STRINGS IN KENYA

Office of News and Media Relations
Christopher Dow
Senior Editor
Email: cloud@rice.edu

It wasn’t the size of the audience that was daunting. Clements often had played for much larger crowds, especially during her year with the Houston Grand Opera. But among the 500 people packed into the church in Nyeri, Kenya, only a handful recognized that she was holding a musical instrument. The program read, “Mount Kenya Academy: Solo Violin,” and thinking there was a typo, the minister introduced Clements as, “Violet, from the Mount Kenya Academy.”

“I played the ‘Hungarian Dance’ by Brahms,” Clements said. “The audience almost fell over, and the jaw dropping was pretty amazing — not from being impressed, but just with confusion. It was like, ‘Who’s this white girl from outer space playing at our church? And what the heck is she doing up there? Is that an instrument?’”

TRANSFORMATIONS
Clements had arrived in Nyeri, located in the Kenyan highlands, the previous August to start a strings program for the Mount Kenya Academy, and her performance demonstrated that culture shock works in both directions. But if the people of Nyeri didn’t know what a violin was before she arrived, they know now: Clements has 85 violin, viola and cello students ages 6 through 19. “I’ve gotten the opportunity to create an experience through music for students who will forever remember learning violin and playing together and people enjoying their performances,” she said. “It builds their confidence and does something nice for the whole community.”

As a professional violinist, Gillian Clements ’02 has had her share of performances, but none more surprising than one she played in October 2006.

Clements can appreciate the transformative value of such an experience. Born in Durham, N.C., she spent her early years in nearby Chapel Hill and started playing the violin at age 6. When she was 11 and living in Melbourne, Australia, she joined the Junior Strings of Melbourne, a kid’s chamber orchestra that toured Europe for three weeks. “After that, I was hooked on violin,” she said. “I loved being part of a high-quality ensemble that was internationally recognized. From that point on, I knew I would have my life’s work in music, though as I’ve gotten older, my career path has turned toward education.”

VIOLINIST BOOT CAMP
Clements studied violin at the North Carolina School for the Arts before placing second in Boston Classical Orchestra’s Concerto Competition. The prize was a full scholarship to Boston University. In her senior year at BU, she met Sergiu Luca, the Dorothy Richard Starling Professor of Violin at Rice’s Shepherd School of Music, who was in Boston to visit a former student.

“I played some Bach for him,” Clements said, “and he suggested I audition at Rice. I wanted to study with him no matter where he taught. I knew he’d ensure I had the proper technique and all the tools I’d need if I was going to have a career as a violinist.”

“My ideal job would be to start a music program for kids at a university, such as the Shepherd School Preparatory Program.” -Gillian Clements

Clements refers to Luca’s training as “violinist boot camp.” “By the time you finish studying with him,” she said, “you know not just the entire repertoire, but a new way of analyzing music. Luca teaches you how to think about a musical piece so you can make decisions about how to play it and why you want to play it that way.”

While at Rice, Clements started a music preparatory program called String Fling with fellow students Ginger Neff ’03, Valdine Ritchie ’03 and Joanne Wojtowicz ’03, and the endeavor reminded her how important her own youthful experience with the Junior Strings of Melbourne had been. “After that, I really knew I wanted to teach kids,” she said. “I love designing programs to get kids inspired through music.”

Clements earned her master’s in violin performance in 2002 and played with the Houston Grand Opera for a year before moving back to Boston to teach at BU and the Duncan Hall School in Wellesley, Mass., and to work on a doctorate in music education at BU. To help make ends meet, she founded the Iris Ensemble, an all-female string quartet.

FROM DISSERTATION TO OCCUPATION
While Clements was looking for a project for her dissertation, fellow String Fling founder Neff, who had moved to South Africa, put her in touch with an outreach music program in Johannesburg. As Clements prepared to visit there, her uncle mentioned that a friend of his, Scott Hawkins, was at the Mount Kenya Academy. “I made a detour to Kenya and fell in love with the school,” she said. “It was the perfect fit for both me and the school.”

In exchange for starting the string program, Clements is given time to conduct research for her dissertation — a case study on the differences in how children learn both Western classical and traditional Kenyan music within the same institution. But creating a strings program from scratch isn’t simple, even with students who know what a violin is. “The kids learn traditional Kenyan songs and dance on an informal basis,” Clements said, “and the school offers piano lessons, but before I arrived, teaching strings wasn’t even considered.”

The school owned a few violins in poor condition, but stringed instruments are so rare in Kenya that even the main music shop in Nairobi had only two violins, which, Clements said, “were horrible by American standards.” Violas and cellos are even scarcer. “As far as I can tell,” she said, “there are probably 10 cellos, if that, in all of Kenya.”

That meant Clements would have to bring instruments with her. With help from Hawkins and the school’s director, Charity Mwangi, Clements organized funding to buy instruments. Then she went to a musical instrument warehouse in Boston, where she played about 50 or 60 violins and violas. “I picked the best 30 to send over,” she said, “so I’d have something to work with.” A professor at BU also donated five cellos. After Clements arrived, she told the owner of the music shop in Nairobi that she had many students who needed instruments, and the shop managed to ship in a batch of violins from India so the students could buy them.

REWARDS
All the effort was worthwhile. “The kids are intrigued and excited about playing violin, viola and cello,” Clements said. “In Kenya, only the best schools in Nairobi could even dream of offering stringed instruments. The fact that these kids can learn all three instruments out in the highlands of Kenya is a real novelty. The kids are fantastic — they do their absolute best and are just tickled to death when they get to perform for their peers and their parents.”

Clements has taken her students to Nairobi to see performances by the Nairobi Orchestra and started a small string orchestra at her school. This past spring, she spent a lot of time preparing her students to take Grade 1 of the Associated Board of the British Royal Schools of Music exams. There was no sheet music for the exams in Kenya, so copies had to be faxed from England. “The kids who pass will have a certificate for the rest of their lives that is recognized all over Europe and Africa as a huge musical accomplishment,” Clements said. “They will be able to get better jobs and more money just on the basis of having a simple music certificate because it sets them apart.”

Clements will leave Kenya late this fall to complete her doctorate in Boston, but she isn’t done passing on her love of music. “My ideal job would be to start a music program for kids at a university, such as the Shepherd School Preparatory Program,” she said. “I thrive on the conversations and ideas that spring from being surrounded by colleagues and students in a vibrant university campus like Rice.”