Posted to Web: Wednesday, May 13, 2009 11:38AM
Appeared in print: Wednesday, May 13, 2009, page B4
It was a captive audience, to say the least. A quartet of musicians from the Oregon Mozart Players sat down behind bars Tuesday morning and played three brief classical concerts for several dozen young inmates at Lane County’s John Serbu Youth Campus.
If their half-hour shows didn’t have the raucous energy of, say, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, the music was exquisitely calming — and that was the point.
“Two years ago, we had a small group play at one of the Bethel middle schools,” said Charley Wright, chairman of the board of the Mozart Players. “And we got a report back from the principal about the extraordinary effect this music had. One of the students had said, ‘I usually listen to Latin music. This is so calming!’ Well, this is certainly a place where calming music might be appropriate.”
Armed with a $300 grant from the Kiwanis Club of Eugene to pay the group’s professional musicians, Wright made arrangements with the Serbu staff for a quartet consisting of Cheryl Denice on oboe, Matt Fuller on violin, Clark Spencer on viola and Dale Bradley on cello to perform a Mozart oboe quartet and a waltz written by Bradley himself.
“This is the first time we’ve done anything like this,” Wright said.
The first of the group’s three gigs on Tuesday was for youngsters in the Phoenix unit, a locked section of cells looking out on a large multipurpose room plastered with motivational posters and holding a couple of television sets and a pingpong table.
As the musicians set up to play, Viriam Khalsa, manager for the treatment program, explained that the group of rather typical-looking teenagers slouched on chairs in front of the musicians — they were almost all boys, though the group included a couple of girls — were being treated to the best Lane County could offer in the way of programs to keep them from returning to a life of perpetual crime.
The youth were here for offenses ranging from drug abuse to assault and robbery. Many had been convicted — “adjudicated,” in the proper juvenile court parlance — a dozen or more times.
Despite the room’s accomplished criminal record, the audience was as well-behaved as most you’d see at the Hult Center, applauding enthusiastically, if not always in the proper places by stuffy classical standards, and enjoying themselves.
Where the audience was untypical was in the questions its members asked after each performance.
“Why do you keep tightening the bow?” (It’s horse hair and it needs to be kept at the right tightness.)
“Can I play your cello?” (Um, I’m not sure what the rules are about that.)
“How do you get so good?” (Practice…)
“Play Charlie Daniels!”
At that, cellist Bradley launched into a convincing version of the famous fiddle player’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” on his cello.
Later, violinist Fuller explained, in response to another question about difficult music, that the hardest piece of music he had ever had to play was by 19th-century violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini.
“There was a guy named Paganini who lived several hundred years ago,” Fuller told the youth. “He was such a good violin player that people thought he had sold his soul to the devil so he could get super powers.”