Production of “Applause” on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

Coming up on “Applause” These groovy kids want to take you higher at summer camp.

A woodworker gets a new gig making guitars, and the Cleveland Orchestra shares a new take on an old classic.

Hello and welcome to “Applause” I'm Ideastream Public Media's Kabir Bhatia.

Now, when I was in middle school, I spent a lot of time listening to records, trying to get better and better at bass guitar.

Let's see if I still got it.

I probably would have benefited from a week at this summer camp, like the talented kids you're about to meet.

For the past 20 years, students in the Cleveland Heights University Heights School District have honed their skills, but there's much more to it than simply reading notes and laying down a groove.

People are playing everything.

We have violins, we have violas, we have cellos, double basses, trumpets, trombones, euphonium, and the percussionists who play everything across the back.

And this year, we even have a harp player.

What happens here is kids discover they have so much more in them than they knew.

It comes right out!

We realized that doing this camp really only a week, but it's so intense and so much happens that that was a really strong way to equalize opportunity across the district.

For anybody who was really motivated to do music, and it was a perfect way to support and strengthen the music program.

Honestly, it's really the highlight of my summer.

Like whenever school is about to end, I always think about music camp because I learn so many things and I have so much fun.

It's just like a positive environment.

Everyone's there to help.

No one judges you.

It's just like such a fun experience.

And like when it gets to the end, the performance just feels so, like thrilling and amazing.

One of my favorite things about the camp is the Spirit days, which is why Im wearing this hat.

Today is crazy hat day, and those days are really fun.

You get to like, see how everybody expresses themselves.

And it's, nobody judges Nobody judges about it.

Everybody is so open to it and we all just have fun with it.

we recognized that because the increasing of the diversity of our school district, both racial and economic.

We had kids who had very different opportunities when it came to music.

You know, one of the wonderful things is that we raise a fair amount of money from our community to pay for the cost of running the camp, so that we don't have to depend on everybody paying full tuition in order to participate.

And that's been a really important part of making sure that the arts are available to everybody, not just in name only.

I went into camp playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and I came out playing some of the most complex orchestral music that I've ever played in my life.

So it showed me how to be a better musician, because at the time I did not have private lessons, which was odd for a student in the district at the time who was in the music program.

And I also didn't really have the access that others did to ensembles both in school and out of school.

There were people who were my age, but there were also people who were a little bit older than me and a lot older than me, and looking up to them and seeing what they did and how much they enjoyed it and how much I was helped as a camper as well, is the reason why I wanted to go on to be a mentor, because music changed my life in such a radical way, and I wanted to do that for someone else who needed it.

And it's got a lot of implications way beyond the music, which is why I really think it's worth doing.

This is about life skills.

It's about collaboration.

It's about getting along with people.

It's about doing your part.

It's, you know, it's all these other lessons that are so important.

So the students arrive.

After the students arrive, they have to head for the stage and they unpack their cases and they get tuned.

They start warming up at 9:00.

They start playing.

one, two, one, two.

We have two rehearsals with the whole orchestra, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.

And the progress that we've made, even just in two days, is just, is just wild.

And it's from it's from the work that I've done and the work that the kids have done.

But it's also the work that they've done the rest of the day with the coaches and in there with the high schoolers and their sectionals and all of that.

I think we have a way of underestimating what kids are capable of.

And this is not a place where that happens.

The concert is just the thrill of everybody's life because it's multigenerational and multi skill level.

I mean, everybody plays together.

This is an 140 piece orchestra.

We're dressed alike.

Everybody has on our new shirts and blue jeans is our uniform.

And the public is invited in to watch.

So parents come to watch their students play their pieces.

So it's kind of, its just beautiful.

And the kids have been able to grasp hard music.

They get to know it better.

They're more excited about it.

We all like getting better at something.

We all like seeing that progression, right?

When they start to recognize the progress that they're making, it builds on itself and it's it's really, really exciting.

From hearing what took place on Monday to what takes place on Saturday, it is unbelievable.

And I cry every time.

Every time, it's beautiful.

I believe that music has the power to change lives.

And there are kids who said, “she saw in me what I didn't know I had” and that right there says it all for me.

That says it all for me.

And I can.

I can walk away and be like, yeah, and maybe they'll do the same for someone else.

Hopefully they will.

Check this out.

I asked my daughter to write to us while she's at Camp Granada this summer.

"Hello Muddah Hello Faddah Go check your email.

Love, Sunita” Oh, well, that was nice of her, I think.

But you can email us to send us art story ideas from anywhere in Northeast Ohio.

We're talking all of our 22 counties Cuyahoga Summit, but also Lorain, Lake Whatever you got, Trumbull, Tuscarawas, Portage, Wayne.

