Music Instruction
Award-winning music lessons, ensembles, and group classes for aspiring musicians of all ages and skill levels — children, teens, and adults.
Early Childhood
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.
Presented In Partnership With New Ghosts
February 27 from 8:00pm - 10:00pm
The music of Edition Redux includes the range of Vandermark's interests and influences, incorporating the experimental jazz of the AACM; the different schools of improvised music based in England, Netherlands, and Germany; post-punk, Tropicalia, dub, and funk.
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 YouTube page at showtime. Accessing the stream is free but donations are encouraged and directly support the band.
------------
Ken Vandermark: 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 musicians such as Fred Anderson, Hamid Drake, Peter Brötzmann, Sylvie Courvoisier, Terrie Ex, Paul Lytton, Joe McPhee, Eddie Prevóst, Mette Rasmussen, Nate Wooley & many others.
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. He is also a prolific writer and in 1999 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in music.
Erez Dessel: is an improviser, pianist, composer, and educator. After winning multiple Downbeat Student Music Awards, Dessel moved to Boston to study at the New England Conservatory of Music (NEC), where he worked with a host of jazz luminaries, including Billy Hart, Ethan Iverson, and Jason Moran. As an educator, he led his quartet to perform and teach in over 50 workshops in the Boston area and was also selected to bring his group to the Virginia Arts Festival. After graduating from NEC in 2020, Dessel moved to Savannah, GA to accept the position of music director at the Savannah Music Festival Jazz Academy, Savannah’s first and only free after-school youth jazz program. He currently lives in Chicago, where he's performed with a host of improvising musicians at venues indulging the Hungry Brain and Elastic Arts. Dessel’s music is centered around exploring improvisation, graphic notation, and polyrhythmic structures. He frequently works with cassette tapes and is currently developing ways to paint with the piano using charcoal, pastel, paper, and linen.
Lily 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. In 2022 Lily returned to Chicago where she is involved in various creative groups and projects.
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. 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.