highlights of the day include a workshop by Craig Nutt; Program Director of CERF+ (Craft Emergency Relief Fund + Artists’ Emergency Resources) called “Building a Better Safety Net” – Tips and Tools for Emergency Planning. In addition, Pam Korza, co-Director of American’s for the Arts Animating Democracy project will present a two-part workshop called “Beyond the Numbers: Measuring the Social Impact of the Arts.” Other events include a Legislative Arts Caucus breakfast, advocacy orientation, and display in the State House Card Room. The Arts Council encourages arts advocates to have lunch with legislators to discuss the importance of the arts to Vermont.

Arts Advocacy Day events are free and open to the public. For a schedule of events or to find out more about any of the day’s activities, visit the Vermont Arts Council’s website www.vermontartscouncil.org.

Christian Wolff was a French-speaking, musical kid when he arrived in New York City from France in the spring of 1941.

He was 7, and his German parents, Kurt and Helen Wolff, were book publishers in Europe who fled Nazi Germany in 1933.

Now they were intent on setting up their lives in the United States. They moved into a tenement in Washington Square. When summer rolled around, they sent their son to camp in southern Vermont.

Wolff, who will turn 78 next month, is a composer who lives in Royalton. Recently, he remembered his long-ago summer in Manchester, and other childhood Vermont trips — hanging out and playing music in Marlboro with Rudolph Serkin, a family friend, and other founders of the Marlboro Music Festival.

Wolff was thinking about these experiences as he prepared to give a talk last November[spo: 2011: ] in Montpelier. The occasion was Wolff receiving the Walter Cerf Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts from the Vermont Arts Council.

“It’s really nice having it be Vermont,” Wolff said. “I started thinking about my connections with Vermont, and music in Vermont. And I have this notion I got imprinted with Vermont at a very early age.”

As a composer interested in experimental, avante-garde music, Wolff has created musical notations and worked with unconventional sounds and rhythms. He’s been particularly interested in the experience and engagement of the players performing his work. His compositions might ask players to make choices within the music, and often involve figuring out the piece with other performers.

“You can make sounds all kinds of ways,” Wolff said. “Music is about sounds.”

John Cage, an influential 20th century American composer, said at one time that Wolff’s music is classical music for an unknown civilization. Wolff was “tickled” by Cage’s comments, he said. “I couldn’t have been more delighted.” (Wolff studied composition with Cage, briefly, more than 60 years ago.)

Wolff was talking on a gloriously clear and cold winter Sunday in his Royalton home, at the end of a dirt road on a high hill. The stone house was built by his in-laws in the 1940s, to replace the old wood frame farmhouse that burned in a fire. It is the house where his wife, the former Holly Nash, grew up.

The couple raised four children in Hanover, where they still have a house. They moved to Royalton a dozen years ago, after Wolff’s retirement from Dartmouth College. He taught at Dartmouth for 28 years, where he worked with composer Jon Appleton, founder of the school’s electronic music program. Appleton called Wolff an important composer and described him as “saint-like.”

“I wanted to have Christian at Dartmouth because he was such an usual person,” Appleton said. “He was different from any other composer I had ever met. He didn’t follow any rules, except ones he made up. His reputation is huge, particularly in Europe. People know his name here, in music circles, but they couldn’t tell you anything about his music. Like a conceptual artist who does some kind of visual experience, Christian does some kind of audio experience.”

Cage and associated composers (including Wolff) added a new dimension to concert music, away from the increasingly technical music of the most influential European composers and toward a new school of experimentalists. The composers, mostly American, used home-made instruments, invented notations, and new musical forms. Silence, the intuition of performers, and ambient sound have been components of their work.

“The idea that the music doesn’t have to go on all the time, it could have gaps, was something we were all interested in,” Wolff said. “The space between sounds.”

If Wolff was imprinted with Vermont at an early age, his musical imprint came before that — probably at birth.

His great-grandfather, Hermann Wolff, was a conductor. His grandfather, Leonard Wolff, was a composer and violinist in Bonn — and a friend of Brahms. “My father met Brahms when he was 8,” Wolff said. “I’ve always gotten a kick out of that, I should say.”