You can send us your arts and culture story ideas to arts@Ideastream.org And thanks.

Reaching Heights Summer Camp is all about a love for music.

And you could say the same about our next artist who merges his music with his family history.

Award winning sound artist Brian Harnetty paints audio portraits of his family's home in Appalachian Ohio.

My process is always rooted in sound, and in addition to that, over the years I've become very much interested in archives.

So the archival work that I do is almost always in sound archives.

The other piece of it is that I became fascinated with working with people, and not just archival materials.

I wanted to learn more about the living communities that the archival materials might reference.

And so I spent a lot of time in Shawnee and other small coal mining towns, just talking to people and and hanging out with them over Well, it's been 15 years now and I continue to to hang out with them today.

So now many of those people are my friends and I, I just love the social aspect of it.

So it's bringing together this historical archival piece, along with the contemporary communities that are connected to those recordings.

I am not always recording.

I'm actually most of the time I'm not recording, and instead I spend a lot of time building those relationships.

And then only after there's a certain amount of trust built up, and that can take a long time.

Will I ask if I can, if I can make a recording?

But a lot of the materials that I use are preexisting recordings.

So oral histories, old folk songs that kind of stuff, or tape phone messages, anything like that, that's really informative.

And then the social part of it is that I often bring those recordings back to the relatives or the people that live in those same places and, and let them listen to those recordings.

And perhaps what I've made from it.

The first time I ever shared a new piece of music that I made from an archival recording.

There were people in the audience that said, it sounds like, you know, the ghosts of my ancestors.

And that really struck a lightbulb in my mind.

And it also raised a lot of ethical questions that I wanted to use the materials in a way that had a kind of archival stewardship, instead of just taking what I wanted and then using it.

If I think about to the earliest pieces that I made, I was using samples of music and I was maybe chopping them up more.

I was using pieces of of material that I didn't really understand or understand the contexts around.

And it was only later when I started to work with the communities connected to them.

I realized that maybe a family didn't want that information out there, or just by getting the permission of a family member or reaching out to them.

It just influenced the I don't know, even the music that I made might not be as dissonant or harsh or something like that.

Maybe I was trying to think of those family members as my main audience, instead of some far off abstract audience.

Instead, it's this very close and personal thing that I started to to make.

I love the idea of storytelling.

I think what I can contribute to it is.

Adding the music as well and letting the music tell that story as well.

And then because I take so much time, oftentimes, you know, folks aren't able to spend a whole lot of time with the material.

But if I can spend a decade or more with it, I can really go into that contextual depth, you know, all of the other information around it.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite activities was to sit next to my dad while he was working on, on something.

He was a tinkerer and a bit of an inventor, and his career was as a typewriter repairman.

And so those earliest memories of, you know, fiddling around next to him were lodged in my mind as an adult as well.

And so when he passed away a few years ago, I had an opportunity to to make a new piece of music, a commission.

And I had inherited his workbench.

So I took it apart piece by piece and then reassembled it in my own garage and, and then made music to go along with it.

I asked myself, what is the sound of that workbench, or what is the sound of my father's life there and then can a workbench contain all kinds of memories in it, almost like a very personal archive.

So before I was working with formal archives, and now it's the most personal kind of archive that I can think of, and I think the objects might be considered as junk by other people, but because I have this connection through my father, these things are extremely important.

They're like relics of a kind, you know?

And so I began to make that piece, and we filmed the workbench in a lot of detail, almost like doing like a, you know, like taking a visual meditation on, on the workbench.

And then the music is sort of elegiac and slow moving at first and builds up and then in between.

Interspersed is the voicemails of my father over the past year of his life or so, and you sort of get to recognize the sound quality of his voice, which of course, I love.

But as it changed and as he moved through the stages of life into death or whatever, you know, it was weirdly capturing that just in our day to day conversations.

“Other than that have a good day Brian, talk to you later.” This is a surveyor's compass that belonged to my great great great grandfather, who is the county surveyor in Perry County.

And here's his notebooks, and I'm making a new piece from these family archival materials.

And it's really made me think a lot about the land, about the history of that land and what it means to survey the land and finding different ways of of thinking about that as well.

So that's this piece.

“Hey Brian, its your dad give me a call when you can.” Let's move from one workbench to another with a professional woodworker known for his furniture.

In his previous life, Freddy Hill gigged throughout Northeast Ohio, playing guitar around Kent and Cleveland.

Today, he combines his musicianship with his craftsmanship, making guitars.

There's an old adage that learning to build instruments is the skill of a thousand steps.

They're incredibly complicated machines.

Visually, they may not look like it, but the inside of a guitar is a very well engineered and complicated piece of machinery to build.

