Imagine, for a moment, this multilayered dilemma. You are a gifted young classical musician, a string player with a passion for communicating your art. And after making it through a conservatory education, suddenly you have a degree, and perhaps some student debt, too. Now what?
The world of big orchestras, with their alluringly steady paychecks, can seem like an impregnable fortress, not to mention a place where a musician’s individual creative autonomy might go to die.
And here is the next layer of the dilemma: You also believe in the necessity of social change. But in the last few years, your own art — which may have always seemed to you, at its core, emancipatory — has been increasingly described as part of the problem. It has a history of exclusion. It has canons reluctant to budge. Its institutions rarely look like the cities they are trying to serve.
So what’s next? If you’re courageous and visionary, perhaps you see this as a moment for radical experimentation, for the reinvention of what a classical ensemble can do and be, its relationship to education, and to the community around it. Once you arrive at that conclusion, you might even try to launch your own ensemble. And if you are lucky, the group you create might come to look a bit like Palaver Strings.
Launched in Boston in 2014 and currently based in Portland, Maine, Palaver is a flexible string collective now in its 10th season. It has 13 members — most are between the ages of 25 and 35 — and no conductor, so all artistic decisions are shared. It has built from the ground up its own community music school. And it performs roughly 40 concerts per year across Maine and New England, including performances at Rockport’s Shalin Liu Performance Center (April 27) and the Longy School of Music’s Pickman Hall (April 28).
“Palaver is really an intentional experiment in community, humanity, deep listening, and shared leadership,” violinist Maya French, one of the group’s cofounders, said in a recent phone interview. “Our model is always changing but it involves having people learn how to truly trust and communicate, and then bring our art to the world, in a way that’s representative of how we want the world to be as a whole.”
As dynamic young performers playing without a conductor, the Palaver players know how to command a stage on their own terms. The group tends to perform with the kind of a collective investment and individual participation that rarely emanate from bigger ensembles, where the expressive circuitry necessarily runs through the central node of the conductor. In one imaginatively conceived program I caught at Rockport just prior to the pandemic — entitled “On the Nature of Daylight” — the group performed works by Max Richter, Mendelssohn, and Vivaldi with a sense of vibrancy and joy.
Palaver of course is hardly the first chamber orchestra to go it alone without a conductor — it follows in the footsteps of groups like Orpheus, the Knights, and A Far Cry, though the nature and depth of Palaver’s commitment to community make it unique. Its educational initiative began with pre-K string instrument instruction and, by adding one new grade each year, its classes will soon extend to fifth grade. It also offers early childhood music classes, reaching a total of approximately 200 students a year, over half of whom are from low-income, immigrant families.
Domenic Salerni, a violinist in the Attacca Quartet (with which Palaver joins forces for the two local programs) has watched the group develop over the years. “Their attitude is ‘we’re in the community — we’re not super-imposing this other cultural story but helping you amplify your own.’ It gives people a very different kind of agency.”
Palaver’s origins date to French’s days as an undergraduate at Boston University, where she met cofounders Brianna and Gabrielle Fischler. All three had a passion for chamber music while at the same time a deep interest in social issues. Some of the ensemble’s first concerts were benefits to raise money for the Liberian Education Fund. But French and her collaborators quickly realized this was neither an efficient nor a truly holistic way of making an impact through their art. Surely, she thought, there must be a way of blending a distinct musical vision with an equally distinct social mission.
One early opportunity to do so came via Carnegie Hall’s Lullaby Project, through which expecting mothers and new parents were paired with professional musicians to create, record, and perform new original lullabies for their children. The project was enormously successful and its ethos became part of the emerging group’s DNA. French also notes that, through this project, they “met” some of their future students before the students were born.
Palaver has since expanded this model of community partnership and collaborative storytelling through music. A newer project called Lifesongs lifts up the stories of local members of the LGBTQ+ community. And an immigration-themed performance project called Welcome Here has shone a spotlight on recently arrived musicians and storytellers of Wabanaki, Puerto Rican, and Congolese descent.
The cellist Kamyron Williams, now in his fourth season with the group and one of the ensemble’s three Black members, recalled participating as a guest artist in a predecessor program called Welcome Home, which also focused on the experience of new Mainers. At the time, he was finishing a graduate degree at the University of Michigan and trying to figure out how to use his cello to make a larger social impact.
“I was already working with classical music in a very diverse community in Detroit, with a lot of Black and brown people, but there was this gap, this missing connection,” he explained.
“People always talk about the ‘pipeline,’” he continued. “But how do we also make sure there are the same resources, the same access to materials, to teachers, to concerts, to education — that’s what’s really missing. It’s not that folks weren’t interested. They just didn’t know where to go, and they also didn’t know there were people who looked like them, or like myself, in those spaces.”
For Williams, Palaver’s work in this direction seemed productive and he formally joined the group in 2020. “It’s not just about sitting in a chair and playing the cello,” he said. “We’re actually taking our talents and building something that creates inclusive community.”
Where exactly to build that community has, over the years, been a complicated question. After starting off in Boston, Palaver musicians realized that the group would benefit from moving to a city less crowded with arts activity, a place where its educational efforts could make a bigger impact. It chose Portland, arriving in 2018, and while keeping a presence in Boston through its performances, the group’s members say it has not really looked back. And the appreciation between city and ensemble appears to be mutual.
“I think Palaver has elevated the arts, and justice and community in Portland to a place that is not only larger than this city, but also deeper than we expected,” said Stephanie Cotsirilos, a locally based writer. “Their commitment to social justice, to education, to diversity is not trendy — it’s who they are. Their authenticity is really rare. And they’ve demonstrated that their commitment to values and to profound beauty in creation are essentially one and the same.”
When it returns to Rockport and Longy, Palaver will bring a program called “Between Us” that explores the concept of collective vision through works by Caroline Shaw, Paul Wiancko, Dana Lyn and Kyle Sanna, Dvorak, and the Renaissance composer Clemens non Papa.
Looking ahead to its next decade, French hopes the group can continue building while maintaining a careful balance between its community, education and performance work. These days, student tuition and performance revenue make up only 20 percent of its annual $780,000 operating budget, a percentage she hopes will increase as the group takes on new management with Boston-based Ariel Artists (grants and private donations cover the rest). But French also embraces a certain acceptance of the unknown. “Palaver has evolved into something I could never have envisioned,” she said. “And the biggest driver of change is that fact that we’re always learning new ways to communicate with each other.”
Meanwhile, as major symphony orchestras across the country struggle to meet the shifting contemporary landscape without driving away their tradition-minded audiences, groups like Palaver Strings are forging an important alternative path, one that is no doubt being watched by new generations of conservatory students grappling with questions similar to the ones that launched French and colleagues on their path a decade ago.
Ultimately, perhaps a lot can be encapsulated in a name. “In Liberia and other west African countries,” explains cellist Matthew Smith, “a palaver hut is a place for resolving difficulties. We think of it as using many different voices to collectively agree on a musical vision.” He pauses, and adds on a hopeful note: “It’s also an act of gathering in one space.”
Palaver Strings and the Attacca Quartet perform “Between Us” on April 25 at Bay Chamber Concerts in Rockport, Maine; April 27 at Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport, Mass.; and April 28 at Longy School of Music’s Pickman Hall in Cambridge. www.palaverstrings.org.
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeremy.eichler@globe.com, or follow him @Jeremy_Eichler.