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A sandpiper hangs out on the water at Broad Meadow Brook Conservation Center and Wildlife Sanctuary. TELEGRAM & GAZETTE FILE PHOTO
Mass Audubon receives grant for stream renovation at Broad Meadow Brook
Veer Mudambi
Worcester Magazine USA TODAY NETWORK
For years, the neighborhood just adjacent to Broad Meadow Brook, by Dunkirk Avenue, has had flooding issues. There has been significant investment by the City of Worcester to mitigate the situation, by creating an underground flood water storage system at the corner of Firth and Brightwood. Despite these measures, during severe precipitation events, the storm drain system gets overloaded and backs up, leading to flooding in the neighborhood.
Mass Audubon knows the only lasting solution is to create more direct flood water storage capacity in the area, which will reduce peak flows, increase flow duration and reduce downstream flooding. How does one do that? By “daylighting” hundreds of feet of the Broad Meadow Brook. For those of us who have no idea what that means, Tom Lautzenheiser, senior conservation ecologist (Central/West) at Mass Audubon, explained. It is the process of removing obstructions, like concrete or pavement, which have been used to cover up rivers, creeks or drainage ways, to restore them to a condition somewhat similar to their original condition.
Daylighting a portion of the Broad Meadow Brook may reduce local flooding by eliminating choke points where the stream was forced into underground channels and also contribute to more effective stormwater management by diverting it from the sewage system. It will increase the area available for water to pass through the channel, since open streams provide direct floodwater storage. Open streams are also highly effective in removing pollution by transforming nitrogen and phosphorus, which improves habitats for fish and other wildlife.
Though Mass Audubon was working on the idea before the
Musical project Stems takes organic, ethereal approach with new album
Robert Duguay
Special to Worcester Magazine USA TODAY NETWORK
The power of music comes in many different forms, but when it’s emotive it can be the most personal. It can make the listener feel less alone, or like someone is speaking for them. With the musical project Stems, Worcester’s Penelope Alizarin Conley aims for this connection while being backed with distorted amplification and personal lyrics. Her latest album, "From My Ever Bleeding Heart," which came out on Jan. 2, reflects this approach with sonic brilliance. It’s also one of the best records to come out of the city so far into the infancy of 2022.
Tracks such as “Covered In Leaves,” “Cinder,” “I’m Here” and “In An Alien Sky” evoke a ‘90s alternative sound that weaves in between gothic post-punk and fuzzy shoegaze. This result comes from an approach that's very natural to Conley.
“It was definitely very organic,” she says about the making of the album. “Typically, I don’t consider myself much of a singer or a musician, but I do consider myself as a songwriter because for me it’s about the whole picture. When I’m writing my material I don’t go for a specific theme, it’s more about the moment. When I go to record it later on, I’ll start with a sketch of a song either on my phone or some sort of recording device just so I won’t forget it. Then I’ll go into my production software and tinker around a bit until I find something that sounds like what I can do and what I can handle.
“If it comes out a little bit on the alternative side, I tend to veer the album towards that,” Conley adds. “My songwriting style tends to have an alternative bent to it even if I’m not meaning it, everyone tells me that. It’s an organic thing but just by happenstance because that’s how I’ve written in the past, it’s how I continue to write.”
During the creation process, Conley did everything in completely DIY fashion as with every other Stems record. This modus operandi ranges from instrumentation and singing to mixing and mastering.
“I’ll start noodling around on guitar and it sounds so bizarre but something will come out of thin air,” she says. “I usually will come up with a vocal melody and actually most of the songs come together pretty quickly. The structure of it can change when I start to record, if I know I got a decent verse-chorus-verse down, the first thing I do, because I started out as a drummer, is get a good drum track going. I can build just about anything off of that while keeping something very simple at first just so I can get the tempo right. Then I can start adding stuff in as I go along, I kind of have a formula in that way.
“After I start out with drums I usually go right into guitar because I want to have something to base the vocals off of and I tend to include them relatively quickly in the production,” Conley adds. “Except for the drums, I do everything in my apartment so if I’m screaming my lungs out at the end of the production it’s 9:30 at night, so I’m sure my neighbors will hate me for it.”
