How we got Here
The last day The Community Music Space was open was Friday March 13th. Yeah, Friday the 13th. It was three weeks and two days ago as I write this.
That afternoon a friend and parent of one of my students (who is also an infectious disease scientist ) called and gave me a clear assessment of what she understood the situation was. When I came back into the studio, Paul Rivers Bailey, my partner at Space Studios, said all the blood had drained from my face. So we did what all good Americans do, we went to Best Buy.
Three days later, the studio was closed and we had ten teachers working remotely from their houses. We had stripped every valuable piece of gear from the studio and built teaching studios in our basement and bedrooms. Paul and I came up with a plan to save the studio and the teaching livelihoods of our faculty, a group of incredible musicians and people that I count as family. Three weeks and one hell of a learning curve later, we’re still here, teaching lessons, running classes and ensembles online.
This experience has made us all reflect on our journey together, and how much we appreciate our community.
How it all got started
On January 1st, 2008, my wife, Ana, and my two boys, Julian and Raphael, then one and three, moved into a rental just outside Red Hook. In the winter of 2008 I built a studio upstairs in a spare bedroom and split my time raising my boys during the day and making music at night. I had picked up a few private students and realized I needed a studio that was outside of our home.
It was 2009, the height of the recession, Ana was working sixty hours a week and I was a full-on stay at home dad, driving Raphael, now four, to his Montessori classes, having playdates in the park, and changing loads of diapers. One day Ana drove past a building in Red Hook called The Chocolate Factory, which had been the original Bakers Chocolate factory, and saw a for-rent sign. In a prescient move to get me out of the house, she recommended that I rent some space and start a music school. And that’s what I did.
The original Community Music Space. This chair, and a giant room.
The original room was big, close to one-thousand square feet, and in it, I placed a music stand, a carpet, my saxophone, and an acoustic guitar. I moved the five students I had to the new studio and put out fliers around town, contacted the local school, and began to develop a plan for what to do next. I had a bunch of musician friends living in New York City and decided to bring them up and put on a show. I also had connected with Music In Common founder Todd Mack and through him met a bunch of great musicians. Throughout this process, I was learning that the Hudson Valley was full of amazing musicians, artists, painters, and writers. I began putting on shows for the local community, hosting Songwriter Speakeasies (round-robin performances of local musicians), and offering open sessions to musicians around the area.
Over the next year, my private teaching practice picked up and I began putting together singing classes and after school programs for kids. One day, at a local farm stand, I met Mary Ward, an accomplished actor and teacher and we began to collaborate to bring her improv teaching programs to the studio. We also adapted a program she had built living in Iowa called Bits of Broadway to offer as a summer camp in town. Also, during one of our open sessions, I met guitarist Josh Colow, and the two of us quickly developed a relationship based on our mutual love for 60’s soul music. We started playing music together and I started to figure out how to grow the business.
There were two businesses adjacent to the Community Music Space. One was About Town, a local newspaper publisher who was very nice and accommodating with all the noise we were making. Around deadline time they would bang on the walls and I would attempt to get a room full of third graders to stop yelling and stomping. My other neighbor was an ambulette company that delivered people in wheelchairs to appointments, but mostly what they did was smoke cigarettes. When their business moved out, I approached my landlord George Verilli - a well-known obstetrician, car collector, and all-around fascinating person - to see if I could rent the room. He agreed and allowed me to pay reduced rent while I built my practice. Since that time, George has become one of our biggest supporters.
I had also met John Esposito, a pianist and Bard College professor. We hit it off and he brought his trio in to perform at our studio for a performance. The new room had three teaching spaces available and I was actively looking for a piano teacher to add to the work that Mary, Josh, and I were doing. He recommended Evan Garcia-Renart, who was just graduating from Bard and soon Evan was teaching drums and piano at the studio.
After a year and a half of putting on live performances, it was becoming clear that they were not paying the bills. It was also clear that there was a demand in town for the lessons and classes we were offering. We had punched a hole in the wall, built a door between the two studios and were off and running. Community Music Space was beginning to look a bit more like a school!
Evolution of a music school
Chocolate Jam, Club Helsinki, 2020
I set to learning how to use social marketing, learned how to build a website, built walls, installed doors, and most importantly, built relationships with as many people as I could. As I reached out into the community and surrounding towns, I met artists, writers, farmers, mechanics, and people of all stripes and skill sets. I quickly learned this was a very rich environment with surprises everywhere I went, and that the Hudson Valley was a lot more than what I imagined when we first drove through Red Hook, a town with two stop lights. in 2014 we hosted our first showcase at Club Helsinki. it was a modest evening but the kids did great and we got the ball rolling. This February we hosted our 6th year in front of a sold out audience with over 14 performances. (Check out all the performance on our youtube channel).
In 2017 we decided to move out of the original space and take over the adjacent studios, basically taking over a sizable swath of The Chocolate Factory’s second floor. We increased our teachable space from four to seven rooms with the help of my friend Jay, a local police officer. We added five more teachers including Sean Gallagher, an incredible musician, and educator who not only runs our language of Music classes and teaches lessons, but who plays organ a 1960’s organ quartet, The Forefathers, with me, Josh Colow and Andrew Greeney. We
Getting back to today
Up until three weeks ago, the business was humming. We had over one-hundred fifty students through the doors each week, with classes ranging from bands, to improv for kids, teens, and adults, to private lessons as well as a number of recording projects. We were running beat labs, recording albums, writing musicals with kids, and offering a new film program this summer.
Then I got the phone call...and went to Best Buy.
While the physical version of our business came to a screeching halt, we shook off the shock of that Friday afternoon and got back to work. Our teachers were all back working virtually in three days and we are currently running most of the classes we offer. We have found new ways to collaborate with our students and will be offering new virtual classes this month.
What has become clear to me is that everyone has a part to play through this pandemic. While the true heroes are health care and service workers, we understand that our job is to keep the music happening, to offer our skills and passion for music to kids and families out in the world.
Our work is to continue to teach lessons, build new classes, connect with our students, and create opportunities for people everywhere to connect. We are going to keep the music happening!
Ben Senterfit