Centerpiece | A Passion for the Arts

A PASSION

for the ARTS

The aphorism, “those who can, do; and those who can’t, teach” does not bear out at Falmouth Academy. The arts department is populated by talented professional artists and musicians in their own right, who make art and music in addition to being inspiring teachers. In fact, one might suggest that the experience of pursuing their own craft, enhances what they bring to class. It just might be the secret sauce to the dynamism of Falmouth Academy’s arts department.

George Scharr

George Scharr plays bass trombone for the Cape Symphony Orchestra, is the founder and conductor of the Symphony Swing Band and the Downtown Dixie Strutters, and is a founding member of the Cape Symphony Orchestra and Plymouth Philharmonic’s Brass Quintets. He is also known to give preconcert talks for the Cape Symphony Masterpiece Concerts.

Scharr is the Chair of Falmouth Academy’s arts department, the Director of Orchestra and Advanced Jazz Band, and Falmouth Academy’s Director of Community Outreach.

He has been recognized as a gifted and innovative educator by the Massachusetts Music Educators Association and the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod, but his students know this firsthand. Although an exacting teacher, his enthusiasm is infectious and his encouragement knows no bounds. A consummate showman, he makes the work of making music seem effortless…but don’t be fooled. Scharr was classically trained at the New England Conservatory and, even in his late ’60s, still maintains a robust career outside of the classroom. He has been playing since early childhood—thanks to his mom, he likes to point out—and began his professional career at 16.

Scharr has played with a very diverse group of conductors and performers including Yo Yo Ma, Peter Schickle (PDQ Bach), Morton Gould, Daniel Pinkham, Joshua Bell, The Drifters, Freddie “Boom Boom” Cannon, Wendy Law, Royston Nash, Rebecca Parris, Bobby Vincent, Ike & Tina Turner, Nadia SalernoSonnenberg, Gunther Schuller, Sesame Street’s Big Bird, the Paul Winter Consort, John Pizzarelli, Dee Daniels, Byron Stripling, Pat Carroll, and Bill Holcombe, just to name a few. Despite this acclaim, Scharr is as gracious and hardworking as he is professional and talented.

His experience as a professional musician provides him with a rich and varied network of fellow professionals, which he freely calls upon to teach a master class, give student lessons, or even join the arts department. In recent years, Scharr has added notable musicians to the roster of part-time teachers at Falmouth Academy including Margaret “Maggie” Bossi (chorus), Paul Weller (mixed instrumental), Norma Stiner (strings), Geraldine Boles (piano), and Andrew Hellwig Saxes (clarinet and flute). He’s even been known on occasion to rope in his daughter Caroline, who is also classically trained by the New England Conservatory, to teach music. His most recent hire, Paul Matthias P’28 (woodworking) came about because the two men play together. Matthias is an accomplished trombonist.

Scharr scouts and cultivates talent, not only for his department but also for engaging and relevant visiting performers and community speakers. He has brought the likes of Sons of Serendip, the Canadian Brass, Livingston Taylor, Jung-Ho Pak, Hyannis Sound, and most recently, Grammy winner Paul Winter and Henrique Eisenmann to Falmouth Academy.

But at the center of it all are his students. There is seemingly no limit to the lengths Mr. Scharr will go to support them in their pursuit of music, whether that is orchestrating performance opportunities such as Music in the Mountains or Pops by the Sea; preparing and transporting them to auditions all around Massachusetts; or hosting interested students to jam together the week before school starts, much like pre-season sports.

Former student James Goldbach ’21 summed it up, by saying, “Mr. Scharr was my music teacher for four years, and my friend and mentor for just as many. His unconditional support and funloving teaching style combined with his ability to hold students accountable without being overbearing or discouraging make him a teacher like no other. Never was I as happy as when the jazz band finally pulled together a song in one of our last practices before a show, and Mr. Scharr’s face lit up. I will be forever thankful for his generous dispensing of musical knowledge, and his constant kindness.”

Susan Moffat

Susan Moffat has taught photography at Falmouth Academy since 1996 and still finds joy in it every day. She started the year off by bringing her students outside to join her inside a refrigerator box cum camera obscura to introduce them to how light travels through space. “Photography is essentially about playing with and controlling light,” explained Moffat. This lesson is quintessentially her as she is an experiential learner, teacher, and professional photographer.