When it comes to production, Conley is mostly self-taught while using a specific program that you can find in any modern Apple computer. She began this project on a slight dare from a friend over 20 years ago because she wanted to prove the friend wrong about the making of music from a certain decade.
“I learned a little bit from what my
Penelope Alizarin Conley’s newest album as Stems is “From My Ever Bleeding Heart.” CHRISTINE PETERSON/TELEGRAM & GAZETTE
Stephen Murray offers a first look at “Nellie: The Musical” at Calliope
Richard Duckett
Worcester Magazine USA TODAY NETWORK
It’s a change of tone for Worcester playwright, composer, performer and educator Stephen Murray.
And while his musicals have had varied settings, from Mount Olympus to Mudville, “Nelle: The Musical” is in a very different place as well.
“Nellie: The Musical,” with book by Robby Steltz and music by Murray, is based on “Ten Days in a Mad-House,” published in 1887 by Nellie Bly, a reporter for the New York World, who feigned insanity in order to be committed to the New York City Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island so that she could expose the neglect, abuse and brutality in the treatment of its female patients.
“This one’s different,” Murray said of “Nellie: The Musical.”
“It’s definitely not lighthearted. Most of the things I’ve written up to this point have been lighthearted and comedic. I’m reaching into a lot of different places emotionally that I haven’t done before, but I’m excited by the results.”
We’ll get an opportunity to see the results so far for “Nellie: The Musical” when it is given a public read-through at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 29 at at Calliope Theatre, 150 Main St., Boylston, the home of Calliope Productions.
While not in costume and putting on the show like a fully staged musical, the cast of nine women and Murray (who will be taking all the male parts and playing piano) will act out the dialogue and perform the pieces of music before a live audience. The reading will be taped, and there are plans to have it live-streamed as well.
Murray has written over 30 shows, including the romantic comedy “Making Scents,” which has been performed four times locally dating back to its premiere in 1995 with Worcester County Light Opera Company.
Last summer, Murray wrote a musical adaptation of the poem “Casey at the Bat” by Worcester’s Ernest L. Thayer. A song from the mini-opera was sung at Polar Park at a Worcester Red Sox game, but a full performance that was to have been part of the annual Harvey Ball celebration struck out as the event was canceled due to COVID. Murray’s still hoping the mini-opera can get to step up at the plate.
Among Murray’s other popular shows, some written with a youth audience in mind, are “Kamp Kaos,” “Pom-Pom Zombies,” “Katastrophe Kate,” “Help! I’m Trapped in a Musical!”, “The Enchanted Bookshop Musical,” and “Greece Is the Word: The Zeusical!” Murray is a music teacher at St. Paul Diocesan Jr/Sr High School and a board member of both Calliope Productions and Worcester County Light Opera Company.
Eldridge Publishing Company Lancaster, Pennsylvania, has published many of Murray’s musicals, and Eldridge also recently published a oneact play, “Nellie,” about Nellie Bly, by Robby Steltz of Duluth, Minnesota. It is Steltz’s first published play, Murray said.
Meredith Edwards, president of Eldridge Publishing Company, “noticed it has a lot of musical elements even though it’s a one-act play,” Murray said.
He said Edwards contacted him and “asked ‘could you take a look at it? We’d love you to try and make a musical out of it.’ “
Murray and Steltz have been working together long distance and things have evidently been going well, with the piece now expanded to two acts.
“Amazingly, it’s only been since June,” Murray said of the collaboration. “The work came very quickly. Some sections I just musicalized the dialogue. Others, I knew where it was going and was able to set it to music and lyrics.”
Eventually, Murray had written 19 pieces of music for the musical.
“Nellie: The Musical” is “absolutely a drama,” Murray said. The mistreatment of the women in the institution was particularly cruel and the music is dark in places.
In the late 1800s, disturbing rumors circulated about the treatment of patients at the New York City Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. Female patients in particular were reputed to be victims of horrible abuse and even torture. Bly risked her own life by committing herself to the asylum in order to investigate. She documented her findings and revealed these horrors to the entire world.
