On a cloudy Tuesday evening, just before dinner time, the members of Club O trickled into the practice room in the basement of the Boys & Girls Club on Fairfield Avenue.

They carried violin cases with them, and then sat down and began tightening bows, plucking open strings and talking about nothing in particular, as middle school-age kids sometimes do.

“Did you forget your violin?”

“C’mon. Kick this ball with me.”

“My mom is picking me up soon.”

Before long, their instructor, Derek Reeves, principal viola player with the Fort Wayne Philharmonic and Club O instructor, arrived and the conversation turned to music, eighth notes and the first musical selection of the day, “Rain, Rain, Go Away.”

“We’re doing it? The song?” Fabiana Cotton asked.

“Yes,” Reeves said.

“You want us to play the whole song?”

“Yes.”

“Together?”

“Yes.”

Play was further delayed when student Phong Dang dropped his bow, not twice but three times.

“Should I get some masking tape, Phong?” Reeves asked. “To keep the bow in your hand?”

At last, the group started to play.

“That sounded terrible,” Keith Erxleben said, allowing his violin to hang next to his leg.

“Let’s not put value judgments on it,” Reeves said. “We’re all learning.”

In only a couple of years, violinists like Cotton, Dang and Erxleben have learned to play one of the most important – and difficult to learn – instruments in orchestral music: the violin.

Twice a week, Reeves teaches the students proper bowing technique, how to read music and the elements of intonation, vibrato and sound quality.

They’re still a little rocky, but they’re getting there.

“I’m working on it,” Dang says. “But until this, playing violin never crossed my mind.”

Anyone who has picked up a violin, drawn a bow across its strings and heard the creaking, high-pitched noise issuing from it knows that playing a stringed instrument is hard. It takes time, patience, practice and proper instruction – all the things most of us claim we don’t have time for.

And that puts beginners such as Cotton, Dang, Erxleben and the other members of Club O one up on us.

Slowly but surely, the students have gone from novices to musicians, capable of creating a sound that – while not perfect – is wonderful, energetic, strong and musical nonetheless.

“Part of the job of being a teacher is to help them understand that improvement is gradual,” Reeves says. “It’s a process. As a teacher, you help them to not get discouraged and show them how they’ve improved. You show them the correct way to move the bow across the strings and all of the other measures that improve the sound.

“Even though it might seem difficult, it is entirely up to them to determine the quality of the result. That’s an important life lesson.”

Club O – a partnership between the Fort Wayne Philharmonic and the Boys & Girls Clubs of Fort Wayne – started two years ago as a way to provide access to stringed instruments to kids who might not otherwise have the opportunity.

This includes children whose families do not have the disposable income to pay for instruments and lessons or minority students who do not see themselves represented in mainstream orchestral music and consequently believe it to be the private domain of white privilege.

“This is an effort to change that,” Reeves says. “Our aim is to increase visibility and experience with classical music, both economically and culturally.”

Because the violins are owned by the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, participants are given access to them 24 hours a day, free of charge. The program is funded by a $60,000 grant from the Auer Foundation, which includes the cost of transportation to and from performances, instruments, books, other equipment and Reeves’ salary.

It is one of many programs of its kind, organized by orchestras nationwide. This includes El Sistema, a voluntary music education program in Venezuela and the United States, predicated on the idea that anybody can learn to play music at a high level regardless of their background. The mission of El Sistema is the inspiration for Club O and Reeves’ participation in it, he says.

“That is the spirit of why we’re doing what we do here,” he says. “And I’m seeing it work firsthand.”

Tuning out stereotypes

A concert violinist – or oboe player, or cellist or viola player – is old. He has white hair, wears tuxedos and, in the evening, listens to Bach while drinking two fingers of good scotch and practicing his ambiguous European accent.

And no one can stand him.

That’s the cliché, anyway. The officious classical musician – the one you see in movies and on television – is, inevitably, a snob, put on Earth to make us all feel like uncultured idiots.

