Vox Corda is the brainchild of Elizabeth Prielozny Barnes. It comes out of a lifetime of music, beginning with music sung and played at home and church in Chicago, the availability of string music education in her hometown’s public school district (as part of a full complement that also included classroom, choir, and band) beginning in elementary school and continuing through high school. It continued through bachelors and masters degrees in violin, piano, a professional life in music that covered both coasts as well as her native Chicago, and a doctoral degree in orchestral conducting. Through her lifetime of musical study and activity she experienced the manifold benefits music brings to life, and yet discovered how few people in her world actually have the opportunity to have quality music experiences. Finally, perhaps because of this she also discovered how much fun, how deeply satisfying it is to present world-class music in non-traditional settings.

In 1994 Elizabeth moved to Minnesota to enter the doctoral degree program in orchestra conducting at the University of Minnesota, a unique program that provided opportunities to work with the Minnesota Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Minnesota Opera, Dale Warland Singers, and American Composers Forum. In addition to these connections to the major performing ensembles in Minnesota’s twin cities, Elizabeth also created a new and unprecedented outreach and educational partnership between the university’s music school, theater and dance program and the Minneapolis and St. Paul Public Schools, as a natural outgrowth of her plan to prepare and perform several major works for small performing ensembles. Working with music school students and faculty, music education students and faculty, dance and dance pedagogy faculty and students, theater students, and arts curriculum coordinators from the Minneapolis and St. Paul Public Schools, Elizabeth’s u2u program presented multidisciplinary performances of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring (for 13 instruments), Igor Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Tale, and William Walton’s Façade, complete with curriculum materials, to students in many of the public schools in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Her final doctoral dissertation is a case study of this project, u2u: A Performing Arts Partnership.

One summer during her tenure as a doctoral student she took a job through the university’s extension program, coaching a group of rural 4H students in the creation, direction, and performance of an original music theater piece. Naturally this led her to begin discussions between the university’s extension service and her u2u partners to utilize the statewide network of extension offices to disseminate access to the university’s arts and arts education programs alongside the more customary agricultural and horticultural services. (Even though the university declined to go forward with this idea, the University of Massachusetts has done just that to great effect since 1973.)

"Preparing Future Faculty” was a series of courses that Elizabeth took as part of her doctoral work. Through this she developed a greater understanding and skills for teaching, especially at the collegiate level. Thus when she was asked to create a new orchestra at the university for non-music majors, the Campus Orchestra she created was more than just a performance vehicle. She developed “learning teams” among her orchestra students, to work in small groups, study and present background historical, theoretical, and cultural information about the music the orchestra prepared and performed.

Elizabeth was dismayed however, to discover during this time that string music education was struggling in the state of Minnesota. The overwhelming number of schools that offered “instrumental” music education offered only band, ignoring instruction on the string instruments that are the cornerstone of the symphony orchestra, which in turn is the centerpiece of classical music in the United States and beyond. There are many reasons not to offer string music education in schools, but the sad reality is that by not offering string music opportunities in schools we abandon an entire population of students who are served by strings but are not served by the very different culture of bands. By not offering string and orchestra education in public schools we communicate that string music is only meant for those families who already know about it and are able to pay for instruments, lessons, and ensemble experiences. Finally, by ignoring string and orchestra education for students we make it all the more difficult to sustain the centerpiece of classical music, the orchestra! As somebody who found the violin and string music education in her public school, and whose life was served so deeply and so broadly by this availability, this situation simply is not acceptable!

Following her work at the university Elizabeth was hired to direct the orchestra at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul. In a school with a strong mission of public service Elizabeth thought her students ought to use their own musical skills and knowledge in service to their community. Therefore she made musical service projects for each member of the orchestra a part of the orchestra curriculum. Thus all student orchestra members, most of whom were non-music majors, found means to serve their personal community through their own music. This took many and sometimes-surprising forms, from coaching younger musicians to playing violin for an elderly neighbor. In addition the orchestra traveled to local schools and community centers each semester to present informal performances to underserved members of the community. We even worked in partnership with a local school to create large, decorative paper-maché animals for a performance of Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals, and with a community center to develop and perform a Hmong translation of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf.

