Port Jervis Consort Had Crowd Spellbound

Jim Blanton, Port Jervis Consort founder, stands on stage at the far left.

Seeds of the Port Jervis Consort, which recently filled every seat in Marsh Hall with rapt listeners, were planted on Christmas Eve in 1968, when Jim Blanton was 16. He came home from a family gathering, turned on the clock radio in his room in Forest City, North Carolina, and Handel’s “Messiah” was playing.

“I thought, ‘This is wonderful. This is what I’ll do.’ I’d thought I’d be an engineer, but I really had no interest in it,” Blanton recalled. He had already been taking piano lessons and singing in the church choir, but he had thought he would be a businessman like his father and grandfather.

“Who goes into music? No son of mine,” Blanton recalled his father saying. “But he made peace with it when I got my doctorate in vocal performance. And I ended up being like him, as an owner of properties. At my father’s gun club, sons are men of business. You don’t say your kid is studying music at gun club dinners. But I’m not afraid of risks. When I told him, he said, ‘No, you’re not.’ But I would have worked my way through college.”

Blanton did support himself through his graduate degrees, at times relying on beans, rice and vegetable stews for meals. Then, after completing his doctoral degree, including his thesis, “Historical Perspectives on Vocal Vibrato,” he supported himself with music in New York City, singing at weddings and funerals in churches and synagogues and as music director at large Catholic churches, sometimes providing chamber music.

After leaving the city for Port Jervis, Blanton continued this work, but after 22 years in Port Jervis, Blanton said, “I felt Port Jervis needed a cultural center.”

So he collaborated with some likeminded cohorts to form Friends of Port Jervis Art and History. They contemplated purchasing Deerpark Reformed Church to make it a cultural center, but that did not work out.

“Then, with no building, we focused on diverse programs with broad public appeal, not just the cultural elite. That’s why we had the cafe setting for the Consort performance, not straight rows where people are figuring out where to clap.”

The concert in June was free, with free refreshments, and attendees varied from very wealthy to recipients of public assistance, Blanton said, which was part of the vision.

Meanwhile, the performers ranged from singers and musicians that Blanton had known and worked with for years to a pianist he first heard through an open window on a Port Jervis street. Music varied from religious to romantic, Renaissance to recent. They performed Renaissance madrigals, Latin motets, a Weber trio for flute, cello and piano and music by Billy Joel and from Riverdance.

Flutist Fern Ashworth, on the left, also sang.

Blanton knew flutist and singer Fern Ashworth, of Greenville, from her work with regional music libraries, recently the Hudson Valley Philharmonic library. She had graduated from Port Jervis High School, where she sang in the high school chorus, then in church choirs. She had also begun playing flute in elementary school and continued through college, playing in concert bands, although she had originally been drawn to the clarinet.

“I told my mother I wanted to play clarinet, but she said, ‘How about the flute?’ There was lots of squeaking with the clarinet she might not have liked,” said Ashworth. “Later I played saxophone off and on.”

Ashworth both sang and played flute at the first Port Jervis Consort performance, “Chamber Music Cafe,” where performers sang and played both from the stage at the front of Marsh Hall and, at times, from the opposite end of the room by the door.

“I was astounded by the turnout,” said Ashworth. “I was amazed by the full house.”

The crowd of about 115 sat in groups around small tables as well as on chairs lined up along the wall for those who arrived after tables were filled. They sat in complete stillness and silence listening to the music performed with a delicate acuity that no one threatened with a whisper or fidget.

Soloists at the back of the room “created a nice call and response echo effect” that audience members noted later in emails and texts to Fern Ashworth.

“As the first time out, I didn’t know how people would react. Evidently, this is something that people in the area want to see. They enjoyed the piece with the soloists in the back, while the other performers were in front,” said Ashworth. “People emailed and texted me. It created a nice call and response echo effect. Jim has a nice ear for what we can work toward. He knows how to get good results. He’s open to suggestions too. Some conductors are not.”

Jim Blanton was walking down a Port Jervis street when he first heard pianist Bill Goodwin playing.

The pianist, Bill Goodwin, said he learned not to talk before a performance to be able to sustain the right pace for collaborative grace. Blanton discovered Goodwin as he strolled down a Port Jervis street and heard Franz Liszt’s “Dance of the Dead” drifting from a window— “the solo piano version with pyrotechnics,” Blanton said.

“Usually people walk by and it doesn’t seem to register,” said Goodwin, who had moved to the house in August of 2017 from the Bronx house where he raised his family.

Goodwin had worked for Metro North planning department where he learned that the further from Manhattan on the train he went, the population thinned and real estate prices decreased. Port Jervis is at the end of the Metro North line, and on the internet his daughter found him a “rambling house” there, where Blanton heard him playing piano about a year ago and knocked on the door.

Goodwin grew up in Ann Arbor, where, he recalled, his grandmother showed off his precocious musical skills to family on an electric organ. At nine he began piano lessons and then went on to regular performing in Ann Arbor and later attended Julliard for an M.F.A. But having a family to support led him to Metro North, which diverted him from music, as did his son Alexander’s early film career—at five he was in “Nobody’s Fool” with Paul Newman.

When his son grew out of film roles, Goodwin toured Europe performing, but in Port Jervis, he said, “I felt isolated. Cultural activity is only in nooks and crannies I missed chamber music.”

That changed when Blanton knocked on his door.

“Jim yelled, ‘We have to get you playing.’ I hadn’t played in public for several years, but one goes into a certain mode willy nilly. As a young adult, I was more nervous. Not now. I jumped at the opportunity. It’s important to play with others for your own development. It’s easy to play well by yourself. But in performance, only 80% of what you do is in practice.”

He has learned to limit practice and conversation before performing.

“Practicing is stimulating before a performance, but it’s tiring,” said Goodwin. “I don’t talk to people before performing because time slows down on stage. If you’re socially excited, time goes too fast and interferes with performing slowness.”

“This is exquisite,” said Nancy Von Ignatius, second from right.

In the audience was Nancy Von Ignatius, of Matamoras, who has been in the local Four Seasons Chorale for 40 years.

“This is exquisite,” she said. “The room is coming back to life. They’re certainly upholding standards.”

The next Port Jervis Consort performance will be in October, Blanton said.

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