Interview of Dan Sedgwick as told to Seth Garcia
Can you share a little about your background or your story? How did you first come to music, and how did you end up here in Somerville today?
I got started in music through my mom—she’s played piano all her life, and she was my first piano teacher, starting when I was around 5 or 6. I grew up in Worcester, which has a great public school arts program, and I was able to enroll in the music magnet program at my neighborhood schools (Burncoat Middle and Burncoat High). So I had two periods of music every day from grade 7 to 12, including individual lessons on piano and french horn from excellent teachers (Mark Manuel and Deborah Cole), and lots of performance opportunities with the jazz band, brass ensemble, concert band, orchestra, and chamber music groups. That was where I first had the experience of being a part of a musical community.
Skipping ahead to how I ended up in Somerville: my wife (violinist Marji Gere) and I moved to East Somerville in 2009 after I finished my doctorate at Rice in Houston. At the time, I had a teaching assistant job at the Harvard Music Department and we were both working with the Charlestown Working Theater. Our apartment close to the Capuano School in East Somerville was just about halfway between those two spots.
What pieces of music have inspired you along your journey as a musician?
Far too many to include here! To pick one recent example: Beethoven’s “Archduke” piano trio was part of our most recent Around Hear program, and I know I tend to feel this way about whatever I’m currently playing, but I couldn’t help thinking that it was the most amazing and inspiring and uplifting music I’d ever had the opportunity to play.
Can you speak to the importance of collaboration to your art/process?
Collaboration is great! One obvious example is that I’m someone who loves writing songs, but I have no idea how to write lyrics, so it’s very nice to be able to collaborate with someone who does. For both performing and writing music, I find it helpful to be able to go back and forth between working alone and working together with others; the two kinds of work feed each other and I think that leads to a dynamic, productive, sustainable process.
Along with Marji Gere, you co-direct the Around Hear concert series, which often weaves together music with different art forms like puppetry, poetry, and theater. For you, how does music compliment other art forms?
I think we combine music and other art forms for the same reasons that so many other artists do: we’re hoping that the words and music and puppets and visual and narrative elements will all support and heighten and provide context for each other. In general, we want music to
resonate with our emotions: we choose happy music for celebratory occasions, and we prefer to hear sadder music when we’re feeling down. Theatrical and narrative art forms take us on powerful emotional journeys, and that enables the music to work its magic and intensify those emotional experiences.
Your work is rooted in community engagement. What has Somerville meant to you in terms of community, place, or home?
This past Friday evening, as I was biking home from our weekly Around Hear piano class, I heard a kid from my neighborhood call out from his doorway, “Hey! I know you!” I stopped my bike, and he said again, “I know you! You play music, and you come to the Healey School, and you do puppet shows!” And I recognized him, too; I’d seen him at our Around Hear performances for Healey School 3rd and 4th graders. His older sister was there with him, and she asked, “So when is the next time that Honk is happening? Can my mom come too?” (Around Hear has recently begun collaborating with the School of Honk to offer a series of free all-ages brass band workshops on Tuesday afternoons outside the Mystic Activity Center.) I’m grateful to live in a place where I can give concerts and classes and puppet shows and make brass band sounds with the same people I run into on the street or at Market Basket.
You are an educator as well. When did you first want to teach? How does education inform your practice?
I learned a very significant portion of what I know about music from the piano lessons I took in high school from Mark Manuel and Eric Stumacher. I really enjoyed the lessons, and I remember thinking at the time, “Hm, teaching piano lessons seems like a pretty nice line of work.”
When I’m teaching, I’m very often making music together with students, so we’re playing four-hands at the piano, or I’m singing or playing bass or guitar or percussion along with them; most of the time (especially with beginning students) I’m generating that part for myself on the spot. Sometimes it’s an improvisation or composition that we’re creating together, and very often I’m supporting them as they play a familiar melody, and I think it’s a great musical exercise for me to do that so regularly, and to try to do it as well as I can. And the ongoing challenge of having to articulate and communicate musical ideas to a wide variety of people (of all ages and experiences) is another great exercise.
What are your favorite sounds to listen to in Somerville?
I’ll share one recent Somerville listening highlight: earlier this month I got to hear an amazing Somerville Porchfest performance by an artist named Bahloul, a Syrian poet and singer and oud player (and also a psychiatrist in Worcester), and Mohamed Araki, a Sudanese keyboardist who’s now living in Boston. They were performing together for the first time since 2020, and they played both original and traditional music, and everything about the scene was magical and inspiring and beautiful.
Any favorite places in Somerville (musical or not)?
Every time I walk into the Mystic Activity Center at 530 Mystic Ave, where we present our Around Hear public concerts and hold our weekly classes, I feel grateful that it exists and that we’ve been able to build a musical community there. It’s a central gathering space for the Mystic Housing Development, and it houses the Mystic Learning Center, an afterschool and out-of-school program for youth, as well as The Welcome Project, an immigrant advocacy organization that offers English classes for adults and interpreter training for high school students. I feel that it’s a truly welcoming place and community, and the all-purpose Activity Room at the center of the building is a perfectly sized and shaped space for the small-group chamber music events we hold there.
Any current or upcoming projects you want to mention?
I’m very excited about our next Around Hear program! It’ll be our first program to feature music for the harpsichord, and the centerpiece is a fantastic piece from the 1920s by the Spanish composer Manuel De Falla, for flute, oboe, clarinet, violin, cello, and harpsichord. It’s a piece he worked on for a number of years, and it’s full of imaginative, surprising, ear-bending details. And there’s a bunch of other amazing music on the program too, from Élisabeth Claude Jacquet de La Guerre, Jacques Ibert, Bohuslav Martinů, Imogen Holst, and Henry Purcell. The public concert will be at 2pm on Saturday, June 7th at the Mystic Activity Center, at 530 Mystic Ave. As always, it’s free, all ages are welcome, we’ll have coffee and tea and art supplies available for people to enjoy as they listen, and we’ll share some pizza after the concert!
More details are available here:
https://sites.google.com/view/aroundhear/public-concerts
Arts Council postscript: Around Hear is doing amazing work in the community. If you too agree, help them by contributing today.
More Artists of the Month from 2025
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About the Artist of the Month
This program is inspired by the Nave Gallery’s “Featured Artist” program, which ran from 2005 to 2009.
SAC’s Artist of the Month program is a way for us to celebrate the enormous wealth of talent in our city, by shining a spotlight on a different creative Somervillian each month.
This program has been put together by a whole raft of people: Coordinators Jenn Harrington (2013-2014) and Kellie Veiga (2013), Gilmore Tammy (2017) and Somerville Arts Council board members Matt Kaliner, Tim Devin, Valeria Amato, and Michael J. Epstein, Bill House (2019-2020), Charan Devereaux (2019-2025), Tori Weston (2019-2025) and Andrea Read (2022-2025). Current coordinators, are Kerrie Kemperman (2019-), Seth Garcia (2025-), and Ben Cuba (2026-).
Know of a great Somerville based artist who should be recognized, please nominate the artist for consideration. We seek artists who contribute to the community through their strong work and community collaborations. Artist should either reside in the City or contribute to the City’s vibrant art scene.