Colette Ruoff (photo by Dion Ogust)
Imagine you’re living in a nursing home or hospice, and a singer-songwriter comes to you and asks you who you really are. Together, over time, you write a song about something essential about your life. Then one day, you go to a concert hall and hear a choir of young people perform the song you’ve composed.
Imagine you’re a singer-songwriter, hearing the stories of an elder, a person approaching death, as she reviews her life, and you help turn her experience into art. Now imagine you’re a 20-year-old choir member who has learned a new song about someone else’s life, and now that person is sitting in front of you as you sing his song.
“My first thought was, this is the best thing I ever heard of,” said Colette Ruoff of Rosendale, describing how she felt when she first learned about Lifesongs. The program, started by two Santa Fe musicians, is the model for Ruoff’s new project, SageArts, which is training Hudson Valley singer-songwriters to help elders write songs about their lives.
“It moved me that we could celebrate and honor, through a creative process, the elders in our community. I fell in love,” said Ruoff, an organizational consultant who encountered Lifesongs while working with the program’s non-profit organization, Academy for the Love of Learning. “It woke something up in me that was asleep. I’ve never worked with elders, and I’m not a musician. But I found myself inspired to bring the program here, partly because I love this community, and I’ve been yearning to know how I can contribute to it. When this appeared, it was obvious.”
SageArts kicked off with a benefit concert and dinner in early June to raise money for Lifesongs founders Acushla Bastilbe and Molly Sturges to come and train eight local songwriters in the process of working with elders.
“One of the great tragedies of American culture is that we separate the generations from each other,” said Woodstocker Elly Wininger, after taking the two-day training. “Other cultures carry their elders on their backs and consult the elders for their wisdom and experience. Young people here have terrible prejudices and stereotypes about old people, and the old see the young as spoiled and tragic. I’ve seen those stereotypes break down in projects like this one.”
She was also drawn to SageArts because of its emphasis on songwriting, which “transcends all trappings of intelligence, age, everything except this life force we all have. I love being a witness to that and supporting it in other people. It’s magical to me.”
Elizabeth Clark-Jerez, harpist/vocalist/songwriter for the band Mamalama, also took the training. She commented, “We’re all facing these big questions about our own mortality. A huge part of the training process was to deal with those questions ourselves first. When we’re working with elders who are at that place, we need to be able to be there and not have our own fears get in the way.”