| Practice makes perfect . . . fund raiser Student musicians hold 24-hour ‘Practice-a-Thon’ for D.C. youth music center BY MATT GETTY 
Photos by Jeff Watts
The gently weeping notes that spilled from Adam Hansen’s cello never sounded better. The junior music major had worked hard to perfect the Shostakovich Cello Sonata. He’d practiced nearly three hours a day. He’d taken numerous lessons from his instructor and fellow cellist, AU music professor Nancy Snider. And now, as he played in the middle of the Mary Graydon Center, he finally nailed it. “That was awesome,” he recalls. “It sounded just how I wanted it to sound.” Too bad no one else heard it—he was playing in a virtually soundproof booth. That kind of perfection in isolation is nothing new for most music majors, who spend more than 15 hours each week honing their craft alone in the Katzen Arts Center’s practice rooms. But for Hansen and the two dozen other students who played their cellos, violins, and guitars in that booth during the last week of March, perfection in isolation actually reached out to the larger community. Using a transparent, portable, eight-foot practice module, the Spinoza Practice Club raised more than $2,000 for the Patricia M. Sitar Center for the Arts through a 24-hour “Practice-a-Thon” that put musicians on silent display in the Mary Graydon Center. “We wanted to have a fund raiser, and we thought, what better way to do it than by practicing?” says Snider, the club’s faculty advisor. Formed last fall, the Spinoza Practice Club offers both music majors and other AU musicians a community for their solitary musical pursuits. “It’s kind of a support group for all of us practicers,” says Hansen. “You can feel a bit isolated going into those practice rooms by yourself all the time. The practice club reminds us that we’re all going through the same thing.” Though the students still practice in separate rooms, they discuss the rigors of practice, share rehearsal strategies, and occasionally coordinate practice times. “Sometimes it just helps to know that someone else is practicing at the same time you are,” says first-year student Alex Mensing, who joined the club to help keep up his chops on the tenor sax. After visiting the Sitar Center last semester, club members decided there were some practicers outside of AU that the club could help as well. “There’s no better cause than these kids at this place,” says Snider, who volunteers at the center, which provides after-school arts programs for more than 350 children from low-income homes. “It’s grown from this moldy basement in public housing in Adams Morgan to this state of the art facility.” Now the club had its cause, but it still had a pretty big problem. How do you take the intensely private act of musical practice and turn it into a public fund raiser? “We could practice in our practice rooms in the Katzen, but then nobody would know what we were doing,” says Snider. Enter another practicer—Steven Spurlock, one of Snider’s private cello students, who also happens to be an architect. “The challenge was to create a space that was private, but also drew attention,” he says of the booth his firm, Wnuk Spurlock Architecture, donated to the club. Built with transparent lexan panels in the front and sound-absorbing homasote foam in the back, the practice module did just that, creating a space that could put the musician on display while keeping the sound of their practice private. Practice club members worked with AU’s service fraternity, Alpha Phi Omega, to set up the module in the Mary Graydon Center and pledged to fill it with nonstop practicing from noon on Thursday, Mar. 29, to noon on Friday, Mar. 30. Making music for two hours each, the members made good on their pledge as others took donations from passersby, who couldn’t help but turn their heads at the site of a sparkling musical terrarium in the midst of students chatting on sofas.
“It’s definitely gotten a lot of attention,” says Lucie Jaronowski, the club’s president. “I think that if we were just sitting here with a sign, we wouldn’t have gotten nearly as many people to stop.”
For Snider, getting people to stop was almost as important as getting a donation. “One of the things that’s really important to me on campus is the whole concept of bringing music to the
people,” she says. “Art is a part of our daily lives whether we recognize it or not, and this really reminds us of that.”
Snider hopes that the practice module can continue to highlight the arts in performance and process well beyond the fund raiser. Designed to be easily assembled and disassembled, the unit went into storage at the end of the “Practice-a-Thon” but may reappear in future fund raisers or other arts events. “It would be great for other disciplines as well,” says Snider. “Actors could use it to rehearse a scene . . . We could have a practicer of the week on display. It’s a great way for people to see the process behind the arts.” So as Hansen played his heart out behind those lexan panels, his flawless sonata may have been inaudible, but it was far from wasted. After all, the Spinoza Practice Club’s motto is based on one of the tenets of its namesake, seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. “Just as Spinoza believed that virtue is its own reward, we believe that practice is its own reward,” says Hansen. In this case at least—with more than $2,000 collected for the Sitar Center—that reward went well beyond the practice room. |
