 Hello, good evening. I'm Lorna Materna, the executive director of United Counseling Service. We're very happy to have you here today as we celebrate our 65th anniversary in providing services to Bennington County community. UCS started in 1958 when two separate entities came together before United Counseling Service. And today we serve more than 3,000 Bennington County residents, your friends, your neighbors, on an annual basis. And we have 300, just over 300 staff. We work with community partners extensively to build a stronger community. Our services have expanded to include residential homes for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, mental illness. We provide a head start, early head start services, crisis services, and addiction services, and many more. And we grow and change what we are providing to our community as the needs of our community grow and change. Thank you for joining us tonight as we listen to Me Too Orchestra. So very happy to have you here. They will perform Beethoven's Symphony No. 6. Thank you to our evening sponsors, Taconic Music, Bennington Banner and Manchester Journal. And thank you to Ian Corso and her team at Southern Vermont Art Center for the opportunity to hold this event in this beautiful space. At a time when mental health and substance use challenges are at levels never before seen in our community, the message that Me Too Orchestra brings to us is more important than ever before. We can only succeed when we support each other, include each other, and educate each other in embracing new and different perspectives. We are so excited to present this group of talented musicians who are not defined by their illness and who work to erase the harmful stigma often associated with mental illness. Please join me in welcoming Me Too Orchestra of Burlington, led by music director and conductor Michael C. Colburn. And thank you so much for joining us for this performance by Me Too Orchestra of Burlington. A performance as you heard of Ludwig von Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, a symphony that is unique in a number of ways, but especially because it's the only symphony that Beethoven wrote that was intended to musically describe specific scenes in nature, scenes that Beethoven actually explained in the subtitles for each movement. I'll talk more about that in just a moment. Nature was very, very important to Beethoven, for reasons that I'll describe here in a moment. But when I found out that we were going to be presenting this concert in the middle of May on this beautiful campus here in Southern Vermont Arts, I thought, you know, it's going to be in the middle of spring. It's a beautiful campus. Let's do Beethoven 6. It'll be perfect. Now, being a native composer, I know that being in the middle of May is no guaranteed. And we're going to have beautiful story about it, right? But we are lucky, did we not? We made this show so beautiful out there. And you're thrilled to be here on this beautiful campus, as I mentioned. Nature was very important to Beethoven. It was a source of inspiration. Much of his music came to him as he was soloing to the countryside as he was beginning with nature. But nature was important to Beethoven for other reasons as well. When people think of the kind of stereotypical tormented artists, they often, I think, picture that furrowed brow of Beethoven, right? That we've seen so many artist depictions. And it's commonly known that Beethoven did struggle with his own mental health around his life for a number of reasons. First and foremost was the ongoing deterioration of his hearing, the most important sense to Beethoven, which he lost to the force of his life, which seemed to him to be the greatest insult of fate, right? So he wrestled with difficult feelings surrounding that loss of hearing. But he also had a number of family issues and other kind of spiritual challenges throughout his life. And from the time he was a young man, he was a teenager, he would often find that those long swirls to the countryside, that communing with nature, was not only an inspiration for his music, but was also a way for him to center down, to regain his sense of spiritual centeredness, and to really help him to kind of keep the perspective that he needed to make his way through a very difficult life. So I think in many ways, this music is really the perfect vehicle for me too, for the message that we want to convey to our audiences, because music is such an important source of solace to us, and much to the way that nature is a source of solace to me too. And the message that this music brings of conveying a force of natural beauty, is just one of the most explicitly beautiful pieces in the repertoire. But also that message about the importance of maintaining one's own sense of centeredness and mental health and how important it is as well. So we're gonna present the entire symphony to you here today, all five movements, but we are gonna take a little break between the first and second, and the second and third movements, so we can tell you a little bit more about the mission of me too. As I mentioned, Beethoven often offered rather descriptive titles for each one of these movements, and the first movement is one of the most descriptive. It's called the awakening of truthful feelings upon arriving in the countryside. Our 12th year as a group, which is pretty awesome, we're in positions with a... And now there are three central orchestras. There's one in Boston, there's one in Manchester, New Hampshire, we have a flute choir, we have a chorus, we're making music everywhere now. You all agree. And what we do every week is we intentionally create what we call the stigma-free zone, a space that we can all show up to, musicians who live with mental illnesses and those that support them, and make art together, art as beautiful as what you just heard, and then you out in the community, like we do all the time, and we spread that message. Part of spreading that message means we've played in a lot of interesting places. We have played in prison and penitentiaries. We have played in elementary schools. We have played outside. We have played at the airport. And it feels good for a group of musicians like us to be playing such an