 I'm Phoenix Crockett and I'm the managing director of this group, Me Too, Burlington. We are one of three such orchestras, one's in Manchester, one's in Boston, doing mental health advocacy work in our communities and beyond. We are a group of musicians who are people who live with mental health diagnoses and those who support them. We don't just play in beautiful recital halls. Thank you, Tally Long, for hosting us tonight. We also play sometimes in correctional facilities or elementary school gymnasiums or out on the street or in airports, spreading our message. Tonight, we're here with you to present a show called Happy Birthday Gustav and you'll hear three selections at Gustav Holst. Without further ado, I bring on Michael Culver. Thank you so much for joining us for this slightly early birthday celebration for Gustav Holst. His birthday actually isn't until later in the year. Once we turn the calendar into this 150th year of his birth, we decided we just couldn't wait. Of course, most people know Gustav Holst for his incredible suite for large orchestra of the planets and I emphasize that's for a large orchestra, a much larger orchestra than we have here in B2. But fortunately for us, Gustav Holst wrote all different types of music for different size and types of ensembles and so we decided to really focus on some of the different types of music that he wrote here tonight. So we began with a work for string orchestra, his St. Paul's Suite and it's called St. Paul's Suite because Gustav Holst was the music master. He was the music director at St. Paul's Suite for most of his adult life from I think 1904 to 1930. So even in the years of his great fame after the planets, he still kept working at the school. He was really grateful to have that touchstone in his life. One of the premier ensembles of the St. Paul's School, which was a girl school, was their string orchestra and he actually wrote several works, including the one you just heard for that ensemble. It's got a little bit of an unusual history in that he wrote the work in 1913, a couple of years before he wrote the planets, which was 1915. But it wasn't published until 1922. Holst was one of those composers that kept fussing with his music and he always felt like it wasn't quite ready to publish. So it was actually almost 10 years before he published the work in 1922. The work that you are about to hear, his first suite in E-flat for Wind Band, has a very similar kind of story. He wrote the work in 1909, it was actually even earlier than the St. Paul's Suite, and it was fairly early in his career. And most importantly for the band world, it was one of the very first original works for concert bands. So the concert band in the early 20th century still played a lot of marches and waltzes of later music and occasionally orchestral transcriptions. But composers didn't really start writing seriously for this ensemble until later in the 20th century. And actually Gustav Holst was one of the pioneers in that effort. The first suite, as I said, was written in 1909, was not performed until 1922, the same year as the St. Paul's Suite. And oddly enough, as important as this piece is to the history of the concert band, we know very little about its origin. When Holst was asked who he wrote this for, he couldn't even remember what ensemble he wrote it for. So I'm not sure why he didn't remember it in greater detail. But we don't really care in the band world. We're just awfully happy we have this music. So we thought it'd be interesting to take the wind, brass, and percussion section from our orchestra and to perform this piece that is generally done by wind bands. So this is the Holst first suite in E-flat. Me again. We have many concert traditions with this group because it's our 13th season of doing this and things fall into place over time. You're about to hear two of those. Now, you'll see in your program something called Questions and Answers and something called the lived experience. We're going to start with questions and answers because what we do is not typical. It's not something that you see every day. It's not something that every state in the union has. And people often have questions about the logistics of how we work or about our philosophies or about me or about absolutely anything at all. And we often open the floor for those questions. And if I don't know the answer, probably one of them does. And now I look to the audience. Before I was a conductor, I was a euphonium player. So that, right, Tom, I mean, there's no better instrument than the euphonium, right? Yes, so. But that's hardly an objective answer. But yes, that's my favorite. Euphonium is fine. Cello is the preferred instrument. But we don't need to get into that. Is everybody from Vermont raised your hand if you're from Vermont, if you're a local? So a significant number. I don't think anyone's ever asked that before. I didn't know that. That's a lot. I am not. Mary is just irreplaceable in general. What inspired the formation of Me Too? So there was a man, and his name, well, is a man. He's doing well. And his name is Ronnie Bronstein. And he is a wonderful conductor and musician himself. And he was looking out into the world and thinking, I am a man who lives with mental illness. And I want to create a group where people can come, and they can make music outside of stigma, outside of all of these oppressive forces that were keeping people away from their care and away from their communities and away from art. And so he put his head together with one Caroline Woodens right over there. And they got a small group of musicians together. This is many, what, 2010, 2011, something like that, many years ago. And it