His father, who published writers including Kafka, Pasternak and Gunter Grass, was an excellent cello player. The family’s circle of friends included first-rate musicians.

New York City, “rich with possibilities,” was a serendipitous and interesting place for a kid to grow up, Wolff said. “It was an incredible piece of luck, for my subsequent life,” he said. “If there was nothing to do, you could go to the Museum of Modern Art.”

His parents, who founded Pantheon Books, “worked like crazy,” Wolff said. “I lived the life of an only child.” (His older half-siblings stayed in Europe.)

As child and teenager, Wolff played piano – with an interest in classical music and aspirations of becoming a solo performer. The family, whose beginnings in New York were “hard scrabble,” had no piano for a time. This turned Wolff into an itinerant player who practiced when and where he could. “It wasn’t very effective,” he said.

After a while, the Wolffs arranged to borrow a piano from psychoanalyst friends who studied with Freud. “My life is just ridiculous,” Wolff said, laughing. “It’s been so lucky in various ways.”

The friends had a summer house in Shaftsbury.[spo: vt: ] When they left Vermont for the winter, the couple shipped their piano to the city for Wolff to play: a lucky instrument that summered in Vermont and spent winters well-played by Wolff.

After the Wolffs acquired their own piano, it was thought by a certain crowd to be of inferior quality. This was revealed on the 60th birthday of Wolff’s father, when two prominent performers of the time, Serkin (piano) and Adolph Busch (violin), visited the Wolff apartment to perform a Bach Sonata for Kurt Wolff. They stopped playing after one movement: the piano wasn’t good enough to complete the piece.

Nonetheless, pianos and piano playing existed in sufficient quantity — and quality — that Wolff took lessons with Grete Sultan, a classically trained performer and teacher.

“It became clear to me, and it must’ve been clear to her, that I didn’t have the chops,” Wolff said. “You either have it or you don’t. In my case, I clearly didn’t.”

To make up for not practicing, Wolff would bring to Sultan pieces he had written, “fumbling” with composition. She introduced Wolff to Cage. Wolff was 16 when he had composition lessons with Cage for about six weeks.

The lessons, “as such,” were built around a handful of projects: analysis, rhythmic structure, counterpoint exercises. The gist of the work was learning about discipline and solving problems.

“We finished all but one — counterpoint,” Wolff said. “I wasn’t very good at it and he was bored. At the end, he said, ‘Oh, just write your music,’ ‘’

In appreciation of the lessons, which Cage didn’t charge for, Wolff gave Cage a copy of the I-Ching. The volume was an English translation of the ancient Chinese book published by Wolff’s parents.

Wolff chose the I Ching because of Cage’s interest in Asian philosophy. The book would prove interesting and useful to Cage for his work, for reasons related to methods of making chance.

After lessons ended, Wolff continued to hang out with Cage. Piano-less the summer he was 16, Wolff would hop the subway to Delancey Street and walk south to Monroe, where Cage lived and worked in two small rooms with views across the river.

Wolff brought his lunch and his music, and he played piano while Cage worked. They’d take an afternoon break together to eat, and talk.

“He was interested in what I was doing,” Wolff said. “He was an amazing person – incredibly smart and funny, and very congenial.”

Classics and composition

Apart from his work with Cage, Wolff is a self-taught composer. His formal education is in classics, as an undergraduate and graduate student at Harvard. He is a scholar of Euripides, with a Ph.D. in comparative literature. At Dartmouth, Wolff had an unusual appointment that allowed him to teach in three departments: comparative literature, classics and music.

Appleton remembered a concert he and Wolff gave of their music at Dartmouth. “I think three people came,” he said.

Wolff and Appleton taught a music class together. Students learned to write, listen to and play music, often using home-made instruments and their own musical notation. The work was based on ideas found in Wolff’s early music, Appleton said.

“He used to work more abstractly,” Appleton said. “In recent years, I’ve seen and heard some of his music, fully notated in traditional music notation. How those notes go together is completely original and not like any other composer. Christian knows traditional music, but when you think that the biggest influence of his life was when he was still a teenager, 14 years old, and you meet someone who inspires you. Then you follow them in that direction. If he had met someone else, who knows what would’ve happened?”