But just when you’ve settled on that image, Derek Reeves walks into the room – like he did during last week’s Club O practice – wearing sneakers, carrying two pizzas and telling his son, Preston, to finish eating his dinner.

Preston, dressed in a green sweat suit, is 4 years old, smart and already a violin player. His answer to Reeves’ request to finish eating his dinner was a calm, serious, “Why?”

Reeves paused, laughed and said, “Because I said so.”

There were no tuxedos or tumblers of scotch involved in this exchange. Just a father and son engaged in an age-old disagreement about dinner.

Reeves, 38, was born in Okinawa, Japan, the son of a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, but spent most of his life moving around the Midwest.

Schools changed, neighborhoods changed, but the violin was a constant in his life. His lessons started at age 2. Carnegie Hall came during his teenage years. A fellowship with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and positions with at least half a dozen professional orchestras came after he graduated from Indiana University.

But as much as he loves to play, he also loves to teach, he says.

“I love finding innovative ways of making classical music and string instruments available to young people,” Reeves says. “Music education should be made accessible to everyone. That’s one of the reasons I applied for this job.”

As a teacher, Reeves treats his students as contemporaries, peppering his speech with the kind of vocabulary some adults would struggle to keep up with. Dissipates. Pendulum. Intonation.

For two hours a week, the students involved in Club O are treated like the classical musicians they are becoming. It’s the same technique Reeves’ teachers used with him.

“I was fortunate to have teachers who inspired me,” he says. “And a wonderful orchestral program at North Central High School in Indianapolis. We won the state championship while I was there.”

Reeves pauses to smile.

“Twice,” he says.

But as a student, Reeves’ musical experience was in predominately white orchestras. The racial disparity was something he got used to, he says.

And then he entered college, met other musicians of color and sought out music by black classical composers such as William Grant Still.

“I looked around and thought, ‘Hey! I’m not the only one!’ ” he says.

Since then, exposing children and young adults of all races and economic backgrounds to classical music has been a priority.

“Exposure at an early age is imperative,” he says. “If orchestras want diversity, it has to start in childhood.”

Reeves can rattle off several benefits of studying music – greater hand-eye coordination, greater spatial awareness, increased knowledge of mathematic and scientific concepts. But improved self-esteem is also an important part of the process, he says.

“Kids particularly are at that critical age where they’re still developing a sense of self and finding out who they are,” he says. “If there are cultural or economic barriers to pursuing and exploring music as an avenue of self-discovery, that’s potentially a great loss.”

‘They’ll get there’

For Club O, two Thursdays ago was performance day at Coventry Meadows, a local assisted-living facility on Fort Wayne’s southwest side.

Standing in front of the dining room, the ensemble launched into its first song.

Two seconds into the performance, Kathlyn McKee began to cringe.

McKee, 89, a resident at the local assisted-living facility, isn’t one to shy away from expressing herself. So, as the group began to play, her brow furrowed, the corners of her mouth dropped toward her shoulders, and her nose crinkled as if she was watching the cow patty plop at a county fair.

She made a dismissive sound – “meh” – and looked around the room at her fellow residents, all of them gathered in the dining room for their evening meal. In between songs, she began to talk about her own experience with music.

“I’ve played in several orchestras,” she said. “I started giving piano lessons to other children when I was 8 years old. I played in a …”

McKee paused, leaving the sentence unfinished. Then, looking at the three kids standing at the front of the dining room – posture straight, violins held to their chins, a look of fierce concentration on their faces – she began to smile, possibly remembering her own timid first plunks on the piano.

“They’re just starting out,” she said. “It takes a lot of guts.”

In the front of the room, Cotton, Dang and Erxleben took a deep bow toward the audience, their violins cradled in their arms in rest positions. And when they smiled, McKee clapped just a little louder.

“They’re getting there,” she said. “They’ll get there.”

edowns@jg.net