Consuelo Sherba, Teaching Associate
Consuelo Sherba, violist, is a founding member and artistic director of the performance ensemble Aurea, dedicated to exploring the connection between music and the spoken word. She recently selected and performed solo viola music for dozens of performances of the play Not About Heroes by Steven MacDonald with Providence First Stage, a production that will be taken to New York City in the fall of 2004. With Aurea, she has taken programs of music and poetry into inner city schools in Rhode Island in projects that have demonstrated the important role arts education has on measurable academic achievement on students at risk. Twelve of the Pawtucket High School students who participated in Aurea workshops with Consuelo last year were winners in a regional poetry contest, an unprecedented achievement for students at their school. She has been on the applied music faculty at Brown University since 1986, and also teaches at the RI Philharmonic Music School, where she coaches orchestra strings, chamber music, and heads the Creative Communities string program, which has been recognized as one of the 5 best programs of its kind in the country. In 2001, she went to Caracas, Venezuela to study the internationally acclaimed Venezuelan Youth Orchestra program, and bring back ideas for her Creative Communities project with the Pawtucket Housing Authority. Since then, many of her young students in this program have graduated to membership in the Rhode Island Philharmonic Youth Orchestra program. She encourages her students at Brown to help with this project, and create other arts education projects of their own. She has also performed with the Rhode Island Philharmonic, Vermont Symphony, New Hampshire Symphony, Milwaukee Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, Charleston String Quartet, and was guest violist with the Boston Chamber Music Society. She has performed at the Monadnock, Grand Teton, Aspen, and Colorado Music Festivals, was principal violist of the West Virginia Symphony, the Atlanta Ballet, and the Atlanta Chamber Orchestra. Some of her students have gone on to study music at Rice University, the Hartt School, Boston University, and other institutions.