Here’s what happened: Cage told Wolff to just write his music, and Wolff went off to Harvard, where the traditional music department had no place for him. And he had little use for it.

“You might say I got a little spoiled,” Wolff said. “I had already known John Cage for two years. They had no use for Cage whatsoever. I could see that studying in that department was like going back to study counterpoint. The kind of music that I was doing didn’t connect to anything that was out there.”

But there was a student music group, and Wolff participated on occasion. He remembers surprising people a bit when he submitted a piece that had been published in a journal of music. And he recalls getting a phone call from the head of the music department the night before a performance. “What are you going to do to my piano?” the worried professor asked.

Wolff played prepared piano, in which you mute the strings with various objects — screws, coins, nuts and rubber wedges — and turn the keyboard into a percussion instrument. “It’s a very cool idea,” he said.

There was the question of what to study at Harvard. Wolff had seen the life of Cage – “poor as a church mouse” – and he wondered about its appeal. “He had a terrible time,” Wolff said. “I thought, ‘I can’t do that.’ I might want to have a family, and live a more ordinary life.

“Then I did something really weird, and studied classics.” The department “pounced” on him, Wolff said. He had studied Latin in high school. Between his freshman and sophomore years, Wolff learned Greek.

Studying classics struck Wolff as odd because he was making experimental music on the one hand; and studying classics, a most conservative discipline, on the other.

“At first, I didn’t see any connection,” he said. “I just thought it was parallel lives.”

He has come to understand a strong relation between the two disciplines, a relation connected to making something by starting from scratch; and to the precise and crucial attention to text.

“I’m trying to write music as if nobody has ever done it before,” Wolff said. “You really thing about everything. You take nothing for granted. The old Greeks were a bit like that: Well, how can you explain the world? You have to start from scratch. You make it up. Suddenly, you have a very fresh view of what’s going on.”

Wolff’s parents left Germany in the winter of 1933, the day after the Reichstag burned. His paternal grandmother was Jewish, but the family’s departure was more related to circumstances that had become “totally unacceptable” to his father, Wolff said.

“He couldn’t bear to live there,” Wolff said. “On the other hand, it had become dangerous for him to be there.” (Wolff recently learned that 80 percent of the books his father published were banned by the Nazis.)

The Wolffs left Germany for Nice, in southern France, where Wolff was born in March 1934. In 1939, they moved to an apartment in Paris, on the Seine.

A few years ago, Wolff had a gig in Monaco, not far from Nice, with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. The company was stranded in Monaco for a few days, and Wolff traveled to the city of his birth.

He hadn’t been to Nice since 1939. Wolff remembered the stone beach; he found the street where his family had lived a few blocks from his hotel.

On recent trips to Paris, including the dance company’s final tour last fall, Wolff found himself staying in a hotel that had expanded to take over the building on the river where he lived as a child.

“My past is catching up with me,” he said.

Arts advocates are asked to join the Vermont Arts Council in Montpelier on Friday, February 24th.

On Friday, February 24th the Vermont Arts Council will convene Vermont's creative community in a day-long event at the State House and Pavilion in Montpelier. Arts Advocacy Day provides professional development workshops for artists and arts administrators, offers networking and idea sharing opportunities and encourages arts advocates to meet with legislators to discuss the important role the arts play in their communities.

Highlights of the day include a workshop by Craig Nutt; Program Director of CERF+ (Craft Emergency Relief Fund + Artists' Emergency Resources) called "Building a Better Safety Net" - Tips and Tools for Emergency Planning. In addition, Pam Korza, co-Director of American's for the Arts Animating Democracy project will present a two-part workshop called "Beyond the Numbers: Measuring the Social Impact of the Arts". Other events include a Legislative Arts Caucus breakfast, advocacy orientation, and display in the State House Card Room. The Arts Council encourages arts advocates to have lunch with legislators to discuss the importance of the arts to Vermont.

Arts Advocacy Day events are free and open to the public. For a schedule of events or to find out more about any of the day's activities, visit the Vermont Arts Council's website www.vermontartscouncil.org.

The Town of Ferrisburgh is among the nine Vermont institutions which received cultural facilities grants in a ceremony at the Vermont State House last week.

