Sarah McLachlan is doing more than just building a mystery. She’s harnessed her success to give scores of youth a free pass to a community of musical education that would otherwise be out of reach.
Last Friday, her Sarah McLachlan School of Music hosted a “spotlight celebration,” which gave students the chance to shine on stage and honoured the donors who’ve helped build and grow the charity over its 24-year history.
Special tribute was paid to Dona Wolverton of West Vancouver. Before her death last year, Dona left a legacy in patronage of the arts through her family’s Wolverton Foundation. That includes the School of Music’s permanent home at 138 East Seventh Ave. in Vancouver, which the foundation donated in 2011.
“Dona sadly passed last year, but I feel like this is a big part of her legacy, and we wanted to honour that,” McLachlan said. “So we’re going to be doing a bunch of great student performances and honouring Dona and her family, who are here tonight.”
McLachlan, who has lived in West Van for 28 years, counts Dona’s daughter Lisa Wolverton among her best friends.
“Lisa was influential in talking to her mom about what we did because, of course, we’re good friends,” she said. “When Dona found out, being a great music lover, she wanted to know more and just wanted to get involved. And we said, ‘We need a home.’ And they spent months searching around for a building that would work.”
Now the former bowling alley hosts 16,000-square-feet full of instruments, instructors, DJ equipment, nourishing food and bright-eyed young musicians.
Most of the school’s 1,100 students visit the building on East Seventh weekly – around 800 of them. Another 150 visit a programming space at Douglas College in New Westminster, and around 200 attend a dedicated home inside MacEwan University in Edmonton.
School of Music spokesperson Emily Oswald said 92 per cent of the kids face financial barriers to participating in after-school programs.
The school does intake calls, and most of the students are referred by partners including school counsellors and social workers.
“I always call it a fabric of care, of folks that know who in our community would benefit most from accessing music,” Oswald said.
“There’s no admission or audition to get in. It’s based on financial need and social emotional need,” she said. “So we are giving our programs to the kids that might otherwise fall through the cracks.”
Once enrolled, students don’t reapply. And most of them stay for the full eight years before graduation, Oswald said.
“Once you’re in, you’re in,” she said. “We can be that anchor in a kid’s life, that one safe space for them.”
Music is medicine, student says
Tikvah Wilkinson, one of 10 senior students performing at the spotlight event, said her life would be very different without the school.
“Sometimes I get very stuck in my head, and it’s not great. And so coming to [School of Music] and being able to interact with other people and focus on something else … was really helpful,” she said. “Without [the school], I’m not sure how exactly I would cope.”
For Wilkinson, music is medicine.
“With singing, I know there’s like a physiological thing with the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic nerve,” she said. “Singing is very calming or energizing. I love that.
“Because I live down the hill [from the school], when I walk home after my voice lessons, I sing all the way home.”
What Sarah McLachlan has built with the School of Music is really powerful, Wilkinson said.
She’s empowering … all different kinds of people to – the motto of the school is find your voice – so to find their voices and to figure out what’s going on,” she said. “Or to find some peace.”
Growing up in Nova Scotia, McLachlan said she was fortunate enough to have parents who could afford to pay for private music lessons.
“I do not know if I would be here if it wasn’t for music, particularly in those tough teenage years, I leaned on it really, really heavily for support and for a sense of my own worth and value,” she said. “And I thought, ‘If kids don’t have that opportunity to have music in their lives the way I did, what’s going to happen?’”
That thought was the impetus to found the School of Music, first partnering with Arts Umbrella in 2001 to run the school as an outreach program. Eventually, they outgrew that arrangement and moved to build the independent school.
McLachlan’s goal was to create a different experience than her solid, yet strict musical education.
“I wanted to create something that was way more fluid and kept kids interested and engaged,” she said. “Kids’ attention spans are so much shorter these days.... We learn differently. And I think the education system really needs to have a big overhaul and look at how kids learn now and figure out new and innovative ways to keep them interested.”
McLachlan gets an “immense” sense of pride every time she visits the school.
“I really wish I had this place when I was a kid,” she said. “They would have not been able to get rid of me.”
After overcoming vocal illness, McLachlan readies for new album release
For the better part of the past three decades, the two-time Grammy winning, four-time Juno winning recording artist has called the forested mountain slopes of West Vancouver home.
McLachlan often finds herself surfacing on the municipality’s many hiking trails.
“I love being up there by myself in the woods with the dogs,” she said. “It’s magical.”
McLachlan added that she’s a big fan of Zen Japanese Restaurant on Marine Drive.
“It’s great sushi,” she said. “I go there quite a bit.”
Her North Shore home has been a refuge, and a place to recover from her busy professional schedule, which has included a tour for the 30th anniversary of Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, and recording a CBC documentary about her all-female music festival, Lilith Fair.
On tour last year, she lost her voice and developed a “terrible virus.”
“I was on steroids all summer just to get through it,” she said. “I was on vocal rest for three months, and then just vocal rehab and just slowly working it back up.”
But now her voice is back, McLachlan said.
“I think it’s solid,” she said. “There are certain notes I kind of can’t hit anymore and I have to do work arounds, but so far so good.”
And her recovery couldn’t come at a better time, as McLachlan prepares to release her 10th studio album.
“It’s called Better Broken,” she said. “I love it so much. It’s coming out Sept. 19.”
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