
Sphinx Organization founder Aaron Dworkin delivers his lecture on “Lessons in Gratitude: Excellence, Representation, and the Transformative Power of the Arts” Wednesday in the Amphitheater.
With a sprawling, blended-family story of his formative years, Aaron Dworkin likes to describe himself as a Black, white, Jewish-Irish-Catholic-Jehovah’s-Witness … who “grew up with a big afro playing the violin.” “No big surprise: A huge part of my life is music and diversity,” Dworkin said Wednesday morning in the Amphitheater, delivering a lecture of music and poetry for the Week Six theme of “Exploring the Transformative Power of Music.”
Dworkin is the founder of Sphinx Organization, a nonprofit focused on increasing representation in classical music. He first spoke to this mission at Chautauqua in 2007, and Wednesday drew upon that work again in a presentation titled “Lessons in Gratitude: Excellence, Representation and the Transformative Power of the Arts.” Dworkin, who is also founder of the Institute for Poetjournalism, a MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient, social entrepreneur, author, artist and activist (and violinist), shared with his audience the power of music, the arts, and the role they play in everyone’s lives.
Dworkin began playing the violin at the age of 5, thanks to his adoptive mother, who was an amateur violinist. He was lucky, he said, to have access to extraordinary teaching. Dworkin’s first instructor was Russian violinist Vladimir Graffman, who imparted just how serious the craft of violin was — it wasn’t enough to love music, or to simply want to play.
“I had to develop the skill sets to be able to communicate on the instrument,” Dworkin said. With this, Dworkin realized that through the violin, “I could speak. I could communicate through the instrument in ways that I couldn’t verbally.”
That was incredibly powerful, especially during challenging childhood moments only exacerbated by his parents’ strictness, and his experiences as a kid “with a big afro, playing the violin, with the last name ‘Dworkin,’ ” he said. “I did not fit in.”
Struggling with his identity and rebelling to such a degree that juvenile detention was a very real possibility, Dworkin — thanks to his violin — received a scholarship to Interlochen Arts Academy.
“I credit that arts institution with saving my life,” he said. “The role of arts institutions is incredibly critical.”
Interlochen led him to Penn State University, where he further explored music and several other disciplines. Life circumstances forced Dworkin to drop out of college and, at the time, he had no support system to lean on. Eventually, he found himself in a homeless encampment in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
“This issue became very important to me, and my mind has always been you can’t just complain about issues. You somehow have to contribute to their solution,” he said. Transitional housing was a much newer idea then, and as new laws were being developed and passed, Dworkin thought: “I can solve homelessness by developing an organization that focuses on transitional housing.”
So he did — not that he had any idea what he was doing. One thought was to reach out to as many celebrities as possible, sending out letters in the hopes someone famous would do promotional work to raise awareness of the issue. Rejections followed, Dworkin shuttered his fledgling organization, and soon was evicted again. Then Marsha Williams called.
“A voice on the line says, ‘I’m calling about a letter written to my husband,’ ” Dworkin said. Marsha Williams, at the time, was married to comedian Robin Williams. She and Dworkin spoke for more than an hour, even though Dworkin’s transitional housing organization had closed down.
“She asked, ‘What are you doing with your life?’ So I explained my life. I shared my life story,” Dworkin said. “I shared how all I really wanted to do was get back to school so I could continue studying on my violin.”
Marsha Williams’ response: “Well, send Robin and I copies of your student loan (records) and we’ll see if there’s something we can do to help.” Dworkin didn’t just send those records; he sent some of his poetry, and a violin concerto he’d performed at Penn State. A few months later, a letter arrived. Robin Williams had paid Dworkin’s Penn State loans, brought his federal loans up out of default, and gave the young violinist a clean slate.
Dworkin went back to school, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in violin performance at the University of Michigan. It was during those studies, Dworkin said, he started to think more about race — particularly his race, as a biracial Jewish-Irish-Catholic-Jehovah’s-Witness. No one, at any orchestra performances he attended, looked like him — on stage or in the audience.
