Reaching A New Audience: Natalie Merchant focusing on youth during weeklong residency at Chautauqua

Most people know Natalie Merchant as a founding member of 10,000 Maniacs.

These days, the Jamestown native spends a lot of her time on Cabinet of Wonder, an enrichment program developed in partnership with the Chicago Symphony, the Chicago Children's Theater and the National Head Start Association. It was a topic on Merchant's mind as she spoke to The Post-Journal on a visit to the county. Merchant is in the midst of a weeklong residency at the Chautauqua Institution.

She will be the speaker at Chautauqua Institution's morning lecture today at 10:45 a.m. in the Amphitheater. The theme of the week for Chautauqua is "Art Against All Odds" and Merchant's lecture will focus on the importance of early childhood art education, as that is an area she is currently working in. Merchant has a second lecture happening Thursday, with the topic of using art for social change. Following that she is visiting three day camps in Jamestown: the YWCA, the YMCA at Camp Onyahsa and visiting the Boys and Girls Club. Merchant has been supporting all of these nonprofit organizations since 1997, and occasionally goes to visit and see the kids.

Sunday, Merchant will be doing a free concert at Chautauqua Institution with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra that will be a children or family concert, and all of these events connect back to her current project, "Cabinet of Wonder". Merchant has been working on "Cabinet of Wonder" for about eight years.

"It's an enrichment program for teachers and children from the ages of three to six years old, so early, early childhood," Merchant said. "It was a collaboration with the Chicago Symphony and the Chicago Children's Theater and National Head Start Association. It's a full curriculum that was developed with the National Head Start Association in line with their standards."

"Cabinet of Wonder" features 24 child actors and 26 musicians, most from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and involves music videos, teaching guides and sheet music that is royalty free and downloadable from the website, cabinetofwonder.org, with everything available to teachers all over the world for free.

"It's a really exciting project that has taken up most of my time for the last two and a half years for sure," Merchant said. "Now I'm just trying to make as many people aware of it as possible so that it gets used."

A pilot program was done with the project in the Chicago Public Schools last year, and Merchant did a free concert for 3,500 children at the Chicago Symphony Hall back in May. The concert was the culminating event for the children after studying the curriculum for a year. The New York City public schools, the largest school district in the country, will also be adopting it in the upcoming year. Head Start is implementing it in schools across the country, serving 800,000 children. With around 22 million children in the United States under the age of six, Merchant said there are a lot of kids she hopes to reach with this program.

Merchant performed with the Chautauqua Symphony three years ago, and was invited to return with all of these events again as she said Deborah Moore, who is in charge of Chautauqua Institution's programming, invited her back to do a residency. Merchant is also working with some kids in the Chautauqua school, doing a workshop with the younger grades.

"She said 'it would be a great opportunity for you to come home to Chautauqua County, visit the programs you've been supporting for years, do things with kids in the Institution and talk about your work'," Merchant said. "I came to Chautauqua when I was a kid, so I would point to my experiences at Chautauqua as being extremely formative and would love to have that same kind of impact on some other kids."

While Merchant said she is "always surprised" when people come out to her events, she said it is good for people to talk about the welfare of children and that people should all be concerned with the emotional and social development of children in this age group because of this specific age range being a formative time for them.

"I feel that there's a big threat to childhood, especially in the age of the Internet and AI," Merchant said. "I really think that there needs to be more human engagement with children in this age group and this program that we've developed really gives a lot of opportunity for that."

Merchant invited people to come out to her events because of this exact reason, saying as a community people need to pay attention to this particular age group and offer them quality educational tools and enrichment tools. Merchant also spoke of a puppeteering group from Westfield, Das Puppenspiel, while she was growing up that would do things in the public school system that she completely fell in love with. The group had traditional European style marionettes and would do plays by Charles Dickens, with their own hand-sown costumes and suits for their puppets.

"They were so beautifully made and the music and the dialogue was completely magical," Merchant said. "They had a huge impact on me and the way that I wanted to pursue literature and music and art."

Merchant remembers seeing the group at Chautauqua doing an exhibition and performing with the Symphony with giant puppets, all of which she said was amazing.

"I was a little kid and I remember it very well, and I'm sure it shaped part of my aesthetic and it definitely is the reason I would like to give other kids that experience of music and movement and poetry and beautiful costumes and a land of make believe that is accessible to them and not created by a computer on a screen somewhere," Merchant said.

More information on Merchant's events at Chautauqua Institution this week can be found on their website, chq.org.

45 years ago, Natalie Merchant and the other members of what would eventually become 10,000 Maniacs came together to sing. When speaking with the Post-Journal, Merchant said 10,000 Maniacs originally came together just because they wanted to play music.

"It was very informal," Merchant said. "There was a warehouse down in the downtown area called Broadhead Mills that some artists had taken over and were having parties there. There was a PA system and a kind of open mic night, and I just showed up and sang with them and we became a band."

Many of the members went to Jamestown Community College and met through the radio station. Additionally, Merchant said the original meeting was very informal with no plan for a music career, though eventually the band signed to a major label when Merchant was 19. The band ended up living in London, and Merchant said it continued to grow until it became their jobs.

"Since I joined the band when I was only 17, by the time I was 29 I was living in New York City, commuting back and forth to Jamestown for rehearsals," Merchant said. "I just felt that I wanted to do more song writing on my own and not have the ties to Jamestown anymore since I had moved somewhere else."

Merchant gave the band two years' notice, and in that time they did a tour and two records, including, "Our Time in Eden", along with an MTV Unplugged opportunity. They parted on good terms, and Merchant then went off to her long solo career.

As far as favorite memories go, Merchant said there were a lot of great memories.

"It was my first experience traveling," Merchant said. "We met lots of great people, slept on a lot of floors, traveled in a converted school bus and we had a tent and would sometimes camp out. It was a great way to see the world when I was that young and didn't care if I was sharing a cheap hotel room with six guys. The sound man was there too, so it was me and six guys all the time."