By
Morristown Green Contributor
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By Chip O’Chang
In the buildup to last weekend’s Giralda Music & Arts Festival, promoters tempted Morris County music-lovers and art aficionados with a tantalizing offer. The festival would be a day filled with food trucks, ice cream, and local artists and artisans to support, all accompanied by the sounds of jazz and a symphony orchestra. What could be better?
The answer: All that, but air-conditioned.
With Saturday’s heat index projected to reach triple digits, festival organizers at Morris Arts feared their traditional spot at Giralda Farms Preserve in Madison was too exposed. So they moved everything to last year’s backup location at Liquid Church in Parsippany.
For a Plan B, the church checked all of the necessary boxes and then some–-a large and inviting space, bright colors, child-friendly features and accessibility, and a 1000-seat auditorium with a projector for the folks in the back.
The AC kept temperatures comfortable, but a trip to the Empanada Lady’s food truck outside required a return to thick, oppressive heat. Luckily, there also was a vintage ice cream truck.
You never get the same number of people at a backup site. That’s wisdom from Tom Werder, executive director at Morris Arts. Yet a sizable crowd did show up at the indoor location, filling most of those one thousand seats toward the evening’s end.
“The mission at Morris Arts is to build community through the arts,” Werder said. “This is the perfect example of how we do that. We bring artists together. We bring an audience together. And we get to be in a space together as a community enjoying the arts. I think there’s nothing like it.”
Slideshow photos by Chip O’Chang. Click/hover for captions:
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The vendors and artists filled the hallway outside the auditorium. Their wares included ceramics, jewelry, paintings made from oil, acrylic, or watercolor. Elizabeth Cherry of Drowning in Pretty, a fiber arts studio, spun raw wool into vibrantly colored yarn. She’d brought her spinning wheel, a portable type called a castle wheel, as a visual reinforcement of what her art was about.
“I’m glad these events continue to exist,” Cherry said. “I’m glad that organizations like this exist. It’s nice to have a place for artists to come and actually show the things they make by hand.”
A sizable table belonged to Empower the Village, a Morristown-based nonprofit that has supported Black business owners and their families since 2018.
Program and Research Associate Curille McKenna explained that with 2020 four years in the past, many have forgotten the outrage that galvanized anti-racist protests across the country in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
“It’s a little bit more challenging for us to get the support that we need and to get people’s attention about Black business owners who still need that support,” she said.
The table displayed works from local Black artists, with sales benefiting both the artists and the organization’s work. Empower the Village also advertised two upcoming fundraisers: A July 13 Power Walk at South Mountain Reservation in West Orange, and the Power Swing Classic on Aug. 27 at Fiddler’s Elbow Country Club in Bedminster.
Meanwhile, the event’s younger attendees had plenty to do. They could explore interactive art exhibits, a giant bubble blower, a frisbee-decorating table (a vestige of the event’s original outdoor setting), and an instrument petting zoo hosted by the Lakeland Youth Orchestra. If you’ve never heard of that, it’s a station where kids can pick up and play with instruments they might not have encountered in person before.
If any adults wanted to participate in these activities, they weren’t turned away. “The arts are the great leveler,” Werder said. “Everybody gets to be a kid and experience the arts in a unique way every single time.”
That’s the liberating quality about the arts, a quality some attendees recognized by feel, but couldn’t articulate.
“From the inside out, music, painting, any kind of art is just one of the best things that human beings could experience,” said Karen Rothstadt from Warren. She attended her first Giralda Music & Arts Festival 20 years ago and introduced her grandson to classical music at the festival in 2019.
It’s an ineffable yet palpable quality that Morris Arts plans to pursue with upcoming programs. Werder indicated the organization’s next initiative would center on arts and health.
“We know that it’s good for mental health,” he said. “We know it’s good for treating people with addictions. We’ve even heard that oncology specialists are using the arts to help their patients become more relaxed, more able to spend time healing. You know, it’s not just an idea anymore. There’s actually data that backs this stuff. And it’s very exciting.”
The highlight of the day, of course, was the music.
First came Lynette Sheard with the John Lee Quartet. The program indicated the jazz vocalist possessed a five-octave range. Even without that knowledge, it was a voice that pierced the hubbub of conversation outside the auditorium and lodged somewhere deep.
At 6 PM came the headliner: The New Jersey Symphony, with Joshua Gersen as conductor.
A music and arts festival could rightfully include any musical artist. But for Werder, it had to be a symphony orchestra, and not just because he played the cello as a child.
“There are very few genres of music where 70 musicians get together and make something happen,” Werder said.
He emphasized the role of the conductor in particular: “There’s somebody that’s pulling it all together. So it’s like they have their own community, right? We’re getting to witness this community experience. And then we all become a larger community when the audience gets to experience that with the orchestra.”
Gersen was especially fitting for this role. Not only is he Jersey-born, but he lived for a while in Parsippany.
He led the New Jersey Symphony in a program he called “a tale of two halves.” The first half included selections from the hallowed canon of opera, including Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Bizet’s Carmen.
The second half presented a celebration of American music. It included some classic names like John Williams, Aaron Copland, and John Philip Sousa. Per the festival’s tradition, the set ended with the Armed Forces Salute. The orchestra played the music of each military branch, inviting active members and veterans to stand as they heard their branch’s theme.
The finale was a highlight of the festival for many, including Pat Haverland of Madison. “It’s a real tribute to the Armed Forces,” she said. “It’s very nice, very patriotic.”
Another track stood out in the second half as particularly memorable: Seven O’Clock Shout, a composition by New York flutist and composer Valerie Coleman.
She composed the piece in May 2020. According to Gersen, it depicts a particular moment in that year of pandemic lockdown– when all of New York City lay eerily quiet, except for a ritual that took place at 7 o’clock in the evening.
When that hour struck, New Yorkers would throw their windows open and make whatever noise they could, with pots, pans, or their own voices, to celebrate the health workers and first responders still at work. The piece told this story in music, beginning with a desolate lone instrument and building to a collective, triumphant finish.
“It really does speak to the power of music,” Gersen said. “Music has this way of capturing these moments in time, and especially moments that we’ve lived through, moments in history that we’ve all lived through. It helps us remember those feelings, thoughts, emotions that were going through our heads and things that maybe we’ve even forgotten about now. Music can do that in a way almost nothing else really can.”
The orchestra played. Meanwhile, the sun scorched an empty field at Giralda Farms. The weekend would tie or break 20 temperature records across New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
But inside the air-condtioned auditorium, as nearly a hundred musicians played in unison for hundreds of listeners, no one remembered the heat.
