Making music for Haiti
For an Ottawa violinist, it's personal
By Steven Mazey, The Ottawa Citizen February 6, 2010
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/Making+music+Haiti/2531357/story.html
She left Haiti 12 years ago and is grateful for the life that Canada offered her and her family, but Ottawa violin teacher Yvrose Philippe-Auguste has maintained deep connections with her homeland through her love of music.
In Haiti, Philippe-Auguste started on violin as a girl and later studied on scholarship at U.S. universities. She returned to spend 16 years there teaching at a music school for primary and secondary students in Port-au-Prince, a school where she says students were welcome regardless of their family's ability to pay.
Though she moved to Ottawa with her engineer husband and two sons in 1998, Philippe-Auguste has returned to Haiti each year for 10 days of teaching at the school. She has also held fundraising events to buy instruments and music supplies for the students, and she has brought Haitian students to Canada for summer studies.
You can hear the pain in Philippe-Auguste's voice when she talks about the horrific earthquake that struck Haiti last month and destroyed the school she loved. Although no one was at the school at the time, she says she has not heard the fates of the students who studied there. Philippe-Auguste lost a cousin in the quake, and she says she can watch the news footage only sporadically because she finds it too upsetting.
"It's devastating. The school I grew up in is gone, the church is gone, the only concert hall we had is gone," Philippe-Auguste, 53, said from her Orléans home.
She says it's too early to say if or when the music school can reopen. For now, she says, there are more urgent concerns, including food, water, housing and medical care.
"It's been very hard. Haiti has been through so much. Even now I still can't believe it. It feels like I'm in a bad dream and will wake up one day. I feel like I'm so far away and that there is nothing I can do."
That's why Philippe-Auguste immediately said yes when organizers asked if she and some of her students would perform as part of a fundraising concert Sunday to support the Canadian Red Cross's Haiti relief work.
The concert, By Youth For Youth, is organized by the Ottawa Association of Chinese Canadian University Alumni. The group organizes a classical music concert in which award-winning young student musicians perform in support of a different cause each year.
Philippe-Auguste will join an ensemble of 17 of her students, about half of them from Haitian-Canadian families, to perform Haitian folk tunes. Some of her students lost relatives in the earthquake, she says, and she wasn't sure if they would want to perform so soon.
"When the organizers called and asked me, I just said yes right away, but I wasn't sure what we would do. It's very fresh for the students who have lost someone. I was touched that everyone wanted to play."
Other performers will include Toronto-area violinist Adrian Anantawan, who studied at the Curtis Institute and in Ottawa at the National Arts Centre's Summer Music Institute. He will also perform in Vancouver this month as part of the Olympic Games cultural programming.
Anantawan, 26, will join pianist Yen-Yen Gee, a graduate student at the University of Ottawa, for music by Brahms and Massenet, and he will join 12-year-old Ottawa cellist Bryan Cheng for Handel-Halvorsen's Passacaglia in G minor for Violin and Cello. With Gee, Cheng will perform the first movement of Beethoven's Cello Sonata No. 3 in A Major.
Other performers include Ottawa pianist Anita Pari, 11, who studies with Andrew Tunis, a children's choir from Ottawa's Chinese community, and Ottawa musician Leena An, who performs on the gu-zheng, a Chinese plucked instrument. Rhythmic gymnast Christina Campbell and children from the Leading Note Foundation's KidSingers' program will also perform.
Philippe-Auguste says it feels good to be part of something that will raise some money for Haiti, and she says she's touched by the offers of help she's already received from colleagues offering to donate instruments or other things to help re-build the music school.
"People have been very kind, but I've asked them to wait a few months until we know what is happening. Right now, everyone is taking it one day at a time."
What: Benefit concert for Canadian Red Cross Haiti relief
When and where: Sunday, Feb. 7, 2:30 p.m.; First Unitarian Congregation, 30 Cleary Ave.
Tickets: $20 general, $10 for seniors and children under 16, at the door.
