Fiddle program helps students thrive
Began with student initiative, raised funds for 20 fiddles
Michele LeTourneau
Northern News Services
Monday, November 21, 2016
QIKIQTAALUK
Julie Lohnes taught for three years in Pond Inlet and, though she left in June 2007, her love of music and dedication to the students can still be felt in that community, and now four others.
Pond Inlet Fiddle Workshop with Greg Simm accompanying on guitar for the students in April 2008. - Photo courtesy Gordon Stobbe |
"During my first month of school and forming relationships with students and getting to know the community a bit (in 2004) ... I had a number of students who expressed an interest in music but we didn't have a music teacher. There was very little to do after school. There was a cadet corps and some intramural sports - but nothing else," remembers Lohnes, a Nova Scotia resident.
"I have a music background and I'd taken an acoustic guitar up to Pond Inlet thinking I would have lots of time to learn how to play, because I knew very little. I just offered to the students, 'If you want to come to the school one evening a week we can just hang out and I can teach you what I know,'" she recalled.
A few months in, the Nasivvik Music Club formed. By Christmas, more students had joined.
Together, the group began fundraising to buy instruments. A community group in Nova Scotia Lohnes had worked with staged a benefit concert and all the proceeds were offered to the music club.
"As well, they held an instrument drive. In August 2005, seven crates of instruments arrived on the sea lift - a drum kit, electric guitar, accordion, trumpet, acoustic guitar, you name it. It was like Christmas. It was better than Christmas," said Lohnes.
The club continued to grow, taking over up to five classrooms in the school.
"But it came to the point, some of them were just so good and they had so much interest, I felt I was doing them a disservice."
That's when the club started raising money to hold a fiddle workshop.
"They had identified the fiddle as something they wanted to learn," said Lohnes.
The first workshop was held in Pond Inlet in May 2007.
Fast forward to 2016 and what began as one workshop in one community has become Tusarnaarniq Sivumut Association/Music for the Future, which sees guitarist Greg Simm and fiddler Kim de Laforest teach more than 200 students at workshops in Pond Inlet, Pangnirtung, Qikiqtarjuaq, Hall Beach and Apex in April and October.
Simms, who has been returning to Nunavut now twice each year since the very first workshop, recalls Lohnes approaching him to teach.
"The kids raised enough money to buy 20 fiddles. They raised enough money to cover our airfare. That's a lot of bake sales," said Simm, who was joined by the program's first fiddler Gordon Stobbe.
"They were keen. It was a very special birth to this whole project, which was capped off that weekend by a Sunday afternoon concert on an iceberg in Eclipse Sound. We dogsledded out."
Simm shared the photographs of the iceberg concert with a friend in Halifax, who shared them with his friend, who immediately wrote a cheque. Tusarnaarniq Sivumut became an entity in 2009, with a board of directors which each year holds an annual benefit event in Lunenburg, N.S.
The program spread to Pangnirtung that year.
"We continue to grow responsibly. We have a great dedication and a sense of responsibility to communities that really don't have access to music education. That's our mandate," said Simm, adding the organization grows slowly because it's not a one-time thing. They leave the fiddles behind at the school and the music teachers' return is promised.
This October trip to all five communities was Simm's 22nd visit to Nunavut, de Laforest's fifth.
"The kids were all great," Simm said. "I say 'kids' ... I still think of them as little kids ... One of the youngest kids is 22-years old now."
"Some of them are still playing," added de Laforest, who travels from Saskatchewan. "Jamesie (Itulu) is in the community, still. He plays. He sometimes comes out and helps us. He writes his own tunes, too."
Some of the 'kids' have even travelled to Nova Scotia to play at the annual benefit.
"Part of what we want to do is train kids to teach, too," said de Laforest. "Have them mentoring with us so that they're able to teach."
And why is music so important?
"It's well-documented that music students are often more successful students in general. It's enhancing. Music education improves English scores, math scores," said Simm.
"That's scientifically proven," added de Laforest.
