Today we’d like to introduce you to Deborah Price.
Hi Deborah, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My passion for chamber music and dance began early. At the age of 8, I started the violin through the strings program offered at our local public school. That same year, in my parents’ living room, holding my great grandfather’s violin, my father introduced my siblings and me to chamber music. I also began my ballet studies at the New School of Ballet in Schenectady, NY. Throughout my youth, in addition to my public school and private teachers, I had the support and mentorship of dancers and musicians from the New York City Ballet and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
I grew up in the foothills of the Southern Adirondacks. My father was an Episcopal priest who had been a music major in college; we always had a piano and harpsichord in the living room. My mother, a registered nurse, sang and played the organ in church on occasion. In third grade, when I was given the opportunity to take a stringed instrument, my mother shared with me that I had wanted to play violin since I heard a violinist at the age of 5, and I finally had the chance to fulfill that wish. My first violin was handed down to me through my mom’s family. I would be the 4th generation to play on this violin.
For years I was very focused on dance. I was in a regional ballet company in my teens, dancing six days per week, as I continued to play violin in my school orchestra and take private violin lessons. Funny thing is, I really didn’t like or enjoy practicing the violin. When I played violin in class, and we all played together, I enjoyed it, but I didn’t enjoy the discipline required to practice by myself, so I understand and empathize with students who feel this way now.
The summer before my senior year of high school, I was introduced to the viola, and I found my voice. Soon after finding the viola, my musical career began to take off. There was something about the middle voice that felt inviting and where I felt called to lead. Even while I was so involved in and infatuated with dance, I was drawn to musicians; they always were so welcoming! Some of these musicians were “rockstars” of the classical world, including Lamar and Ruth Alsop, concertmaster, and cellist of the New York City Ballet Orchestra and parents of famed conductor Marin Alsop, and Norman Carroll and Joseph DePasquale, concertmaster and principal viola of the Philadelphia Orchestra. They appreciated my dance training and the value it brought to my musicianship.
During my senior year of high school, I went to visit my sister, a cellist who attended Baldwin Wallace Conservatory, it proved to be a pivotal moment in my career path. It was during that visit that I switched my focus from ballet to viola because here again, I found the musicians to be so welcoming, passionate about their artform, and simply having a great time making music together!
While my music studies in pre-college and college years focused on solo and orchestral studies, I had the opportunity to play in a string quartet and play a pre-concert for the Philadelphia Orchestra. This opportunity brought me back to chamber music and those early experiences with my father and siblings. My brother played flute, my father played recorders and piano, I played violin, and my sister cello and chamber music was one of our favorite family activities, along with playing card games, Bridge, in particular. My sister and I both became professional musicians, and my flute playing and sports focused brother became a professional bridge player.
After graduating from Baldwin Wallace Conservatory, my undergraduate teacher, Marcia Ferritto, encouraged me to look into coaching chamber groups as part of my profession. At the time, there was a philosophy that only advanced players should be taught chamber music, and I didn’t understand, nor agree, with that philosophy since I had started playing chamber so young in my musical education. I talked myself into the position of directing and teaching chamber music to the youngest students at Jefferson Academy of Music, a music school in Columbus in the late 1980s. Eventually, I started my own chamber music educational opportunities for students of all ages.
Throughout my higher education years, I always kept up my passion for movement and dance. When a new job opportunity for my husband brought us to Columbus, in addition to working as a freelance violist, I found a gig teaching ballet for a ballet school in Westerville. I continued to teach ballet and freelance, even through the demanding schedule as a graduate viola teaching assistant at The Ohio State University.
Movement has hugely influenced my musical path, my understanding of phrasing and interpretation, and sense of timing. In dance, you put the rhythm into your entire body. In ballet training, you’re always being exposed to various styles of classical music and encouraged to understand and feel the different accents of each classical period, so to speak. I began to understand that my calling is to coach and guide musicians on how to understand their musical and physical approach on the stage and understand how to share their performance more effectively.
Around 1992, I had the opportunity to start a chamber music school in Delaware, Ohio and that program, which started as a summer festival, has grown and flourished into what today is now the Chamber Music Connection (CMC), a nonprofit organization based in Worthington, Ohio. Now, most days, instead of teaching ballet, I can be found teaching viola and violin, conducting chamber orchestras, and coaching chamber music all the while sharing my passion for music and movement with my students in innovative and creative ways. I find the nature of the art of chamber music truly fits my personality. I feel called to provide opportunities to our community, promoting and encouraging those around me to follow their passions and fulfill their potential. I’ve realized over the years that I find my joy and passion in teaching and sharing opportunities with others, and it is so very rewarding! To be able to pass on the nuances you see and feel while teaching and playing chamber music is in particular something I seem to be especially called to do, and I just love seeing the potential in all the students. The culmination of this life of joyful connection to others through music and movement is embodied in the message I frequently share with students and teachers, “Breathe together, move together, play together.”