absolutely gorgeous venue. And thank you to the United Council Service for inviting us to be here tonight and share this with you all. Thank you. At different shows, I share different versions and ideas of our story, of my own story with the group. I was not always the manager, director of YouTube, but when I started with them, I was a teenager with a bad haircut, and I sat there. I was also a person who had not yet figured out how to deal with their bipolar disorder, and I needed an outlet, and I needed structure, and I needed people to look at me every day and say, you're a musician and you're loved and we're here with you and we support you. Even if I wasn't always supporting the group, even if what I had in me to give was only to exist in their own, I think that's really important. And I've seen that story play out over and over again for musicians that are here tonight, musicians that can't be with us tonight, from the many hundreds of people that have cycled in with us over time. We've played to small groups. We've played to big groups. I'm looking at this group now and I'm so grateful for all of you coming to hear the absolutely gorgeous Beethoven 6 Symphony, which by the way, is one of my favorites, and it's absolutely perfect. I was a little person who stood on stage so far and said, I cannot describe for you how much this music needs to be played in this weather. It's absolutely wonderful. So thank you to each and every one of you for coming out tonight, for supporting the United Counseling Service, for supporting the Me Too Brothers and Tiddler Orchestra. Let's hear the second movement. So there's a small irony in the second movement. It's just one of the longer or more evolved movements in the symphony, but it also has the choice of expression. It is Seen by the Brook. Thanks Melanie Brown. I've been playing clarinet with Me Too about 10 years at this point. Actually, I remember when Phoenix played right over there with a bat haircut. We go way back. So I would just take a couple minutes and talk to you about what Me Too has done for me here. I mentioned I joined the orchestra January 2013 or so, and it was a time where, so I have a math professor at Stanley College, but I was a music major undergrad and took some time off and it really burned out. And originally joining Me Too because I needed that stigma-free place to remember having a musician again and really fell in love with the ensemble, the mission, and was just so proud of the work that we were doing. But I wasn't telling anybody about it because I was pulling on to some stigma about participating in Me Too. I just had this moment where a couple of years ago, I was like, why am I not inviting people to this? Every time we're in this group, we're all stigma-free and I go play all these concerts. I talk all around the state. Stigma-free, why can I not fight the stigma? You know, at my job. So then I finally did. I finally did. And it was this great breakthrough moment where suddenly I could share with my colleagues what I was doing. I could really open with my students about the work that I was doing as part of this orchestra. And let me tell you all, when we hear about the mental health epidemic facing our young people, it is true. I am on the front lines of that every day. And it is amazingly powerful now for me now that I've gotten over my own stigma to start every semester with greeting my new students, telling them a little bit about me, putting out a couple of pictures of us and talking about my participation as an orchestra and what it means and how I want our classroom to be that stigma-free safe place where mental health is health. And I can't focus on being the student you want to be when you're dealing with these other challenges. And as it has opened up, I think so many, so many lines of communication even with my students. I remember an episode very clearly this semester where I had a student who was very handedness coming into the class. When she was there, she was amazing. But the 19th year from her, the first couple of weeks and finally, finally I did hear it from her. She's like, okay, hot off the presses. I just got a diagnosis for bipolar and you're the only faculty member I feel comfortable telling because I know that you're gonna need to and I know that you get it. So of course I congratulated her on having a diagnosis and cosmologist power and working through that. And I hope for her though in that moment that she was dealing with challenges. We're clearly interfering with her academics but she didn't feel that safe space in other areas of her life. And I'm just so grateful for the work in this orchestra that I'll be get over my own stigma in supporting this work so that I can really bring this work out to my students here. So again, thank you so much. And I'm so excited for you to hear the other three movements going. We're going to present the final three movements. They're totally six and 50 now. And they are connected to the break between us The first movement is called the joyful gathering of country folk. And you're gonna quickly guess what these country folk are doing because if you don't conjure up pictures of a art dance the countryside of Germany, I will be shocked. These country folk are and you have a great time. But the great time is interrupted all of a sudden by a summer storm. We all know in Vermont as they say if you don't like the weather just wait five minutes. Well, the same must be true in Germany because the storm comes out of nowhere and all the country folk must go scurrying off to cover somewhere because we hear thunder and lightning and just the most vivid musical picture of a thunderstorm you can imagine. But as is often the case with summer storms it doesn't last long. It receives off into the distance and as it does we hear the sound of a shepherds call first in the clarinet and then in the horn. And Beethoven goes on to describe the final movement as is feelings of gratitude after the storm has passed. These are the final three movements of Beethoven's sixth symphony. And thank you again so much for coming out to hear this performance by me too, Burlington. This has been a production of the Anya Casting Service and the me too, Burlington Orchestra. Have a great day, everybody.