Louisa Stonehill faced a row of kindergarteners. Their eyes were closed, their necks craned forward, and each one was doing his best to feel the music she played on her violin — with their ears, and also with their faces, their jaws, their chests.
“I can feel it,” one girl said, her eyes still closed.
That is what Louisa and her pianist husband Nicholas Burns came for. They are a kind of missionary, evangelists for music, answering a call.
The couple, founders of Ashuelt Concerts, moved to New Hampshire from Greenwich, London, in 2016, with two suitcases, a 2-year-old and no real plan.
Nine years later, they’ve built a thriving international chamber music concert series, playing 18 concerts a year, bringing world-class performers to tiny New England stages — and, even more remarkably, to area schools. The couple, along with a revolving roster of musicians, will travel to any school within 45 minutes of their base in Keene, New Hampshire, to introduce kids to classical music.
Nick and Louisa, the parents of two boys, ages 7 and 10, reach something like 5,000 children a year, many of whom might never otherwise encounter classical music, much less in a concert played live and up close just for them.
“We literally put a 5-year-old from a rural area a few feet away from one of the best musicians in the world, playing one of most valuable, famous instruments in the world,” Nick said.
A visceral response
Nick and Louisa make a point of not condescending to kids. They play movements from larger pieces, from seven to ten minutes each. It’s a big ask for little kids, but they help the children understand what they are hearing.
Sometimes they wonder if they’re expecting too much. Louisa recalls a “horrendous” musical passage by Shostakovich that evokes prisoners forced to dance before their own graves. They didn’t share that detail with the kids, but the music made its point. How did it land?
“They went absolutely bananas,” Nick said. They said it was like a horror movie, and they loved it.
He added, “We’ve been shocked to our core –“
“– at how viscerally the children respond,” Louisa finished. “We don’t dumb it down. We give it to them real.”
Real, live music brings out an emotional, vibrational delight like nothing else.
Along with the music, the couple delivers lessons kids will need to know no matter where life takes them.
Lessons, for instance, about talent. While some people take to instruments more readily than others, talent alone is not sufficient.
“Talent is the product of learning, practice and discipline, and the act of humility and the act of being honest,” Nick said.
The kids are skeptical, but Nick and Louisa insist: Three weeks before the concert, they couldn’t play the piece. They practiced, they slowed themselves down and they had faith they would prevail. And once you have put in the work to learn something, it’s inside you for good, Louisa said.
“It’s really freaky. You can literally not have played a piece for a year or two, and when you open it up again, it will just take you a second to find that pathway in your brain.”
In faith as in music
Here is where the couple’s Catholic faith asserts itself, even though they do not speak overtly about religion.
“Everything we talk about has parallels with the faith. It’s a living embodiment of our faith,” Nick said.
They both emphasized how vital it is, in faith as in performance, to begin with humility, to accept how little you know and not to get ahead of yourself.
Another parallel: It’s normal to go through a stage of questioning, of rebelling against rules that seem senseless and discipline that feels tiresome. But this stage is worth conquering, because through the discipline of practice, something amazing comes about. You learn to become a vessel for something greater than yourself.
“When you stand up on stage and you’ve got a big audience and they’re all staring at you in expectation, you have to put yourself to one side. It’s not about you anymore. It’s about communicating this great piece of art,” Nick said.
Louisa, an adult convert, describes the almost mystical experience of sharing with kindergarteners the voices of long-dead musicians.
“You’re connecting these two souls in such a unique and special way. You’re bringing these composers down from the heavens, almost, into their arms,” she said.
Great musicians and Catholics share a sense of humility, self-awareness and a generosity of spirit, Nick said. And both groups recognize the flash of genius as a gift, something they’ve been blessed with from outside oneself.
Called to a new community
But even with these overlaps, the “aggressive secularity” of London’s chamber music scene was one of the things that drove the couple away. How did they land in New Hampshire?
Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.
Photo courtesy Ashuelot Concerts