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The process of developing and growing CMC has not necessarily been an easy road; there have been significant challenges. A recent obstacle that CMC has had to face was recovering from the drop in enrollment following the Covid-19 pandemic. An additional challenge was having to come up with new marketing strategies when the old strategies could not be done or were no longer effective. Covid-19 threatened the entire mission of CMC, to connect and make music together. However, through the pandemic, a valuable opportunity arose: the usage of video calls and apps such as Zoom and Acapella. These apps could connect people together from across the world while still being safe and healthy. This gave CMC a new outlet to continue by holding our programming and festivals online, coaching and rehearsing through Zoom sessions, and creating chamber music performances using Bandlab and Acapella. The program not only continued but held strong and became leaders in chamber music education, sharing our online techniques with programs and schools across the country and the globe.
Today, our programs and festivals are back in person, although we’re still in recovery mode from the Covid pandemic. Enrollment continues to be about one-half of what it was pre-Covid, and it has been a struggle to promote and market our mission and effectively share our story of how CMC brings together community and promotes meaningful growth throughout our community. The pandemic brought new challenges as CMC was not able to share what we do with students, teachers, and community through local events and concerts as we had pre-pandemic, as these events were all shut down. We weren’t able to connect with students, teachers, and parents in the same ways we had previously. CMC’s entire in-person marketing system had come to a halt, and it has been challenging to find new ways to spread the news of the program.
We have been working diligently in the past several months to promote and spread the news of CMC through social media. Many schools have also changed their music educational structures, moving the start age from fourth grade to 6th grade. However, as more and more music organizations bring back their performances and productions, we are hopeful that enrollment for CMC and youth orchestras will also continue to return to similar levels of pre-pandemic participation.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar, what can you tell them about what you do?
The Chamber Music Connection brings together musicians of all ages and abilities to perform in chamber ensembles each year. CMC is a non-profit, performance-based, and equal-opportunity educational program. Our passion is to welcome students of all abilities. Many of our alumni have attended prestigious music schools such as Curtis, Juilliard, Eastman, CIM, Bard, and others. We also have many alumni who continued to play music while pursuing degrees in pre-med, pre-law, engineering, business, and more at astute institutions, including Northwestern, MIT, Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton, Stanford, OSU, Michigan, and more.
What makes CMC unique is that it is one of the only organizations of its kind in the USA. CMC was founded on the mission to teach and share chamber music inclusively. Many music students are offered the opportunity to play with large groups in school and youth orchestras, but learning to play in a small ensemble with only two or three others and learning to carry the sole voice of your instrument in that group – that’s an experience many never get, and it can be daunting to some at first try. But that’s where the magic happens. Playing chamber music offers musicians the opportunity to learn to communicate in an unspoken, universal language, to watch each other, and to help each other, and become one voice together. Chamber music is an opportunity so many musicians wouldn’t otherwise have access to if it weren’t for CMC.
At CMC, participants are grouped into small ensembles with consideration of previous experience, instrument, and their potential to learn from and inspire one another. Participants learn to collaborate and problem-solve with their group members to achieve their musical goals. Ensembles work with team coaches–including CMC alumni, associated faculty, and guest artists–to expose students to multiple interpretations.
CMC also connects students with guest artists from around the world. They have opportunities to participate in unique side-by-side residencies with renowned touring chamber ensembles in collaboration with local presenter Chamber Music Columbus. All of these guest artists bring unique gifts to the table – introduction to improvisation, classical music with folk roots from other global cultures, encouraging performance with confidence and professionalism. The classical world is far less narrow than people might imagine; these guest artists open windows on that world for the students they play with and the audiences that come to hear them. In turn, the CMC students, with their enthusiasm for chamber music making, remind the professional artists why we all got into this field in the first place.
I founded CMC in 1992 as a summer festival, and it became a year-round program in 1998. Today, we host and present several programs throughout the year – Fall Fridays, NovemberFest, Winter Fridays, Spring Fest, and a Summer Fest. We present over 15 concerts annually, and have a thriving gig and outreach program, a revolutionary high school fellowship program, and offer jazz and cover tune music workshops. The mission of CMC is to use chamber music to promote personal and musical growth and development while building a sense of community and interconnectedness in the lives of students. By fostering both leadership and collaboration, CMC strives to build skills not only for music but for life. We offer needs-based scholarships so that those in financial need may still have access to chamber music education.
