Parent of Program Alumni, Gregory, Bennett, and Todd Kramer
Clinical Psychologist
Of all PMP’s unique features, the one that strikes me as most significant is its capacity to provide a ‘facilitating environment’ for its student musicians.
“PMP is no ordinary place. Initially conceived by Toby Perlman as her “dream” music camp for gifted preteen and adolescent students, it has developed over the past twelve years as a truly outstanding, one-of-a-kind music program. Of all PMP’s unique features, the one that strikes me as most significant is its capacity to provide a “facilitating environment” for its student musicians. A term borrowed from psychological theory (D.W. Winnicott), the “facilitating environment” responds to the psychological needs of the child in a way that allows maturational processes to proceed without interference and, ultimately for the child’s true potential to emerge and to flourish. During the past nine years in which my sons have been PMP students, I have been able to witness and to share in the many ways PMP has facilitated their optimal development and that of their peers.
It is not easy to be a teenage classical musician. As each of my sons discovered, the positive feedback they received from elementary school friends for being a cellist or violinist gave way to indifference or, at times, ridicule as they entered adolescence. They traveled to Juilliard’s pre-college program each Saturday during the school year —a musical life-saving experience in terms of the level of instruction and connection to other like-minded music students. As a seventh grader one of them concluded, “It would be great to be with music friends the rest of the week, not just Saturdays”. PMP’s summer program provided this total immersion in music with other students who shared my sons’ interests and commitment. Most importantly, in being with others like themselves, they had the necessary experience of being “normal” and of belonging to a peer group for an extended period of time. PMP became a family for each one of them. The growth that has been facilitated for my sons through superb individual instruction and chamber music coaching, Patrick Romano’s chorus, and Mr. Perlman’s orchestra is difficult to quantify or summarize. PMP has provided each of them with truly life transforming experiences – personally, educationally, and socially. All three have experienced a true sense of awe at being able to be coached and conducted by Itzhak Perlman. It is not at all lost on them that Mr. Perlman could choose to spend his summers in any number of other ways; they experience his presence and involvement with them at camp as a gift beyond measure.
Performing at PMP is an extraordinary part of the music camp experience because Toby Perlman has facilitated a Works in Progress model through which it is “safe” to loosen the demands for “perfection” and to be oneself (at whatever level that may be) on stage. How different an experience this proved to be for one of my sons than his music camp experience the summer prior to attending PMP! He had attended a music boot camp of sorts, in which he practiced 5 hours a day with no hopes of performing individually or in a chamber group. (When I had questioned whether I could attend a summer concert to hear him play, an administrator informed me that it was unusual for a first year student like my son to be invited to perform without first “passing muster”).
Among the many wonderful attributes of PMP is that it is a dynamic, ever-changing program. Toby Perlman has been so well attuned to new ideas and possibilities and she is willing and eager to try them out. The genesis of the Contemporary Music Project three years ago was the result of her commitment to bringing the works of living composers to PMP. It has been of great benefit to one of my sons, a student composer, that he was encouraged to perform the works he composed himself at PMP. In addition to learning and performing challenging contemporary pieces by composers such as Crumb, Reich, and Golijov at PMP contemporary concerts, he had the opportunity to be a featured composer himself! I will never forget the wild cheers from my son’s PMP friends following his performance of his own string quartet last summer with the amazingly talented violinists and violist who joined him.
In touching on just some of what makes PMP a dream turned incredible reality, I know that I cannot adequately “sum it up”. I have encouraged and will continue to encourage those I know to visit PMP to see and hear for themselves. My sons, my husband, and I have all internalized something truly magical through our experience with PMP that nurtures us in the present and will continue to be very much a part of us in the years to come.”
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