PORT TOWNSEND — Songwriting Works and Community Partners will launch a national project with two public music and songwriting events in Port Townsend on Wednesday.
Seven performing songwriters will participate and share their music at these events at an afternoon Songwriting Works Workshop from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. and a Community Conversation with film and live music that evening from 6:30 to 8:30.
The free afternoon workshop will feature Judith-Kate Friedman and special guests Sally Rogers, Krista Detor, Hogan & Moss, Don Strong and Jessie Lynn Ritter at San Juan Villa, 112 Castellano Way.
Elders from San Juan Villa and local senior housing communities are invited to join in as participants. Others in the community are invited to witness the Songwriting Works process and to experience the music.
The songwriters — in town to train as Songwriting Works facilitators — will join Friedman, founder and director of Songwriting Works, in composing a collaborative show with senior participants.
Everyone will have an opportunity to listen, learn and sing.
Conversation about the workshop, along with a short film and live music from the artists, will take place that evening, starting with a potluck at Rosewind Common House, 3131 Haines St.
Friedman and guest artists Rogers, Hogan & Moss, Strong and Ritter will talk about the workshop that took place earlier in the day at San Juan Villa and give examples from their work as community teaching artists.
Conversation will surround a screening of the award-winning short documentary film “A Specially Wonderful Affair,” featuring elders of the Jewish Home San Francisco recording their debut album with Friedman and others.
The evening will close with the featured songwriters sharing their original music in-the-round.
All events are free of charge and made possible with support of the Port Townsend Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts.
In 2018, Songwriting Works Educational Foundation is partnering with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Arts, Wellness and Vital Involvement in Aging (AWVIA), and AHEPA Management Company, a provider of affordable/subsidized/HUD housing for older adults to study the impacts for elders of making original music in collaboration with professional songwriters.
Communities in Houston, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Connecticut and Mobile, Ala., will be served. Performing songwriters, chosen for their expertise as a community teaching artists as well as their years of experience composing, performing, touring and recording, will train with Songwriting Works and AWVIA to serve as facilitators.
The project begins with a week of training for the artists in Port Townsend and “rolls out” in communities in the artists’ home regions in five parts of the U.S. this spring.
Impacts will be studied by researcher LinChiat Chang of San Francisco and findings published in a white paper toward the end of 2018.
Sally Rogers is a nationally renowned singer-songwriter, folk musician, composer of folk operas and cantatas, author, and recording artist whose award-winning music includes fourteen recordings. Her work has been published in hymnals and national school music textbooks, and her children’s picture book was published by E.P. Dutton.
Detor is a singer-songwriter and pianist from Indiana whose music has been featured on NPR and with Mike Harding on the BBC. She was the only American woman invited to the BBC’s Darwin Songhouse Project, Shrewsbury, England (2009), and has been commissioned to write musical theater for the U.S. Department of State in New Delhi, India (2012); for the Indiana Arts Commission (‘The Breeze Bends the Grass,’ recipient of the Indiana Arts Commission’s Masterpieces Grant-2016); as well as choral pieces for several national and international choirs.
Jon Hogan and Maria Moss (Hogan and Moss) have been performing original songs and old-time adaptations together for a decade. With their band, the Old Weird America, in 2017 they played more than 250 shows across 14 states.
Strong is a Minneapolis-based music producer/songwriter/performer, master teaching artist and documentary filmmaker. Formerly a songwriter in New York City for the ground-breaking urban label, Def Jam Records, he is currently active in the fertile Minneapolis music scene as organizer, performer and showcase producer for Songwriters Circle/Twin Cities LLC.
Vocalist and songwriter Ritter grew up in Missouri on the Mississippi River. She earned a music degree from Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., and found her own voice in the city’s songwriting community.
Friedman is a songwriter, vocalist, improviser, producer and community music maker. As founder and director of Songwriting Works Educational Foundation, she is recognized as an innovator in music education and community building through song.
For information about the workshop and evening event, call 360-385-1160 or email songwritingworks@gmail.com.
Jessie Lynn Ritter of Pensacola, Fla.
Sally Rogers of Pomfret, Conn.
