About
The East Bay Community Music Project, a casual grassroots organization, promotes community through music-making for people of all ages, cultural backgrounds, abilities, and economic status. We believe that music- making is as intrinsic to the human experience as language, preparing food and nurturing children. With this in mind we create and facilitate events, gatherings and classes that empower individuals and groups to make music that expresses their feelings, challenges their bodies and minds and engages them with their community.
East Bay Community Music Project events are a chance to make music with your peers, your elders, the youth of your community, experienced musicians and those that will learn from you. We make music with our bodies, our voices, with instruments that you bring with you and instruments that are on-site. Familiar sing-alongs and poetry created on-the-spot, just for the occasion. Activities are facilitated by experienced teachers and by members of the community who are inspired to share. There is a road map, and also lots of room for spontaneity, improvisation, and the unexpected. Not a music class, but there is an educational element for those that want to learn. The emphasis is on mutuality, the community bonds that grow from collective music-making, and fun.
Ryk Groetchen, director
Ryk Groetchen is a multi-instrumentalist (voice, flute, guitar, bass), composer and lifelong music lover. His performance experience includes rock bands, free improvisation ensembles, jazz big-band, vocal ensembles and multi-media/spoken word performance groups. He has participated in a variety of community art- and music-making activities with young children, middle- and high-school students and adults.
Ryk is a perpetual student, committed to continuing his own music and movement education while sharing his understanding and his learning process with the community. He has taught early childhood music classes with East Bay Music Together since 2002 and was awarded Certification Level I by the Center for Music and Young Children in Princeton, NJ., having demonstrated outstanding achievement in teaching, musicianship, program philosophy and parent education. Ryk has also completed Orff Schulwerk Certification Levels I, II, and III, and is a proud graduate of the Orff-Afrique course in Ghana, the Smithsonian Folkways Course in World Music Pedagogy, and Using Orff Principles to Teach Jazz.
Ryk has always had a strong desire to contribute in some way to musical culture, which led him to found the East Bay Community Music Project in 2012.