Information: 613-263-5971
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
For an Ottawa violinist, it's personal
By Steven Mazey, The Ottawa Citizen February 6, 2010
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/Making+music+Haiti/2531357/story.html
She left Haiti 12 years ago and is grateful for the life that Canada offered her and her family, but Ottawa violin teacher Yvrose Philippe-Auguste has maintained deep connections with her homeland through her love of music.
In Haiti, Philippe-Auguste started on violin as a girl and later studied on scholarship at U.S. universities. She returned to spend 16 years there teaching at a music school for primary and secondary students in Port-au-Prince, a school where she says students were welcome regardless of their family's ability to pay.
Though she moved to Ottawa with her engineer husband and two sons in 1998, Philippe-Auguste has returned to Haiti each year for 10 days of teaching at the school. She has also held fundraising events to buy instruments and music supplies for the students, and she has brought Haitian students to Canada for summer studies.
You can hear the pain in Philippe-Auguste's voice when she talks about the horrific earthquake that struck Haiti last month and destroyed the school she loved. Although no one was at the school at the time, she says she has not heard the fates of the students who studied there. Philippe-Auguste lost a cousin in the quake, and she says she can watch the news footage only sporadically because she finds it too upsetting.
"It's devastating. The school I grew up in is gone, the church is gone, the only concert hall we had is gone," Philippe-Auguste, 53, said from her Orléans home.
She says it's too early to say if or when the music school can reopen. For now, she says, there are more urgent concerns, including food, water, housing and medical care.
"It's been very hard. Haiti has been through so much. Even now I still can't believe it. It feels like I'm in a bad dream and will wake up one day. I feel like I'm so far away and that there is nothing I can do."
That's why Philippe-Auguste immediately said yes when organizers asked if she and some of her students would perform as part of a fundraising concert Sunday to support the Canadian Red Cross's Haiti relief work.
The concert, By Youth For Youth, is organized by the Ottawa Association of Chinese Canadian University Alumni. The group organizes a classical music concert in which award-winning young student musicians perform in support of a different cause each year.
Philippe-Auguste will join an ensemble of 17 of her students, about half of them from Haitian-Canadian families, to perform Haitian folk tunes. Some of her students lost relatives in the earthquake, she says, and she wasn't sure if they would want to perform so soon.
"When the organizers called and asked me, I just said yes right away, but I wasn't sure what we would do. It's very fresh for the students who have lost someone. I was touched that everyone wanted to play."
Other performers will include Toronto-area violinist Adrian Anantawan, who studied at the Curtis Institute and in Ottawa at the National Arts Centre's Summer Music Institute. He will also perform in Vancouver this month as part of the Olympic Games cultural programming.
Anantawan, 26, will join pianist Yen-Yen Gee, a graduate student at the University of Ottawa, for music by Brahms and Massenet, and he will join 12-year-old Ottawa cellist Bryan Cheng for Handel-Halvorsen's Passacaglia in G minor for Violin and Cello. With Gee, Cheng will perform the first movement of Beethoven's Cello Sonata No. 3 in A Major.
Other performers include Ottawa pianist Anita Pari, 11, who studies with Andrew Tunis, a children's choir from Ottawa's Chinese community, and Ottawa musician Leena An, who performs on the gu-zheng, a Chinese plucked instrument. Rhythmic gymnast Christina Campbell and children from the Leading Note Foundation's KidSingers' program will also perform.
Philippe-Auguste says it feels good to be part of something that will raise some money for Haiti, and she says she's touched by the offers of help she's already received from colleagues offering to donate instruments or other things to help re-build the music school.
"People have been very kind, but I've asked them to wait a few months until we know what is happening. Right now, everyone is taking it one day at a time."
What: Benefit concert for Canadian Red Cross Haiti relief
When and where: Sunday, Feb. 7, 2:30 p.m.; First Unitarian Congregation, 30 Cleary Ave.
Tickets: $20 general, $10 for seniors and children under 16, at the door.
Information: 613-263-5971
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
