Posted by: mhubler
on Mar 29, 2012
Tagged in:
volunteering ,
special events ,
performer-adult ,
non-profit ,
musicians ,
music heals ,
live music ,
isolated audience ,
inspirational ,
concert ,
audience-adult ,
accoustic music
In Singing Lessons: A Memoir of Love, Loss, Hope and Healing (c. 1998 p. 174) Judy Collins recalls looking for songs for an album project in 1976.
“After the death of her husband, Dick Fariña, Mimi Fariña, Joan Baez’s younger sister, had started a nonprofit organization in San Francisco called Bread & Roses, to provide free entertainment for people in homes, jails and hospitals in the Bay Area. She wrote the “Bread and Roses” melody to a poem by James Oppenheim and I recorded it, using a choir of voices in a church in New York.” 
In her liner notes for the album, also titled Bread & Roses Judy said: “Songs come from many places, unexpectedly, amazingly.” She relayed how Mimi had sent her a copy of the “Bread and Roses” poem. She thought it so beautiful that she asked her to set it to music. Her sister Holly Ann then designed a Bread and Roses tapestry piece featuring a single rose and wove it using hand-dyed yarns which was then used as the art for the inside album cover.
Posted by: mhubler
on Jan 10, 2012
Our Heart of Marin Award nominees for 2011: (left to right) Peter Merts, Tucky Pogue and Dick Miner.
On Thursday, January 5, 2012, at the 19th Annual Heart of Marin Awards in San Rafael, Bread & Roses board and staff honored three of our Marin volunteers: Peter Merts of San Rafael, Dick Miner of San Anselmo and Tucky Pogue from Ross. Peter and Dick were nominated as "Volunteer of the Year" and Tucky, for her "Excellence in Board Leadership."
Posted by: ldonaldson
on Sep 01, 2011
Robert Gupta's story is an inspiration to us all: not only does he play first chair violin for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he is also their youngest performer, having joined the orchestra in 2007 at the age of 19. What is perhaps most remarkable about this young prodigy is that in addition to his professional music career, he also directs his own free concert series, The Street Symphony, which brings live classical music to the homeless and mentally ill on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. KQED's California Report recently did an audio story on Robert's social service outreach, which includes comments from the patients after his concert. You can listen to the report here: http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R201108250850/b
In the San Francisco Bay Area, Bread & Roses serves a number of residential mental health facilities at major hospitals including short-term units at San Francisco General, and California Pacific Medical Center, as well as longer-term treatment facilities such as Cordilleras in Redwood City and Canyon Manor in Novato. Among our most challenging audiences, we know that mental health patients, particularly those who are also homeless, can be hard to engage and at the same time, are often deeply appreciative of and positively affected by music's healing force.
Gupta's interest in music as therapy for the mentally ill was perhaps inspired in 2008 when he met and began tutoring Nathanial Ayers, the schizophrenic musical virtuoso who is the subject of the bestselling book, The Soloist by L.A. Times columnist, Steve Lopez. Many of you might be familiar with the film adaptation, which stars Jamie Fox and Robert Downey Jr. Of his time working with Ayers, Gupta remarked that he was struck by how music seemed to calm Ayers and act as a sort of medicine or therapy. It was at that time that Robert began The Street Symphony.
