Crescendo

Last fall, Community Music Works—a nonprofit founded by Sebastian Ruth ’97 that offers music lessons to children from South Providence—found itself with a very short move and a whole lot more space.  A $15-million, 24,000-square-foot new building, featuring practice rooms and a grand performance hall, opened its doors just a block from the group’s original home in a modest Victorian storefront. Ruth is a violinist and violist who first got the kernale of CMW going with a $10,000 Swearer Center grant when he was 22; he won a MacArthur “genius grant” for his work in 2010. He hopes the new space will allow CMW to serve more children. Currently, the program—which serves up to 150 children at a time, establishing long-term relationships between them and local musicians, and boasts a 90-percent retention rate—must restrict applicants to certain neighborhoods and ask them to apply through a lottery system.