The Score | Music for Meditation

Meditation and music intersected this spring at three Ohio orchestras, which together commissioned a piece by Brian Raphael Nabors to be premiered in classrooms. The initiative was a partnership with Mindful Music Moments, a program by the Well, an organization that uses classical music in schools to promote calm and focus through mindfulness. The Cleveland Orchestra, Columbus Symphony Orchestra, and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra recorded movements of Nabors’ new work. The 12-minute piece was influenced by feedback from K-12 students who participate in Mindful Music Moments and told Nabors what they thought the piece should sound and feel like. The four-movement work for string quartet—one movement for each city, plus a fourth movement incorporating ideas from all three—premiered in schools in May and on the orchestras’ Facebook pages on June 10. The Facebook premiere also featured a short film by Cincinnati filmmaker Asa Featherstone documenting the process. Joan Katz Napoli, the Cleveland Orchestra’s senior director of education and community programs, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “This is exactly the time when we need something like this. My hope is that this creates a daily habit that kids will carry into adulthood.”