The town received a grant of $5,500 to support the purchase of operable curtains, with valences, for the four large windows in the community center portion of the Ferrisburgh Town Offices and Community Center building also known as the Ferrisburgh the Grange Hall.

With its tall wood-paneled ceilings and hard maple floors, the center space has issues with sound reverberation. The space is used for town functions, for the meetings of Grange Chapter 539, and it can be rented for various uses such as weddings, parties, meetings, and classes. A committee of representatives of the town and the Grange 539 studied the sound issue and arrived at the curtains as the best solution.

The Vermont Cultural Facilities Grant Program funds a variety of projects that improve existing cultural facilities and expand their capacity to provide cultural activities in their communities. More than 100 Vermont organizations have been funded in the past eight years alone. The program is funded by taxpayers.

I am frequently asked, what is the state of the arts in Vermont? My response?

Vermont.

Vermont is the State of the Arts.

Census figures for 2010 are not available, but based on 2000 data, Vermont is first in writers, seventh in visual artists, and fifth overall in the per-capita ratio of artists-to-citizens out of all 50 states. I believe, however, that visual artists are extremely under-reported in Vermont, and that once the 2010 data is out, we will find ourselves ranked first overall.

From communities as diverse as Brattleboro, White River Junction, Island Pond, Rutland, Bennington, and the greater Burlington area, Vermont’s artists leave an indelible impression on citizens and visitors alike. We are a creative state whose character is hewn as much from the keyboard and the brush as it is from the soil and the forest. For most Vermont artists, the natural landscape informs their creative core. For others, Vermont’s independent streak inspires provocation and even outrage, as certainly art should from time to time. The critical note, here, is that of all states I have heard about, Vermont artists describe themselves exactly this way: “I’m a Vermont artist”—using Vermont as an adjective to encompass the depth and variety that very name conjures in the imagination. No other artist from any other state does this, to my knowledge — at least not with the same degree of commitment.

Arts institutions in Vermont—the “healthy” ones—are nimble, have strong community support, and make the most of digital media and social networking tools to reach out well beyond our border. Virtually all who regularly apply to the Vermont Arts Council for funding fulfill the “artistic excellence” requirement with ease. Grants, therefore, tend to be awarded based organizational capacity and the value and impact that their activities have in/on their communities, not on the past record of accomplishment; a subtle but important difference. If nothing else, it indicates a sector that is fully mature, with very high standards, and aware of its important role in bringing quality programs and services to the public.

From the consumer’s perspective, therefore, the arts in Vermont are thriving. There are many arts events to choose from, not just on the weekends, but on any day of the week. And with very few exceptions, they are all of really high caliber. A glance through any community newspaper will prove the point.

The view is very different, however, from the creative/producing end.

Whether the root cause is the economy, donor fatigue from massive weather cataclysms, or the increasingly vocal, but very ill-informed, national movement to remove all so-called “nonessential government services,” the issue for all is survival. The Kennedy Center’s Michael Kaiser believes that the key to survival lies in the diversity and excellence of programming coupled with an ever-expanding commitment to marketing and promotion.

Therein lies the rub. Arts organizations are mission driven. If there is an extra dollar left over at the end of the year, the mission mandates that it be spent on programming. The result is that Kaiser’s advice to focus on diverse, excellent, new programming with an emphasis on marketing is difficult to sell to trustees and audiences.

What the sector really needs are tools for analyzing the impacts of artistic activity on education, community economic development, and social services. With the Pew Trust’s Cultural Data Project just getting started here in Vermont, and the new fields of “Social Impact Analysis” and “Brain-based Learning” coming into their own, we will soon provide policy analysts and state/local officials with much better information about why they should be advocating for significantly more resources to be spent on supporting and promoting the sector.

Artists and arts organizations are generally pretty capable at corralling what they need to put on a show. What they are less good at is reaching audiences in Boston, New York, Montreal, Albany and the Berkshires to let them know what is available less than a half-day’s drive away. This is where the state’s interests and the arts sector’s interests are currently most in alignment and where immediate returns are already beginning to be found. (There are many others, but this is the lowest of the “low-hanging fruits.”)