“Classical music has saved my life. It’s the greatest constant in my life,” Dworkin said. “How is it that this is somehow not speaking to what, supposedly, is my community?”
During a lesson, when a professor asked Dworkin if he wanted to play any music from Black composers, it was mind-blowing. William Grant Still, David Baker — the professor had literal volumes of books he pulled off the shelves for Dworkin.
At the University of Michigan, amid all of these eye-opening experiences, Dworkin reflected even more on his own identity. Through all of this, an idea — more of a question, really — started to form.
“What is up with what’s happening in classical music and is there something to do to solve it? Part of my scientific upbringing: You need to quantify if you’re going to be able to make any difference,” he said.
He looked at the representation of musicians of color in major orchestras, the repertoire performed by composers of color. Dworkin quoted Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “The danger of a single story is not that it is untrue, but that it is incomplete.”
“I realized that the stories that we were weaving in classical music were incomplete,” he said. “What if those stories were different? Would that change our society? Would that change our nation at all? What if the numbers were different?”
The numbers weren’t great — when Dworkin founded the Sphinx Organization in 1996, he said, less than 1.5% of orchestra musicians were Black, and less than 1% were Latinx. Less than .5% of orchestra presidents were Black. Less than 1% of “all works, performed by all American orchestras,” were from composers of color.
“We have now been able to dramatically shift a number of those, and it is through this work,” Dworkin said.
He played a video in the Amp about the work done at Sphinx Organization to spotlight and empower young classical musicians of color. Quickly, the organization saw a need to reinforce the pipeline for these musicians, ensuring a solid professional trajectory to performance stages and executive arts offices. From mentorship and educational programs, to competitions placing winning musicians with partner organizations — like the Institution and the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra — Sphinx artists are shaping the future of classical music. Those partnerships, Dworkin said, is how impact is made.
“No single person, and no single institution, can do the important work that needs to get done — especially as it relates to the arts,” he said.
Dworkin stressed the importance of two key components in a creative career or creative life: innovation and failure. He pointed to the conversation he had with Marsha Williams, in which he had to open about his failures — not dropping out of college, or living in an homeless encampment, but “the failure to build relationships” and communicate with those he needed most. Expressing failure, learning from it, and moving forward from it, Dworkin said, is a critical part of innovation. And when innovation, by definition, requires a higher failure rate, it makes mental health all the more important.
He spoke about the early days of Sphinx, and the toll of building an organization from the ground up; if you feel like your mental health is deteriorating, “that is the very last thing you are going to share with anyone. (You think) ‘there’s no funder on the planet who’s going to support me if they think I’m losing it.’ ”
With mental health so woven into the creative process and entrepreneurship, reducing the stigma of mental illness is critically important. And Dworkin, both a creative and a social entrepreneur, knows this first-hand.
“I love Einstein’s saying, ‘Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.’ … What does that even mean? How do you define it? (I think) rather if you strive to be of value to yourself, to your community, to your family, to your industry, to your artistic discipline, to your craft,” Dworkin said, “then compensation and recognition (and success) — that will follow.”
In his own life of creative entrepreneurship, he said, “there is nothing I have accomplished on my own, there is nothing creative, there is nothing artistic, there’s not even a poem that I have created that did not in some way involve the collaboration, engagement and supportive partnership with others.”
Dworkin asked the audience to think about how they see their role in society. What are the things, he asked, “you might do, especially as it relates to the arts and/or identity and diversity — including the diversity that you experience in your own life — which you can actively impact?”
Our lives, Martin Luther King Jr. once said, begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
“I submit to all of you, this work that we do in the arts, the role that the arts plays in our society matters, arguably more than ever before, especially for our nation,” Dworkin said. “… It doesn’t mean it solves the political discourse, but what it does do is create a shared humanity so that discourse is decent and isn’t harmful.”
He referenced the friendship between Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia as proof of this shared humanity and decency in discourse.
“(The friendship) was genuine and it was built on the shared experience that they had in the arts,” Dworkin said. “That leads to friendships, and with friendships we can communicate. We can understand. We can tolerate, even though we may still have differences, which we always will.”