Teacher's energy brings sweet music to school

Rosemary Furniss arrives in Charlotte and promptly energizes violin students

By Steven Brown
The Charltote Observer

School is out for the day. The halls at Winterfield Elementary are quiet - except near Ms. Hollenbeck's room.

There, a grown-up violinist and cellist are zipping through a Handel duet. Sometimes they churn out so much sound that you might think more players are at work. The rapt audience: 16 Winterfield students, all armed with violins. When Handel's last chord rings out, the children burst into applause.

"Did you like that?" the violinist asks, aiming an encouraging smile their way. Her cheery British accent adds another inviting note.

"Now," she tells the youngsters, "we'll work on what you're going to play with us."

After a cameo appearance with the Charlotte Symphony in January, they're concert-hall veterans compared to most kids. Now they're preparing to chime along with Handel for a concert at Winterfield.

Rosemary Furniss, who just played the violin half of the Handel duo, has worked out a five-note pattern the kids can play to harmonize with Handel. She also arranged the music for their Charlotte Symphony appearance - counting on the youngsters' experience in front of the orchestra to energize them as it has students of hers in England, her homeland, and in Brazil.

Furniss moved to Charlotte over the summer with her husband, Christopher Warren-Green, the Charlotte Symphony's new music director. As he has settled in with the orchestra, Furniss - after more than 20 years as a violinist and teacher in London - has transplanted her own career.

She already performed for the concert series at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art. More chamber music is coming up in Charlotte and Davidson. And at Winterfield, she is resuming a life of teaching that extends all the way back to when she was a student.

For the Winterfield kids, she and Charlotte Symphony cellist Alan Black play through the Handel duet again. Now she gives the students a say in when they'll chime in and when they'll wait; when to use their bows and when to pluck the strings with their fingers.

They start getting the hang of it. Furniss again reaches out with a smile.

"That was wonderful," she tells them. "The lovely thing is, you decided how you want to play and what you want to play."

'Take Rosemary up to London'

When Furniss decided she wanted to study the violin, at age 4, it was actually a mistake: She had the guitar in mind, but got the name wrong. The violin won her over, though. She was 7 when word spread through England that violinist Yehudi Menuhin - a celebrated figure in classical music - was launching a music school.

"My father noticed the advertisement," Furniss says. "He didn't really think much of it. He just thought, 'Take Rosemary up to London, see Yehudi Menuhin, have a wonderful day, and come home and forget about it.' But (Menuhin) accepted me."

For the next decade, Furniss immersed herself in the Menuhin school.

"I was just totally in love with the violin," she says.

"It's the closest thing to a human voice," she explains. "It's a very emotional instrument."

Furniss moved on to the Royal Academy of Music. In the school orchestra, she sat next to a fellow student named Christopher Warren-Green. He had taken up the violin at age 12 - extremely late - and was making what Furniss calls "a meteoric rise."

"We were always very good friends," Furniss says. But music led the aspiring violinists in different directions.

Warren-Green left school early to start his career. Furniss came to Philadelphia to study at the Curtis Institute of Music. Her teacher was Ivan Galamian, whose generations of students included Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman.

Watching Galamian teach, Furniss wondered why he sometimes overlooked obvious mistakes.

"I'd think, 'Why is he saying so little?'" she says. But "by the end of the lesson, they'd be playing wonderfully. They would've made so much progress. So it was the greatest thing to learn not to give people too much information at one time.... If you try to tell everything that's wrong at one go, it never works."

'So fired up'

Furniss built a busy career as a London violinist in the early 1980s. She played in the much-recorded Academy of St. Martin in the Fields and other chamber orchestras. She took part in recording sessions for rock albums and movie soundtracks. She belonged to a modern-music group headed by a leading composer - Scotland's Peter Maxwell Davies.

She also landed a teaching spot at her alma mater, the Menuhin School. When Menuhin himself started a program teaching underprivileged children, Furniss worked with him. After his death, she spearheaded a similar project for the London Chamber Orchestra. Warren-Green was the group's conductor, Furniss, its first-chair violinist.

One of the challenges of teaching string instruments is keeping the beginners interested. Playing the violin is "a tricky thing to do," Furniss says, and students have to devote a lot of time to rudiments that aren't much fun. But Furniss found a way to awaken students' enthusiasm.

"I realized something early on," Furniss says. "You can teach children something very basic.... Then, if you get them to play with an orchestra, something phenomenal happens. It's an amazing sort of alchemy.... You see a tremendous difference in the children after the experience."

It happened again after the Winterfield students played with the Charlotte Symphony, Furniss says. She returned to the school the following Tuesday for their weekly session.

"The lesson began at 2," she says, "and one child was still practicing in a corner at 4. 'Have you got any more music? What else can I learn?' It was really extraordinary. They were so fired up."

'Sounded like angels'

It was through the London Chamber Orchestra that Furniss and Warren-Green, who had started families with other spouses, became close again. They married in 1998.

As they prepared to move to the U.S., the Charlotte Symphony - aware of Furniss' teaching work - thought of putting her into action at Winterfield. Until the orchestra got involved at the school in 2009, second-grade teacher Courtney Hollenbeck had been going it alone.

Hollenbeck grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., where children could study music beginning in the second grade. From then through the ninth grade, she played the violin in her school orchestra. When she became a teacher, she picked up the violin again. Besides thinking it would be fun to play it for children, she figured it could help her teach other subjects.

One day in 2007, she brought her violin to illustrate a science lesson about sound.

"I had a little student in my class - Maria," Hollenbeck says. "She was really shy. She must have told her mom about it. Her mom came in the next day and said, 'Maria said it sounded like angels.'

"She really wanted to learn how to play the violin. I got to thinking, 'There must be other kids in school who would love to learn an instrument.'"

On her own

Instrumental music instruction begins in sixth grade at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. So Hollenbeck started her own program.

She started gradually, buying two or three violins at a time - paying for them out of her own pocket. Each year, the students who moved up to the next grade stayed in the group, and the new second-graders had the chance to join.

As the original students reached the fifth grade - their last year at Winterfield - Hollenbeck turned to the Charlotte Symphony for help. She wanted a professional musician to make sure the children had the skills they needed.

The orchestra not only supplied a violinist to work regularly with the children, but it landed some grant money to help pay expenses. This fall, the orchestra enlisted Furniss.

The students "love her to death," Hollenbeck says. "They're learning so much. And I'm learning from her."

Thanks to fundraising by the Charlotte Symphony, four child-size cellos arrived at Winterfield last week. A cellist from the orchestra, Joy Payton-Stevens, will help teach. The orchestra's timpanist, Leonardo Soto, is leading a bucket band - that's right, using buckets and drumsticks - to give the students a grip on rhythm.

About a year ago, Hollenbeck finished a master's degree from Montreat College. Her thesis looked at how music helps students in school.

"A lot of those people were saying it kept them going to school," Hollenbeck says. "Playing in a recital or performance helps their self-esteem.... I've had parents say that their students are more into their schoolwork now. They've made bonds with kids in the group, and they work well together and they help each other."

Furniss takes an even broader view.

"I think there are messages everywhere," she says. "You get people in harmony. You get people sharing things - joining in together with music. It really does produce some amazing things."