Moving Music
After 100 years and thousands of lessons, MacPhail Center for Music finally gets a home equal to its impact
By Tim Gihring
Photo by Andy Potts (Illustration)
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In the past few years, MacPhail has doubled the amount of financial aid it offers to individual students. Its community partnerships, providing musical training in schools and other organizations, have increased from 18 to 48. MacPhail’s programs now extend from Thief River Falls to Blue Earth, with more than 70 percent of the school students qualifying for subsidized lunches. For the Ascension School, a Catholic academy in north Minneapolis, MacPhail essentially is the music program—students are bused in weekly to the center for classes.
MacPhail’s recent growth correlates with cuts in funding for the arts in public schools. MacPhail senior vice president Paul Babcock, who has overseen the center’s outreach, acknowledges that the center is taking on kids whose parents want more and better training than the schools can give. But he believes there is nothing wrong, and everything right, in simply wanting the best musical education available. “We’ve had parents tell us that the progress with their neighborhood teacher wasn’t what they wanted,” he says. “MacPhail took something that was just okay and made it great.”
On a typical weeknight, the small studios lining the MacPhail Center’s four levels are a honeycomb of harmony (if everyone’s been practicing), a hive of industriousness that speaks to the idea that musicians aren’t born, they’re made.
Two pianos are crammed into Nachito Herrera’s studio, one occupied by a teenager with shaggy blond hair and an affection for the pop music of the 1970s. Herrera corrects the student’s fingerings then suggests some practice pieces. He still runs through similar exercises two or three hours a day. “Everything that’s been useful for me, I give to them,” he says.
As soon as the teen’s time is up, the next student enters: an older man in wingtip shoes who is a fan of Chopin and other Romantic-era composers. MacPhail’s 160 instructors work with whatever material the students are interested in pursuing. The teacher’s job is simply to spur progress.
Courtesy of James Dayton Design
About a quarter of Leap’s students are adults (nationally, the fastest-growing group of music students is aged 25 to 45). Among them is a Guthrie actor who is up for a singing part, a 60-year-old Jewish woman researching Yiddish theater music, and yes, a female accordionist who wants to learn Edith Piaf songs. But the majority are teenagers, some working toward auditions for college music programs, others pushed into class by their parents (the latter, Leap says, “don’t last long”).
The fact that these students of different interests and abilities meet delights Babcock, who believes strongly in the social significance of performing together, of sharing an ancient tradition. That’s why he has expanded the center’s music-therapy classes, in which developmentally disabled kids play simple instruments. It’s also why MacPhail’s youth programs are offered practically in utero—parents bring children as young as six weeks to a class of lullabies, bouncing games, and massages.
Ultimately, music is a sort of sounding board, Babcock believes—a true measure of oneself. “Music is completely honest with you,” he says. “You only sound like what you sound like. It’s brutally honest and there’s something nice about that.” Of course, what one hears is sometimes not so nice, and students may eventually step away from the tuba or the trumpet, never to honk again. But they’ve experienced music firsthand, and that’s good for them and good for the community.
“People are much more prone to becoming patrons and audiences for the arts if they themselves have engaged in the arts, not just gotten bused to a concert,” says O’Fallon. MacPhail’s legions of students, in other words, may well be enabling the growth of the area’s arts community. With the new building, the spotlight will be on them for a change.
Click here to see more pictures of the MacPhail Center model.
Tim Gihring is senior writer at Minnesota Monthly.