sort of still holds from there, playing in little churches around Vermont, playing in correctional facilities, playing outside the group swelled and swelled and became what it eventually was. And now there's the Boston group and the Manchester group. And I came on two years ago to kind of help things out. Yeah, that could be your question. I am not a volunteer. They give me money to do this. Isn't that crazy? But I like doing it. You know, I actually started as a cellist in the group. Many years ago, I was an 18-year-old with a bad haircut playing cello over there with some people who are still now in the group. And I've actually took over management duties. And, you know, someone's got to deal with all this paper. That's mostly what I do. Gustav Holtz writes movies for us. Did Gustav Holtz live to see the moving picture? Yeah, he lived to see them, but he wrote no film music. So it was really bad. Well, he's written some music. In fact, the first movement of the first suite was actually used for a documentary about the production of British planes and actually was incredibly effective in that context. So that's very perceptive. Well, thank you all for your questions. And especially thank you for joining us once again. We're really glad to have all of you here. It's wonderful to see the community come out and show up for art, for music, for classical music, especially, too. What you're gonna hear next is some brief stories from three of our members. We call this the lived experience piece, right? Everybody here has a story of how they got here and how they got to music and why this means so much to them. We try to share some of those stories during these shows so you can sort of see the impact that this group has not just on its community, but on our musicians as well. First, you're going to hear from Alex in our cello section and then Deb in our percussion section and then Melanie over in Wins. I'm going to hand the microphone now over to them. Thank you, Phoenix. Evidently, I had two minutes to explain my entire lived experience and appreciation of me too, which is gonna be tough to do. But I started with me too about eight years ago, seven to eight. I was living in a sober house. Recently got to DUI's in the space in jail time. I was seeing the counselor at that time and I saw a flyer for me too. And then I played an instrument, but it's been a while since I played with a group. So I contacted Carolyn and been with the group ever since. It's been about eight years, but during that time I've had a lot of ups and downs, but a lot of ups, which is good. I came out as a non-binary. I bought a house and now living on about 70 acres, a long ways away from living in a sober house. But I've also had periods of fairly serious depression and relapses into my addiction as well. So it hasn't been an easy road for sure. But through it all, me too, has been just an instrumental part of helping me through that. I've always had this group to come to and rely upon. And recently we lost a member to mental health and it's one of those things that always carries with me how important this group is, not only to myself, but for all others as well. It's, I can honestly say, it's saved my life, so it really is very impactful. And one last thing, it was really cool to be in the audience and to hear all of this. So thank you. Among those trials of tribulations, Alex was also among the most influential stand partners I ever had and I'm very, very grateful for them. Deb. My name is Deb Gaye and I am a percussionist here with the Me Too Orchestra in Burlington. Being of a certain age, which I will not tell you, I've had a lot of life experiences and it really occurred to me that a lot of the part of my life that I lived in Massachusetts before moving here to Vermont, I really didn't have a clue about what was going on with me. I knew that on my mother's side, we had some relatives back in Maine who were unusual. They struggled with many different things, including epilepsy, depression, anxiety, agriphobia, but they weren't given those names. In my younger years, you didn't talk about mental illness. You called it something else. They're just a bundle of nerves. They're just pessimistic. And so when I grew up, a rather traumatic event happened at the age of eight when my father died very suddenly at home with us there of a massive heart attack. In those days, I never heard anything about PTSD. There was no counseling for kids. You just kinda soldiered on. So I had no idea what effect it was going to have on the rest of my life. I went off to college. I joined the marching band, the concert band, the opera orchestra, and I was having a great time until halfway through one year. When I had what I now know is one of my first anxiety attacks. I did not know what hit me. Nobody else seemed to know either. Until finally I went home and my mother, thank God, who is a brave woman and more progressive than some, went to see a psychiatrist and took me with her. I still didn't know what was going on, but they put me on medication. I went back to school. I was fine. I graduated from college. Found a teaching job. Was doing pretty well, except for occasional nerves, as people call them. And then, don't take this the wrong way, I met the most wonderful man, my husband, who's sitting over there in the audience. And suddenly, the events from my childhood raised an anxiety in me about losing someone that led to full-fledged panic attacks. When I say full-fledged, I mean waking up in the middle of the night, curled in a fetal position, crying and feeling like there's an enormous locomotive about to run you over. I didn't know what was happening. I kept having for a month before