SPECIAL RECOGNITION: The young string players, their teachers, and administrators from Trenton Music Makers have been chosen to take part in PlayUSA, a network of music education organizations based at New York’s Carnegie Hall. (Photo by Nick Donnoli Productions LLC)
By Anne Levin
It has been less than five years since Trenton Music Makers began teaching Trenton Public School students to play violin, viola, cello, and bass. Despite its youth, the program was recently selected for membership in the PlayUSA network, part of Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute.
That means a $30,000 grant, training for teaching artists from Carnegie Hall staff, and interactions with some of the 16 other musical organizations that have also been selected for 2019-20.
“We are delighted, and honored, and proud, of course,” said Carol Burden, executive director of Trenton Music Makers. “This is giving us exactly what we want, which is wonderful professional development, opportunities for our teachers to learn, and a chance to show people that what we’re doing is successful.” more
The younger you are, the closer you are to the moon, whether it’s dangling in a mobile above the crib, or the funny-faced thing the cow jumped over, or the serene presence just outside the bedroom window you’re saying goodnight to as you serenade your drowsy two-year-old with the little book by Margaret Wise Brown. In the story made at once wondrous and intimate by Clement Hurd’s images, the moon is there with you, in the “great green room,” as close and as real as the teddy bears and the kittens and the telephone. I’m also thinking of the moonlight immediacy captured some 220 years ago by Samuel Taylor Coleridge when the author of 
