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Morning & Full-Day Preschool programs with a full, child-centered curriculum of creative specials like music, science, drama, social and emotional learning, and more!
Music Therapy
Established in 1966, our pioneering Center for Music Therapy (CMT) uses guided music experiences to help individuals meet life's challenges.
Bop Stop
BOP STOP at The Music Settlement is Cleveland's premier listening room: an intimate, acoustically pristine performance venue with sweeping views of Lake Erie.
April 15 from 8:00pm - 10:00pm
In Cleveland on Saturday, April 15th, three artists from the vibrant creative music scene in Chicago will be showcasing aspects of their work for the first time. This concert is presented in partnership with New Ghosts. Tickets to attend this concert in person are $20 each.
This event will also be livestreamed on BOP STOP's Facebook page at showtime. Accessing the stream is free but donations are encouraged and directly support the band. To donate, select "Donation: Livestream Attendee" (which is a $10 blanket ticket price) as your Ticket Option above and follow the steps below:
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Lily Finnegan (drums) and Beth McDonald (tuba and electronics) join forces to present a set of new duo material. Through compositions and graphics, this music pieces together abstraction with concrete grooves. They will explore a non-traditional musical setting by sharing and inverting roles while supporting each other. Coming from two different backgrounds of jazz and punk rock with classical and new music, the pieces will show that these styles don’t need to be opposing but are in fact symbiotic.
Ken Vandermark dedicated himself to the creation of a new book of works for solo reed instruments during 2020, which he recorded for the album The Field Within A Line (Corbett vs. Dempsey). Though he has performed the material on tour in Europe, this concert in Cleveland on April 15th will be the first time he's played this music outside of Chicago in the U.S. The compositions, which are platforms for invention, are dealt with in relatively economical, almost stripped-down fashion, ringing with a kind of bell-like clarity and focus. Pieces are dedicated to filmmakers, photographers, and painters, musicians, choreographers, and writers, pointing outward to a network of creative icons.
INDIVIDUAL BIOS
Ken Vandermark: (USA 1964) is an improvising musician and composer who plays tenor and baritone saxophone, Bb and bass clarinet. He moved to Chicago from Boston in 1989, and has worked from the early 1990s onward, both as a performer and organizer in North America and Europe, recording in an array of contexts with many internationally renowned musicians (such as Fred Anderson, Ab Baars, Peter Brötzmann, Sylvie Courvoisier, Tim Daisy, Kris Davis, Dieb 13, Hamid Drake, Terrie Ex, Mats Gustafsson, Elisabeth Harnik, Steve Heather, Didi Kern, Kent Kessler, Christof Kurzmann, Paul Lytton, Joe McPhee, Andy Moor, Jason Moran, Ikue Mori, Joe Morris, Paal Nilssen-Love, Eddie Prevóst, Mette Rasmussen, Tom Rainey, Eric Revis, Jasper Stadhouders, Chad Taylor, John Tilbury, Mars Williams, and Nate Wooley).
His current group activity includes the bands Bent Atlas, Lean Left, The DKV Trio, DEK, his large ensemble Entr'acte, the ongoing Momentum projects; duos with Terrie Ex, Christof Kurzmann, Damon Locks, Paal Nilssen-Love, Mars Williams, and Nate Wooley; and work as a solo performer. Ken co-founded Catalytic Sound in 2012, an organization dedicated to the economic sustainability of creative improvising musicians, and since then has been its director. In 2014 he began Audiographic Records, an independent music label. Since June of 2015 Ken has been co-curator of Option, a music and interview series held at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago. Half of each year is spent touring in Europe, North America, Latin America, and Japan; his concerts and numerous recordings have been critically acclaimed at home and abroad. Ken's activity as a writer includes liner notes for a variety of recordings; and contributions to the eighth edition of John Zorn's Arcana: musicians on music, the music journal Sound American, the Spanish language periodical, "El Estado Mental," and "Catalytic Quarterly." In 1999 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in music.
Lily Finnegan: Lily Glick Finnegan is a Chicago born and based drummer, composer and improviser. In 2021 she earned a Master of Music from Berklee College of Music in Boston Massachusetts. She received a full scholarship to participate in the Berklee Global Jazz Institute, a 20-person international cadre of musicians led by Danilo Perez. At Berklee she was also part of the Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. Here she was mentored by Terri Lyne Carrington, Kris Davis, and Linda May Han Oh. She’s worked on projects with Carrington including Music for Abolition as part of the Visualizing Abolition Exhibit at University of California Santa Cruz. Her thesis project was entitled “Music and Abolition: Creating a World Without Policing- Music’s Role in Imagination, Experimentation, and Collectivity”. Prior, she completed a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2020, majoring in sociology and music. This fueled her interest in studying the confluence between power structures, history, and social movements with music.
In 2022 Lily returned to Chicago. New projects in this city have included the Ken Vandermark Quintet, Sarah Clausen Trio, Shoulderbird, and her own self led trio. She has collaborated with artists and bands including Kris Davis, Ben Lamar Gay, Ken Vandermark, Jason Stein, Dave Rempis, Katinka Kleijn, Deodorant, Shoulderbird, Lea Delaria, Christof Kurzmann, Hanah Jon Taylor, and Katie Ernst. Currently she is the record store manager of Catalytic Sound, an experimental music cooperative.
Beth McDonald: is a classically trained tuba player gone awry. She performs mainly as an improviser, using the tuba acoustically and with electronic effects pedals. Densing (2021), her most recent album, uses tuba and electronics in conjunction with natural acoustic resonance to build up unpredictable new layers of sound. The CD version of the album was packaged in handmade felted wool, which was created through an analogous physical process of layering. Beth's next solo album, a continuation and expansion of the Densing project, will be released in mid-2023.
While the pandemic put many of her musical projects on pause, collaboration is an integral part of Beth's musical practice – working with musicians as well as with artists and performers in other mediums. Some notable past collaborators include Becky Grajeda, Ethan T. Parcell, Sasha de Koninck, Eli Wallace, Isaac Turner, Franki Hand, Matt Samolis, Ben Zucker, Nathanael Lee Jones, and Mark Booth.
In a previous musical life, Beth toured as a contemporary classical musician, chamber musician, and soloist. She also participated in orchestral academies at the Lucerne Festival, Aspen Music Festival, and the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, and was on staff at the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice. Beth holds degrees from New England Conservatory, Northeastern Illinois University, and the University of Kentucky.
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