Composing program wins national award

By Cindy Yurth
Tséyi' Bureau

CHINLE, Nov. 10, 2011

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(Courtesy photo -White House)

Grand Canyon Music Festival artistic director Clare Hoffman, left, and Native American apprentice composer Jordan Lomahoema, Hopi, pose with first lady Michelle Obama after accepting a national arts and humanities award Nov. 2 on behalf of the Native American Composer Apprentice Project.





The Grand Canyon Music Festival's Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project, which has taught about 3,000 Native students from around Arizona to compose concert music, has received a prestigious national honor.

The project is one of 12 extracurricular programs selected by the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities for an Arts and Humanities Youth Program award.

The honor comes with a $10,000 grant for the program.

Since the project was founded in 2001, several schools on the Navajo Nation and Hopi Reservation have participated including Hopi Junior and Senior High School, Chinle High, White Horse High, Tuba City High, Greyhills Academy and Monument Valley High.

With the guidance of a Native American composer, each student writes a piece for string quartet that is then performed by professional musicians at the Grand Canyon Music Festival.

One of those students, 15-year-old Jordan Lomahoema of Keams Canyon, Ariz., accompanied Grand Canyon Music Festival Artistic Director Clare Hoffman to Washington, D.C., Nov. 2 to accept a plaque from first lady Michelle Obama. Also in attendance were NACAP's current composers-in-residence, Raven Chacon, Navajo/Latino, and Trevor Reed, Hopi.

NACAP and the other 11 recipients were chosen from a field of 471 nominees.

Russell Goodluck of Chinle, now a student at Mesa Community College, participated in the program for five years.

Goodluck said he was "overjoyed" to hear NACAP had won the award.

"It really does deserve the award, and I am happy that I was a part of NACAP," he wrote in a Facebook message.



NACAP was founded in 2001 as a way to involve Native students in the annual music festival on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. The festival's board of directors asked Navajo flutist R. Carlos Nakai to help develop the program, recalled board member Rosanda Suetopka-Thayer.

Hoffman said the four-day trip to Washington was a "whirlwind."

"I know I shook Michelle Obama's hand and I know I said 'thank you,'" she said, "but I have no memory of it. I had to watch the video to make sure it happened."

Hoffman said she is grateful for the $10,000 award, which will replace $7,000 in funding lost in a budget cut to their NEA grant.

"Financially, it's a wash," she said, "but I'm hoping we can use this to leverage other funding."

The NACAP crew, including 15-year-old Lomahoema, were treated to a reception the night before the award ceremony by handbag designer Louis Vuitton.

Before the ceremony, they were allowed to "roam around" the East Wing of the White House, and before and after the event Hoffman and Lomahoema squeezed in visits to the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, the Air and Space Museum, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and several congressmen's offices.

Hoffman said Lomahoema was chosen to represent the NACAP students because of a 2010 piece he wrote depicting the car accident that killed his mother.

"You could hear the cars accelerating toward each other, the silence after the crash, the sirens coming ... it was a very, very moving piece," she said. "It really exemplified how young people can use music to express events and emotions in their lives."

Perhaps the highlight of the trip was meeting the first lady.

"Before the reception, the lady from the committee cautioned us to call her 'first lady' or 'Mrs. Obama' rather than Michelle," Hoffman recalled. "I thought, 'Well of course that's what I would call her.' But when you meet her, she's so warm you want to go right to 'Michelle.'"

Another highlight was meeting the other 11 winners.

"There were some really incredible programs," Hoffman recalled. "You think you're out there by yourself and then you see all these other like-minded people doing similar things in their areas. It's really heartening."

As for Lomahoema, he may have been a star for 20 minutes, but on the plane to and from Washington, he was just a Hopi High School student with homework.

"He worked on geometry on the flight there and history on the flight back," Hoffman said. "I had promised his grandfather that if he went on this trip, he wouldn't fall behind on his homework, so I made sure to remind him."

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