Elizabeth took the opportunity to participate in an introductory workshop for the Indonesian gamelan that was in residence in St. Kate’s music building, and discovered how valuable the experience of playing the gamelan could be for any musician, regardless of genre. So she invited Joko Sutrisno, the music director of the (then named) Schubert Club Gamelan, to join the Orchestra of St. Catherine in a joint concert. This was her first foray into truly cross-cultural orchestra programming. In preparation for the concert the orchestra students had the opportunity to learn new musical skills by participating in the introductory gamelan workshop, and to rehearse regularly as an orchestra with Joko as coach. The concert, “A Meeting of Two Spirits,” included works for orchestra and gamelan alone, and arrangements of some traditional gamelan songs for gamelan plus orchestra, performed without conductor, in the style of gamelan performances. In addition to offering both the gamelan and western orchestra new performance experiences, the combination of gamelan and orchestra created a sonoric experience unlike anything we had ever heard. Naturally it made Elizabeth wonder what other sonoric experiences orchestras were waiting to experience.

At about the same time Elizabeth was hired to be the first Artistic/Education Director for Young Audiences of Minnesota. As such she had the opportunity to share with an entire roster of teaching artists the skills she had developed over years of presenting the arts in educational settings. At the same time she was introduced to artists from a host of disciplines and genres. It was through her work with these many teaching artists and arts-in-education administrators that she saw more and more her world of classical, orchestral music through the spectrum of the many other genres of music and art in the world, many of which she had never encountered. It was through her work at Young Audiences that Norwegian hardanger fiddle player Karen Torkelson Solgård introduced her to the drone strings of the hardanger fiddle which comprise the oh-so-familiar theme of Edvard Grieg’s “Morning Mood” from his incidental music to Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt. It was through Appalachian autoharpist and mountain dulcimer player Karen Mueller that she heard how reverential the tune “Simple Gifts” (used most famously in classical music by composer Aaron Copland) is in its simple, original format.

Through these artists, many representing indigenous or folk cultures, she saw how much she could still learn about the world of classical music through the lens of the many non-western classical and folk art forms there are in the world. And thus continued the path to Vox Corda. Through her work with these artists at Young Audiences Elizabeth also began to wonder what folk-based string musicians could bring to classical string music education. Thus when Young Audiences Inc. offered a grant to its chapters for programs that worked to enhance the delivery of classical music education in schools Elizabeth turned to Cheryl Paschke (a partner in the development of u2u) with the idea of developing a new string music education project wherein teaching artists representing folk string music traditions worked with classically-based string orchestra teachers in the Minneapolis public schools to create new modes of string music teaching and performing. Classical Traditions, as this program was ultimately named, was wildly successful in identifying the ways that folk and classical string music teaching and performing complimented each other, and how classically-based string teachers could learn valuable, and even mandated skills through their folk-based string brethren.

Elizabeth also continued to experiment with cross-cultural programming with the 3M Orchestra, a community orchestra she directed. The first was a Norwegian program coincidentally timed to happen over the weekend of Syttende Mai, featuring Karen Torkelson Solgård and her hardanger fiddle plus two folk dancers. Emboldened by this program’s success with performers and audience alike, Elizabeth decided to program one such cross-cultural concert each season with her community orchestra, and planned the second based around Appalachian music with autoharpist and mountain dulcimer player Karen Mueller. This time she expanded the contact between Karen and the orchestra by offering an optional fiddling workshop for members of the orchestra with Karen Mueller and fiddler Lisa Fuglie. Before he knew it, the orchestra’s concertmaster, Michal Sobieski of the St. Paul Chamber orchestra was performing a duet with Karen and orchestra bassist Bob Nelson!

In the meantime, Cheryl Paschke, excited by the professional development capacity that folk-based string teaching artists could bring to her district’s music teachers, she included a workshop with Karen Mueller and Lisa Fuglie as part of the Minneapolis Public Schools’ school year opening workshops for teachers.

Developing Vox Corda is the culmination of all of these musical experiences.

In a culture where string music education is marginalized we wish to present string instruments and string music alone, to present the uniqueness of music produced by vibrating strings.

In a world that is being made evermore intimate by virtue of instant global communication and the relative ease and access most of us have to international travel, we seem to be ill-prepared to meet, let alone comprehend and embrace the cultures, behaviors, beliefs, and traditions of so many different people. Most of these cultures have string music as part of their cultural identity. How marvelous, how safe, how comfortable to meet these sometimes frightful, total strangers through the mutual love of music produced by vibrating strings.

In a society that is evermore strictly divided into castes: of people who play the exact same instruments but in exclusively-differing genres, of experts and professionals versus mere amateur – even in the arts – what a marvelous thing to come together to learn together, to discover that even experts at the pinnacle of their exclusive musical genre have wonderful new worlds of knowledge and experience to uncover from somebody who works in a different musical genre, to discover that both the most accomplished concerto player and the music educator who long ago gave up such high-level artistic aspirations in the name of teaching can both be novices when learning how to improvise, all with music produced by vibrating strings.