The YSYOA will host a Fall Music Fest fundraiser concert on Sunday, Nov. 24. The event will feature a varied musical program of classical, traditional, film score and original music. (News archive photo by Matt Minde)
Yellow Springs Youth Orchestra Association to host Fall Music Fest
- Published: November 22, 2024
As the village drifts into autumn and the days get colder, the Yellow Springs Youth Orchestra Association, or YSYOA, aims to bring area residents some musical warmth.
The YSYOA will host a Fall Music Fest fundraiser concert on Sunday, Nov. 24. The event will feature a varied musical program of classical, traditional, film score and original music.
Founded in 1965 by Shirley Mullins and Mary Schumacher to teach orchestral music to village youth, the YSYOA has widened its community reach in recent years, including by hosting public performances.
“We keep trying to expand what we’re doing — we’ve had two student recitals in the last few years, and this year we thought, ‘Well, there are plenty of adults who could perform,’” YSYOA board member Suzanne Grote told the News in a recent interview, along with fellow board members Liz Blakelock, Carolyn Ray and Simone Stave DeMarzi.
Grote added that the Fall Music Fest’s program line-up will include some familiar names — Tucki Bailey, Caryn and David Diamond, Nancy Lineburgh, Brian Mayer, Marna Street and Heartstrings, to name a few — and some maybe less familiar.
“Some folks you’ll know, and some folks you’ll get to know,” she said.
The upcoming Fall Music Fest is the inaugural event in what the YSYOA board members present at the News office said they hope will become an annual tradition — one that will support the organization’s ongoing goal of “fostering a lifelong passion for music” amidst the community, as their mission statement attests.
As Shirley Mullins wrote to the News in 2018, she was “not looking forward to leaving Iowa City” in the 1960s after her husband, Bill, accepted a position at The Antioch School and Antioch College. A cellist and music educator, she left behind her “an orchestra of gifted string players” that she had formed, only to arrive in Yellow Springs and find an orchestra-shaped hole in the local curriculum.
But, to paraphrase a well-known axiom: When the going gets tough, the tough build an orchestra program from the ground up.
“Shirley came into town and started banging on doors and making people play stringed instruments,” DeMarzi said. “She taught private lessons, and we held orchestra rehearsal sessions in the basement of the Presbyterian Church.”
The orchestra Mullins built — now the YSYOA — swelled from a few dozen to about 100 young members. Within a decade of establishing the YSYOA, Mullins’ orchestra program was integrated into the music curriculum of the local schools, with Mullins herself directing.
“She’s why we have an orchestra program in the schools — and how many schools either never got an orchestra program or discontinued it?” Grote said.
“And all that time, Shirley was only working part-time in the schools,” Ray added.
In those part-time hours, though, Mullins managed to do a lot: She learned to drive a bus, for example, so that she could ferry students to Indiana University to sit in on music and conducting classes.
“I remember sitting in on a lesson with [cellist and IU instructor] János Starker,” Grote said.
Mullins also shuttled students frequently to rehearsals for the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra, which at the time was headquartered in Dayton’s Memorial Hall. DeMarzi said she and her fellow students spent some of their time during those rehearsals exploring the auditorium and its backstage nooks and crannies.
“So when famous people would come, we could go backstage and visit with the artists,” she said. “We had fun — [Mullins] gave us so many opportunities to listen to really good music.”
From the mid-’60s through the ’90s, Mullins and the YSYOA helped foster a love for music in scores of local youth; Mullins retired from teaching in 2000. Around the same time, the YSYOA’s reach within the community and the schools began to ease, which Blakelock attributed, in part, to both the establishment of Stivers School for the Arts as a magnet school in the ’90s and a change in how classes were scheduled in YS schools.
“When they went to block scheduling in high school, students had to make a choice between music and math or physics, maybe,” she said. “For a lot of people, you might really love music, but that’s not going to be your profession.”
After a period of relative inactivity, the YSYOA regrouped in 2016 and expanded its efforts beyond an orchestra program aimed at young people.
Since its revitalization, the YSYOA has supported music education and performance in the village by coordinating the Yellow Springs Strings, which meets weekly at the Senior Center; facilitating the annual youth Summer Music Camp, hosted by YS Schools, and providing scholarships to the camp; maintaining and publishing a list of local musical private lesson educators and providing scholarships for private lessons for budding musicians of all ages; and by assisting the local schools and other organizations with the purchase of sheet music and the purchase and repair of instruments.
“It’s a different time, and we’re looking for ways to keep things going,” Grote said. “And we hope people will come out to [the Fall Music Fest] to enjoy some music and help us keep it going.”
The YSYOA will host the inaugural Fall Music Fest Sunday, Nov. 24, beginning at 3 p.m., in the building where it all began — First Presbyterian Church. Admission is by donation; those interested in becoming Friends of the YSYOA via regular annual support may do so online at ysyoa.org/donate. Those who would like to sponsor music lessons or camp tuitions for students are asked to email ysyoamusic@gmail.com.
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