Vermont
Vermont Conversation: From performing for presidents to making music for mental health
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When Michael Colburn was rising up in St. Albans, he dreamed of changing into a euphonium participant in a band. He by no means imagined that the band could be “The President’s Personal” United States Marine Band and that he would lead it for a decade, till 2014. As director of the nation’s high navy ensemble, Colburn served as music adviser to the White Home and commonly carried out the Marine Band and Chamber Orchestra on the Government Mansion and on the presidential inaugurations of former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Colburn is now returning to Vermont for a really completely different musical mission. He takes the baton of the Me2 Orchestra in Burlington, which describes itself as “the world’s solely classical music group created for people with psychological sicknesses and the individuals who assist them.” The neighborhood orchestra was based in 2011 by conductor Ronald Braunstein, the primary American to win the celebrated Karajan Worldwide Conducting Competitors in Berlin in 1979. Braunstein was identified with bipolar dysfunction and needed to abandon his worldwide conducting profession, however he and Caroline Whiddon, co-founder and government director of the orchestra, have created a stigma-free musical dwelling for others with psychological sickness. Me2 has obtained in depth media protection, together with being the topic of a PBS documentary, “Orchestrating Change.” Me2 now consists of two orchestras: one in Boston that Braunstein nonetheless conducts and the unique Burlington ensemble now led by Colburn.
Colburn has gone from conducting a few of the most interesting musicians on the planet to main a Vermont group “that actually welcomes all musicians with out worry of being judged.”
“Music could be an avenue of therapeutic and an amazing useful resource for a lot of who’re combating psychological points,” he stated.
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