Musicians in high school will perform in conjunction with musicians with decades of experience at a new music fundraiser.
Playing it Forward, a concert to honor musicians and to raise money for music programs in several schools, will be March 29 at the Center for the Arts of Homer.
Colleen Kattau, whose songs and performances are often inspired by current events and social issues, has played the concert for decades, and will again this year.
“In other civilized cultures, music is a priority, without question,” Kattau said. “Here, unfortunately it’s just very money-oriented, and there’s an ignorance about the importance of music to our brain development. We are musical beings.”
The concert was inspired by the Phil Clarke Memorial Concert, played in 1988, raising money first for Cortland Memorial Regional Medical Center and eventually the Cortland Youth Bureau.
The concert was named for Clarke after his death in 1997. However, while the organizers of the Playing it Forward show consider their show a continuation of the Phil Clarke Memorial Concert, Rosie Rosenthal, creator of the Phil Clarke Memorial Concert, said he plans to bring back the show eventually, and continue raising money for the Cortland Youth Bureau.
“It’s something new,” Rosenthal said of Playing it Forward.
The last Phil Clarke Memorial Concert was in February 2020 at Bru64, with Tanglewood headlining. Since then, three of the band’s six members have died, said Carol Guingo Clarke, one of the concert’s organizers.
“There’s been some tragedies in the music industry that hit us close to home,” Clarke said.
The proceeds will go toward Homer, Cortland, and St. Mary’s schools’ music programs. Four bands will perform from Cortland Modern Band – a Cortland High School program where students form their own bands and learn to perform.
The students’ participation in this event is a great way for them to see and meet the community’s accomplished musicians, said Jon Keefner, teacher of Cortland Modern Band.
“Our music program has been expanding for quite a while now, and soon, we’re going to have a particularly large boost in ensemble numbers in the next year or two,” Keefner said. “There is always a place for every student in our program, but right now, we don’t have enough instruments to accommodate the incoming numbers.”
The program has more than 80 members. All proceeds donated to the school will go to purchasing more instruments, he said.
“In schools, the first things to get cut are the arts and music, and to me, that’s a travesty,” Kattau said. “There are so many people who are just making ends meet, so supporting families by letting them get an instrument … it’s important to the functioning of a decent society.”
“They’re teaching the kids not only to set up music, but also do sound and lights and book music, so if it’s something they want to get into, at least they’ll have some experience on paper,” said Paul Semeraro, one of the concert organizers. “We just wanted to support that.”
The Playing it Forward show will be at Rose Hall next year, and rotate between Rose Hall and the Center for the Arts of Homer.
“There are a lot of musicians from the Cortland area, and there still are,” Carol Clarke said. “One of the big ones was Ronnie Dio, so I think reviving it for kids, for the students, is really important, because they’re the next generation of musicians that might make it big.”