Vermont’s arts sector is, from an economic policy perspective, one of its last great un(der)-tapped resources. With the right kind of collaborative, strategic and socially-integrated investment, the arts sector could easily thrive and become integral to Vermont’s economic vitality, not just a pleasant, icing-on-the-cake afterthought.

The Vermont Arts Council has awarded $152,330 in grants to improve existing community arts facilities and to expand their capacity to provide cultural activities.

Two Burlington institution were among the recipients. The Flynn Center for the Performing Arts won $30,000 for new seating and improvements to its wheelchair seating area and the Fletcher Free Library was awarded $16,720 for audio/visual and technical improvements to its public spaces.

In neighboring counties, recipients included: the Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury, $7,500 for improvements to its new Vision and Voice Gallery; $5,500 to the town of Ferrisburgh for curtains in its community center; Friends of the Opera House in Enosburg Falls, $18,601 to support the purchase and installation of drapes and sound equipment.

VERMONT ARTS COUNCIL AWARDS $152,330 IN CULTURAL FACILITIES GRANTS

Nine grants will improve existing facilities and expand their capacity to provide cultural activities

Montpelier – The Vermont Arts Council is pleased to announce the recipients of 2012 Cultural Facilities Grants. The grants, totaling $152,330 will be awarded to nine institutions to improve existing facilities and expand their capacity to provide cultural activities for the public. The recipients will be honored in a ceremony at the Vermont State House on Thursday, January 19 at 3:00 PM.

The recipients were chosen by a panel of community members and experts in cultural facilities, historic buildings, and accessibility. Thirteen Vermont organizations applied for Cultural Facilities funding this year.

The Cultural Facilities Grant program is administered by the Vermont Arts Council in conjunction with the Vermont Historical Society and the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation. The program is funded through an annual appropriation in the Capital Budget.

Now in its 22nd year, the purpose of this program is to assist Vermont nonprofit organizations and municipalities enhance, create or expand the capacity of an existing building to provide cultural activities for the public. As a result of these grants, improvements to public cultural facilities have enabled citizens of all ages and abilities to enjoy more cultural events while increasing their participation in the heritage of their communities. More than 100 organizations have been funded in the past eight years alone.

“More and more people recognize Vermont as a place where art is created and where artists gather to experiment with new forms and get important feedback from discerning audiences. It is important to make our venues-whether that is a concert hall or a multi-use town hall theater-as up-to-date, as accessible, and as responsive to the needs of artists as possible,” said Alex Aldrich, Executive Director. “These grants, in effect, legitimize our description of ourselves as one of the most creative and resourceful states in the nation.”

The Vermont Arts Council and the Department of Buildings & General Services invite the public to celebrate the permanent installation of a series of sculptures by artist Gregory Miguel Gómez at the new training facility at the Vermont Fire Academy, 672 Academy Road, in Pittsford, VT. A reception for the artist will be held on Friday, December 17th from 3:30 – 5:00 p.m.

The Vermont Fire Academy recently added a new training facility. The addition of the new building included the installation of a series of permanent sculptures titled, Tools of Command. Works of art were commissioned through the Vermont Art in State Buildings Program.

Gregory Miguel Gómez of Newtonville, MA and Putney, VT was chosen as the lead artist for this public art project. Gómez is a painter and sculptor from a family of physicians and scientists. He has lived many places: Buffalo, New York, Detroit, Michigan, Havana Cuba, and Rochester, Minnesota before ultimately moving to Boston and Vermont. He received his undergraduate degree from Grinnell College and an MFA from Washington University, in St. Louis, Missouri. He has taught at the Maryland Institute, in Baltimore Maryland; The Rhode Island School of Design; and Wellesley College, before coming to Wheelock College, in Boston.

The Art in State Buildings Program is a partnership between the Vermont Arts Council and the Vermont Department of Buildings and General Services. Funded by the Art in State Buildings Act, the program allows up to two capital construction projects be selected each year. Site-specific works of art are chosen by Local Review Committees that are made up of agency and community representatives and visual art experts. Selection criteria includes “. . . high artistic merit and inherent quality of work; and demonstrated experience and ability to work with design professionals, engineers, community leaders, and other artists within a collaborative team context.”