Over the years, CMC has received prestigious awards for its excellence in chamber music and musical opportunity. In recognition of my work as a chamber music entrepreneur, pedagogue, and performer, Baldwin Wallace Conservatory recognized me with their Alumni Achievement Award and the Columbus Symphony Orchestra with their Community Educator of the Year Award. A few years ago, I received a call from Lincoln Center artistic directors David Finckel and Wu Han to tell me that they and their board of trustees wanted me to travel to NYC to receive, on behalf of CMC, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Award For Extraordinary Service to Chamber Music in Alice Tully Hall. This was an award like no other! It’s equivalent to an athlete being inducted into their sport’s Hall of Fame. CMC and I have also received multiple nominations for the Ohio Governor’s Award for Arts Education and Arts Administration.
I have been honored and privileged to mentor CMC ensembles, with additional guidance from our team of CMC-associated faculty and guest artists, who have medaled in the most prestigious of chamber music competitions including: St. Paul String Quartet Competition, Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, Coltman National Chamber Music Competition, WDAV’s Young Chamber Musicians Competition, and Discover Chicago Chamber Music Competition. Many of these groups have also received features on NPR’s From the Top, including Live from Carnegie Hall, and one as well by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center with a performance in Alice Tully Hall.
Through CMC, I have also had the honor to direct and perform in festivals throughout Europe, including performances at Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome, the Beethoven Festival in Prague, and with the Conservatoire de L’Ouest in Switzerland with the Caroga Arts Collective. For over a decade, I served as the co-conductor of the Cleveland Institute of Music Youth Camerata Strings and as the music director of the Women-In-Music String Sinfonia. In addition to CMC, I serve on the faculties of Denison University and Ohio Wesleyan University and teach chamber music pedagogy at The Ohio State University each summer as part of the Midwest String Teachers Conference. I am also a Yamaha Certified String Educator Clinician. In addition, I am a frequent guest artist for festivals and have given numerous presentations at music schools, conservatories, and national conferences. One of my new favorite activities is sharing non-verbal communication workshops for non-musicians, including one for the executives of JPMorgan Chase, sharing and incorporating techniques studied and used by chamber music groups. Articles highlighting my innovative coaching techniques are published in national magazines, including American Music Teacher, Journal of American Viola Society, Keyboard Companion Magazine, American String Teacher, and Chamber Music America.
We all have a different way of looking at and defining success. How do you define success?
All of these kudos I mention above are obviously one way CMC as a program has achieved success. For CMC, a home-grown not-for-profit Central Ohio chamber music educational organization, to be one of five recognized influential chamber artists named alongside chamber musician icons such as pianist Menhamim Pressler, the Marlboro Festival, David Shifrin, Charles Wadsworth – is just an incredible honor.
But success is a highly personal and evolving concept. What constitutes success for one person may not be the same for another. Societal and cultural factors can influence how success is perceived.
For example, I asked some of our fellowship students at CMC, high schoolers who gain experience on how to organize and run a not-for-profit, similar to what a graduate assistant would be doing in graduate school, how they defined success. One of my fellows noted that success meant to complete something in a meaningful and purposeful way. To them, success is learning to slow down and complete simple events or projects with intention. Another fellow shared that success meant to accomplish something that impacts someone or something in a positive way. Another fellow shared that success was to act on one’s passions, to truly enjoy and be content with what one does, with the career or path one has taken.
The fellows at CMC came up with all of these meanings and ideas for just one word: success. As individuals grow, learn, and adapt to life’s changing circumstances, their definitions of success may shift accordingly. The subjectiveness of success highlights the beauty of diversity in human’s values and views. There is not one concrete path or even static meaning for success, and each person must strive to find their own personal meaning of success throughout their lives.
CMC celebrates sharing the passion of chamber music with several hundred participants over our thirty-year history. Many of these alumni have become professional musicians and professionals in other careers, including medicine, law, engineering, business, social work, theater, and education. Our current board secretary includes one such alumna, a successful corporate lawyer who shares that there isn’t a day that goes by where she doesn’t use her chamber music skills learned at CMC in her professional work. And come to think of it, for me, that’s one more piece of evidence on how CMC helps participants achieve success in whatever career path they choose to pursue.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://cmconnection.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chambermusicconnection/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ChamberMusicConnection
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/chamber-music-connection/about/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ChamberMusicConnection/about
Image Credits
Holly Meister Rosebaugh
Deborah Barrett Price
Rebecca Tien