I finally told a friend and they said, let's go see someone. We did. I got full-time medication again. Everything was fine. Happily married, going on 30 years now. Moved up to Vermont and, oh, I'm still dealing with anxiety and depression. Only I didn't know because I hadn't really looked at or heard a diagnosis. Well, and then, I was invited to come and help out the Me Too Orchestra. Now, when you hear the word Me Too for the first time, you're like, what's a Me Too? What's a Me Too Orchestra? But when I went and explained what it was, I thought, oh, that's great. I can help people who are having mental health issues. Never thinking that it was me. And then, I finally looked more closely at a certain medical record that I had and I said, oh, it is me. Hey, Me Too. I felt so much better. This orchestra has made a huge change for me. I would never, ever have stood up in public and said, yes, I deal with anxiety and depression. And now I can. And as I always say, I am not defined by my diagnosis. Thank you. Now, from the clarinet section, the person in the group I looked to, to keep me straight and help me manage things and doesn't let me drown in things like Google Docs or confusing things like that. This is Melanie. Thanks, that's just because I remember Phoenix when he was the bad haircut cellist from way back when. Deb, you're such a tough act to follow. You hear the stories, but every time they're just as impactful as the first time, you hear them. So my name's Melanie Brown. I'm back here in the clarinet section. And I wanna talk a little bit about that stigma-free zone sign. Did anybody notice that walking in? Yeah, so that's a really, I think a hallmark of this organization is this notion of every rehearsal is a stigma-free zone. This concert space is a stigma-free zone. And as you've heard, we're a group where, okay, sometimes I feel like a fraud because I don't actually have a mental illness. I'm an educator, so I'm on the front line of our mental health crisis in our schools. So I've very much lived experience there. But you've heard a little bit from Alex and from Deb about what the stigma-free zone really means to them here. And I think it means a lot to all of us, maybe in different ways. I came to the group coming back to music after taking a departure while I went to grad school and needed that stigma-free zone to come back. And now that we're in it, I love it. As you heard from Mike earlier, this is a really different concert for us. Normally everything we do is full orchestra, everything. And this is a really different program. And I think we have that stigma-free zone really to thank for that, that there is a level of safety and security in this group that really lets us take those risks. First sweet, a lot of us have played this a lot of times, usually with a big-wind orchestra. I'm usually playing this with like 10, 12, 15 clarinet players and the conductor is like, okay, we need to drop down to one-to-a-part kind of thing. Really different playing-it-chamber style where there are four of us clarinetists back here and four different clarinet parts here. And I really think it is that stigma-free zone and it is our level of safety, comfort, trust with each other that really helped make tonight possible. And I'm so glad that y'all are here to join us. Thank you. Well, thanks so much for those wonderful testimonials, moving and thought-provoking as always. And thank you so much for your willingness to share those stories with us. I'm gonna finish up by talking a little more about the music that you're going to hear. It's another piece by Surprise, Gustav Holst. But this time you get to hear the entire orchestra. In fact, we not only have the strings when brass percussion, but we've also invited a piano to go along for the ride. So you're gonna hear a much more complete tonal palette, if you will, in this work. It's a work that is from roughly the same period as the first two works that you heard. It was written in 1915. Actually, Holst was at work on the planets and he took a break from that project to work on this one, a piece that is entitled Japanese Suite. Holst had many interests in his life. Of course, he was very interested in British folk song. Those of you who know his second Suite for Band know that it was based on folk song and a lot of his other works also revealed the influence of that British culture. But Holst had many other interests as well. He was really interested in astrology. That was actually much more interesting to him than astronomy when it came to writing the planets. He was very interested in kind of eastern mysticism and especially in eastern culture. And so when he was approached in 1915 by the Japanese dancer Michio Ito, asking Holst to write him a piece that he could dance to there in London, Holst was excited about this opportunity. The only problem was he didn't know any Japanese music himself. So the singer actually whistled these various tunes that you were about to hear to Holst. Holst dictated or wrote them down or dictated them, I guess I should say. And I used them as the source material for this really interesting suite that you're about to hear. It is in several movements, but they're all connected. So there's no break between these movements. And there are certain themes that you're gonna hear, including the one that's gonna be played at the very beginning by our solo bassoon, several times throughout this work. It's kind of the common thread that kind of ties this all together. But you're gonna hear all sorts of different music that, again, has origins in Japan, but has very interesting levels of variety and points of connection as well. This is Gustav's Holst's Japanese Suite.