Moffat describes herself as a visual storyteller and educator, who is “drawn to humanity and the social struggles therein.” Her most recent work, Chasing Coal, explores the post-economic decline of the coal industry in NE Pennsylvania, home to the largest known anthracite coal bed in the world. Moffat was born in Moscow, PA, and her grandfather ran Moffat Coal Company. Her portfolio was recently accepted for review by the Social Documentary Network and she worked with Amber Bracken, the 2022 World Press Photo of the Year award recipient.

As the child of a professor who taught overseas in both Greece and Iceland, her family traveled extensively, which informed Moffat’s worldview and interest in how people inhabit the Earth. She later earned a BA in both photography and environmental science at Hartwick College and then an MAT from Rhode Island School of Design.

Moffat believes traveling to be one of the best ways to expand a person’s cultural proficiency so that they can become stronger global stewards and citizens. To that end, she has traveled extensively in the US; taught and worked overseas in Portugal, the Canary Islands, and Chiapas, Mexico; and organized international student trips through Falmouth Academy to Cuba, Belize, and Thailand. Knowing that such grand trips are not always possible, Moffat takes full advantage of trips to local landmarks and digital resources to introduce students to “a new way of seeing the world,” which, she says, is what she loves about teaching.

Lucy Nelson

Lucy Nelson earned a BFA at Denison University and an MFA in painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. She was the art department fellow in college and a finalist for the Dedalus Prize and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in graduate school. “Nowadays, I juggle balancing my painting practice and full-time teaching with being a good mom,” explained Nelson. On the best days, she gets up at 4:00 AM to work for a couple of hours before the rest of the house wakes up. Those quiet hours are precious and essential to her identity and practice as an artist. When Covid shut down the world, Nelson recalls that her painting practice contracted, “I felt my work shrink to fit the smallness of my daily life.” Hesitant to leave the house, she turned to her family and home for inspiration. “I loved the repetition and insanely small details of the patterns I incorporated into the figures and portraits,” said Nelson. “It became a meditative practice for me.”

Nelson’s current work investigates the social construct of domesticity and her sense of dislocation within that construct through portraiture and pattern. Through her exploration of tradition as both an imposition and as something to be embraced free from expectations, she weaves a tapestry of contemporary domestic life that alludes to both its dark and benign aspects.

As a teacher, Nelson strives to share the passion she feels for painting and creating. “I hope it inspires my students to see that I am a practicing artist and show my work around the country.” This past year she had a show with Cube Art in Boston, Frosch & Co in New York, and Cove Street Arts in Portland, ME. The struggles students face in the studio, she says, she’s faced too.

Since coming to Falmouth Academy, Nelson has continued to innovate and expand the fine arts program. She established the drawing elective and teaches all levels of painting. When her schedule allows, she also adds special interest offerings such as screenprinting. Nelson has also expanded Falmouth Academy’s Arts Across the Curriculum program, which was originally called Arts in Humanities, to include all five academic disciplines taught by three art faculty.

Seth Rainville

Seth Rainville’s aspirations of playing football for Boston College were cut short by a career-ending injury only a few games into his senior year of high school. While rehabbing in a full leg brace for what seemed like an eternity, he shifted his energies toward his love of art. He landed at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth with designs of becoming the next great painter. Little did he know that when faced with signing up for his first free elective, an introductory ceramics class, he would meet the professor that would change the trajectory of his career. Rainville recalls Chris Gustin looking at some of the drawings in his sketchbook and saying, “You do realize that clay is just a 3-dimensional canvas.” And that’s all it took for Rainville to change his major to Ceramics.

After receiving a BFA with honors, Rainville set his sights on graduate school, but while establishing residency in Phoenix, he was offered a teaching position at the Phoenix Center for the Arts. By the age of 27, he was the head of the department and sat on the Artist Advisory Board for the newly founded Ceramics Research Center in Tempe.

Rainville returned home to manage the ceramics studio at UMass Dartmouth, and then went on to found the NAVIO Artisans Collective in New Bedford, serve as curator of the New Bedford Art Museum, while continuing to exhibit his own work around the country including at the Ferrin Gallery in Lennox and the SOFA exhibition in Chicago. In 2014, he accepted a position teaching at the Falmouth Art Center, and in 2016, was awarded an artist residency at Harvard University.