I'm staring down the barrel at 50.

Furniture has been great.

It's kept me afloat, kept a roof over my head.

But, you know, it's hard and it's a grind.

And I was tired of chasing clients and trying to hunt down work.

And I thought, if I don't do this now, I never will.

So I just kind of threw caution to the wind and started cutting up pieces of wood.

And I've been very lucky that the very first guitars that I built are guitars that I play.

This is this is 90% of it.

This is where the art in shaping the sound of the guitar, the bulk of it lies.

You're looking for a level of stiffness that prevents the guitar from imploding on itself.

You've got 180 pounds of tension pulling this, 160 pounds.

Pulling this way, pushing down here, lifting up here in the braces prevent this from just imploding.

The problem is, the more braces you add, the more you impede the top from from vibrating.

It's a physics game, essentially.

What I'm looking for here is a consistent tone, consistent pitch that rings evenly no matter where I hit the back side.

What I can do is I can fin that brace down.

Townsend Guitar Company is almost a year old.

We have three very unique products.

We have our own electric guitar design.

We have an electric bass design that are completely unique.

And we're doing a very innovative manner of construction with our acoustic guitars.

I do feel like the 20 years that I spent as a furniture builder have absolutely prepared me to hit the ground with my feet running.

When it comes to the individual skills involved in building a guitar, the shaping, the the breaking of corners, the meticulous detail, that kind of stuff.

I started on the violin when I was four years old, started on the piano when I was seven, and I just thought Rock and roll was the coolest thing in the world, so I begged and begged for a guitar.

And when I was 12, I got one.

I've never been somebody that just came easily It's taken a lot of practice to gain what modicum of competency that I have.

I had a pretty solid background in music, at least for a 12 year old, but the mechanics of the guitar was completely foreign to me.

But it was something that I was just so enthusiastic about that it wasn't hard to find time to practice.

Just hours would disappear and I'd be sitting on the edge of my bed playing guitar.

Before I knew it, it was time to go to bed.

I graduated from OU in 1998, and I started grad school at Kent State studying physiology, and at the time this great little club opened up called Mugs, and I was just tending bar.

And after my shift, I would go and sit at a table by myself at Mugs and watch these phenomenal guitar players just tear it up.

And that was the time of my life where I wasn't really sure what direction I wanted to go.

I kind of threw caution to the wind and threw everything I had at studying the guitar, learning musical theory, learning as much as I possibly could.

I was in several successful bands, and I got to see a large part of the country and had some really great times.

I walked away from music when I turned 30.

I walked away from it completely.

I didn't practice at home.

I was just kind of burnt out all the time on the road with the band.

And a friend of mine, really accomplished furniture maker named Gabe Sutton gave me a job, a part time job, just sweeping up the shop and running the planer or whatever little menial tasks that needed done.

And that's when I first conceptualized the idea of building a guitar.

Recognize pretty quickly that I didn't have the skill set to do it, and it was far more complicated than I had anticipated.

I was always that kid that would take things apart and figure out how they worked.

And when I discovered that putting two pieces of wood together is not as easy as using a hammer and nails, that it requires a lot of intricacy, a lot of detail, a lot of patience and practice.

I was really just fascinated by the whole mechanics of the whole thing, and the more I learned, the more interesting I found it, the more challenged I was.

I would say that all the passion I had for music, I transferred completely to design into woodworking and subsisted on it for the next two decades.

And I found that if I applied the lessons that I had learned early in my musical career about learning how to learn and applied that same concentration to woodworking, I was able to practice different joinery, practice different techniques, and improve my skill set, just like if I were practicing guitar.

I really want to cater to the musicians that are local, the people that are out there playing nightly, people who are passionate about music and keep it here, keep it in Cleveland.

So since I started my career as a woodworker two decades ago, it's very rare that I don't wake up excited to get to the shop.

For me, that reward is so much more important than anything else.

You can't- you can't buy that.

On the next round of “Applause,” it's full steam ahead.

as we get you on the right track with the Lakeshore Live Steamers.

It just brings joy to us it brings joy to the hundreds of public people that come here during our runs.

We have anywhere from 400 to 800 riders for each one of our public runs.

Then we get sidetracked by these nature loving jazz cats cooking in the great outdoors.

All that and more on the next round of “Applause” That's it for this very musical round of “Applause” I'm Ideastreams Kabir Bhatia leaving you with four of the most recognizable notes in music.

It's time for Beethoven's Fifth from the Cleveland Orchestra.

And it's Adella app.

Here's the opening movement led by music director Franz Welser-Möst Production of “Applause” on Ideastream Public Media is made possible by funding by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.