Muse Mentors

Encore episode:  Rob Mermin ran off to join the circus in 1969 at the age of 19. He clowned with renowned European circuses, including England’s Circus Hoffman, Sweden’s Cirkus Scott, Denmark’s Circus Benneweis in the famous Circus Building by the Tivoli, and many more. It was his long mentorship with the iconic French mime Marcel Marceau that shaped him as a performer and inspired him to dream and make plans.  In 1987 he founded C...

In this encore episode of Muse Mentors, pianist Jeffrey Chappell reflects on his life and his formative relationship with his mentor the legendary Leon Fleisher. He addresses overcoming challenges and adversity through the lens of his teacher's career-altering medical condition. The episode closes with the voice of Leon Fleisher who offers powerful words to live by. 

Kerrin McCadden's new collection of poems called American Wake is made of the stuff of life --subjects like family, divorce, raising children, love and even her brother's tragic death by drug overdose are poignantly bound together by her strong Irish Heritage and her family's immigrant story. American Wake, is an actual term that refers to a kind of "Irish wake-style" farewell party that was thrown for Irish fam...

Lou Kosma was a bass player in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra for 36 years. He grew up in Philadelphia in the fifties in a blue collar Italian American family - a loving home where the sound of Italian tarantellas  played on guitar and accordion spilled from the windows, and the smell of frying meatballs and Roma tomato sauce filled the air. Little did his working class family know that their son would one day ascend to one of th...

James Pease Blair, one of National Geographic's legendary photographers  talks about love, life, and legacy. 

Jim began his 32 year career at the National Geographic Society with a splash as staff photographer on board Jacques Cousteau's Calypso in 1962. As a photography student in the fifties at the Institute of Design in Chicago, he studied with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, but it was his years as a summer intern with...

It can sound hyperbolic to make the claim that a person has changed the world and made it a better place. In the case of Eli Newberger, it is utterly true.

Eli Newberger is equal parts music man and medicine man. He was the key prosecution witness in the trial of Louise Woodward, the British nanny convicted of second-degree murder in the death of an 8-month-old in Boston in1997. Later during the Archdiocese of Boston sex abuse scan...

Paula Robison was born in Nashville to an extraordinary family of actors, writers, dancers, and musicians. She grew up in Los Angeles not only playing the flute, but studying dance with Bella Lewitzky and theater with Jeff Corey. When she was twelve years old, music claimed her heart and she knew she wanted to be a flutist. Trained at the Juilliard School, she also studied flute with the great French flutist Marcel Moyse during her...

In what could be the most important Muse Mentors episode ever, author and climate activist  Bill McKibben (who wrote The End of Nature one of the first books on global warming for the general public) talks about his childhood, teen-aged years as a journalist; and, before he even graduated from Harvard, an invitation from the late great editor  William Shawn to write for  The New Yorker Magazine. McKibben also discusses the impact t...

The New York Times called David Dworkin, the maestro who "sparkles with high-spirited virtuosity."  This Jersey boy got his start in high school in the late 1940s with clarinet lessons at The Williamsburg (Brooklyn) Community House where he met his mentor the late Metropolitan Opera Orchestra clarinetist Ben Armato. That relationship nurtured David who went on to play in both the American Symphony and Met Orchestras, as wel...

Tony Barrand was born in England in 1945 but has lived most of his life in southern Vermont in the vibrant town of Brattleboro—a place that shines all the more brightly because of him. This Cornell PHD and Professor Emeritus of Boston University is not just an academic, but also a singer, dancer, and story-teller. What first grabs you is his way with words—he can give them weight, make them sparkle, or swirl depending on the point ...

Vermont visual artist Katie Runde was raised by Medievalist parents. This millennial with a Midas touch has been drawing as long as she was able to hold a crayon, playing saxophone since age eight, and theologizing since that day somewhere around age eleven when Mass stopped making neat story sense. An alum of the Eastman School of Music, she also holds a masters in religious studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School, ...

Rob Mermin ran off to join the circus in 1969 at the age of 19. He clowned with renowned European circuses, including England’s Circus Hoffman, Sweden’s Cirkus Scott, Denmark’s Circus Benneweis in the famous Circus Building by the Tivoli, and many more. It was his long mentorship with the iconic French mime Marcel Marceau that shaped him as a performer and inspired him to dream and make plans.  In 1987 he founded Circus Smirkus, th...

Philadelphia-based illustrator Armando Veve is a Forbes 30 Under 30 list designee. He has been awarded three gold medals from the Society of Illustrators and gained international recognition when he was named an ADC Young Gun. His breath-taking and whimsical art has been commissioned by The New York Times, The New Yorker,  National Geographic, the New Republic, Penguin Random House, the Poetry Foundation, Scientific American Mind, ...

In the first full episode of Muse Mentors, pianist Jeffrey Chappell reflects on his life and his formative mentorships first with pianist Jane Allen, and later with the legendary Leon Fleisher.  Jeffrey reveals his early childhood genesis story with the piano; his studies at the Curtis Institute and Peabody Conservatory, and path that led him to an astounding last minute substitution for Claudio Arrau with the Baltimore Symphony. H...