In addition to considering its form and structure, Rainville invites his students to see the clay as a canvas and to bring a painter’s sensibility to their finish work. He also thinks outside of the box with regard to the possibilities of working with clay— considering not only hand-held structures but architectural ones—a perspective that will serve him well as the new 3-D lab elective teacher. This year, Rainville plans to install an outdoor totem-like sculpture on the school grounds that was collaboratively created by his students last year. It seems like Rainville is already leaving his mark on Falmouth Academy.

Liz Ledwell

Liz Ledwell was hired in 1992 to direct FA’s drama program and teach English. She brought to the task a wealth of experience as an actress, director, and talent scout, as well as a degree in drama with a minor in film from the University of Southern California and one in literature from American University.

She and Clyde Tyndale, director of stagecraft, worked strategically to build a repertory company where all students involved learn the skills needed—both onstage and backstage—to successfully put on classic and contemporary productions. To date, she’s directed over 100 productions. Guided by their artistic vision, the Simon Center for the Arts black-box theater was realized and completed in 2017 through the generous support of donors. A ’70s-themed As You Like It was the first play held in the space in spring 2019.

In addition to teaching English and directing, Ledwell is the creative force behind the drama electives. Over the years these have included acting, play reading and analysis, Shakespeare, musical theater, improvisation, film analysis, screenwriting, and video production. These last two came in handy during the pandemic when Ledwell needed to design course content that would work well remotely. Together she and her students wrote and filmed The Circle Dance, which she edited with the help of Charlie Jodoin, who took over from Tyndale in 2019. It premiered red-carpet style in an open-air screening on the lawn at Falmouth Academy, in spring 2021.

Ledwell’s approach to extracurricular drama productions is inclusive, and she aims not just to direct a great production but to expose her students to this history and breadth of theater. “I like to think of myself as a creative problem solver,” said Ledwell, “who works in collaboration with the students to make our shows successful.” To that end, she is discerning in choosing just the right play that suits the interest level of the students and often adapts them so that everyone who wants a part, gets one. She is known to say, “there are no small roles, only small actors.”

Charlie Jodoin

“Theater has long been my passion!” declared Jodoin. “From my very first role as Charlie Brown back in middle school in A Charlie Brown Christmas, I discovered the power of theater.” This rings true, as Jodoin brings a theatrical air and great enthusiasm to whatever he is doing. Over the years, he’s been an avid consumer and supporter of the arts as well as an actor, director, set and lighting designer, technical consultant, stage manager— and he’s probably written a script or two. While not always his main profession, he’s always found a way to stay involved in theater.

Falmouth Academy afforded Jodoin an opportunity to marry his skill, passion, and position as the Director of Stagecraft. “Once I made the decision to move out of public school administration, which I did for nearly a decade, the opportunity came my way and I’ve never been happier.”

In addition to his work at Falmouth Academy, Jodoin is the resident lighting designer for the Priscilla Beach Theatre in Plymouth, MA, which is the oldest barn theater in the US. Previously, he was technical and production manager for the College Light Opera Company in Falmouth, the technical and stage director for Hull Public Middle and High School, and the founding director of Fall River’s Middle School Theater Program. In 2010, he was awarded a gold medal from the Massachusetts Educational Theater Guild Middle School Festival for directing and designing the middle-school production of Jane Eyre. This winter, Jodoin will be bringing Jane Eyre to Falmouth Academy, as he takes over as director of the middle-school play.

Maggie Bossi

Hiring Margaret Bossi as Falmouth Academy’s Chorus Director in 2021 was quite a coup for the music department. She directed the Chatham Chorale for 25 years, retiring in 2008, and has served as the Conductor of the Woods Hole Cantata Consort since 2018. Bossi is currently the Director of Music (chancel choir, bell choir, and organist) at Dennis Union Church. She brings over 50 years of teaching experience to Falmouth Academy, going back to her first appointment at the Winsor School for Girls in 1971.

Norma Stiner

Norma Stiner picked up the violin in the 4th grade, and never put it down. She earned a degree in music education from Boston Conservatory, and has built her career around performing and teaching. Although most of her professional experience has been playing orchestral and chamber music throughout New England, Stiner also played back up to some notable stars in their day, including Liberace, Lena Horne, Tony Bennett, and Johnny Mathis, to name a few. Stiner still plays with the Cape Symphony. Her educational philosophy is deceptively simple—start with the student and follow with the subject.