“Fortunately, This is all factual. She (Nellie Bly) does after
"Nellie: The Musical" tackles a darker subject than playwright Stephen Murray normally deals with. Last summer, Murray wrote a musical adaptation of the poem "Casey at the Bat" and a song from the mini-opera was sung at a Worcester Red Sox game at Polar Park. TRACY MARTINO
Stream
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pandemic, it was only last fall that the Narragansett Bay Estuary Program was able to to make a roadmap. Thanks to recent funds from three grants — $30,000 from the Division of Ecological Restoration that was just authorized on Jan. 18, a $500,000 earmark from the American Rescue Plan Act by Gov. Baker in late December, and a $74,800 grant from the EPA Southern New England Program in early January, the design work can move forward again. And they are now pivoting to further assessment work with SNEP, but construction will probably not begin until later 2024 or early 2025. Lautzenheiser said, “It’s a huge project and we are trying to be deliberate about it because it has the capacity to influence upstream and downstream neighborhoods.”
The biggest catalyst, though, was the decommissioning of the sewer line that runs parallel to the brook, said Martha Gach, conservation coordinator of Mass Audubon’s Broad Meadow Brook Conservation Center and Wildlife Sanctuary. “The city doesn’t need it anymore so we have more freedom to work and it is, after all, a climate resiliency issue with houses that still deal with the flooding.” She was appreciative of the changes in municipal attitudes and how the area of focus has shifted to considering important natural systems as components of the city’s infrastructure. Besides, the Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness action plan identifies the area as chronically prone to flooding.
Gach explained that the whole Dunkirk Avenue area was originally a floodplain — a low, flat piece of land that was probably once a huge wetland. Somewhere long ago in the history of Worcester, it was probably drained for agriculture but then when the city expanded and there was no longer any food being grown there, it must have looked like a great place to build houses.
“I’ve been at the sanctuary for over 20 years and I remember wondering why the stream was so darn straight in some places and winding in others — it didn’t seem to be natural at all,” she said. “But back in the 1930s, the culture was to organize nature, make curvy things straight and neat.”
And then of course, the sewer line was installed. So it isn’t the way nature intended at all — a straight stream bed whose floodplain is crossed from side to side by a sewer line in the city’s infrastructure. However, the idea has always been in the back of people’s minds to return it to its natural state. After all, curving brooks slow down water flow and create a gentler environment for wildlife.
Climate change, she said, creates “freaky storms channeling more water into that stream” and floods the neighborhood since there is no real floodplain to speak of, which might have alleviated the issue. “If we can broaden the floodplain back to what it was initially, that will take a lot of pressure off the storm drains,” she said. The tentative plan is to daylight a section of the brook roughly parallel from Woodcliffe to Sandra Drive and breach the sewer causeway to unite the 40 acres of wetlands.
Giving the stream more room will also create more habitat for animals such as beavers and river otters, but also fish, frogs and muskrats, which in turn will improve water quality. Basically, bringing water into more contact with the wetland system and natural filters will be beneficial in more ways than one — mitigate the flooding issue by creating more storm water storage and improve water quality due to natural filters in the wetlands.
Lautzenhiser agreed that the ecological aspects will be extraordinary. “Our hope in daylighting about 500 feet of the Broad Meadow Brook is that it will enhance the flood storage capacity of the existing wetland complex by making more of the floodplain available.” Right now, according to him, there is very little hydrologic connection between the east and west side of the causeway. And restoring the native plant community on the east side of the causeway with deeper water areas and a shallow emergent marsh will open the area up to more beneficial native flora and fauna.
However, uniting the 40 acres of wetlands means breaching the causeway, which is one of the design uncertainties. “The more sewer line that we remove, the more expensive the project will become” due to costs associated with disposal of the line as well as the causeway since that earth will have to go somewhere, Lautzenhiser said. Pie-in-the-sky thinking would like to see more of the causeway gone than less, but he is not sure where the balance is between restoring hydrologic function versus practicality. The causeway is also currently one of the most popular hiking trails on the sanctuary, so removing that will require more boardwalks and railing to compensate.
Both he and Gach hope to solicit public input in the future and in fact, Gach described herself as the “on the ground person responsible for connecting with the community about the project,” since it will impact not only visitors to the sanctuary but also all the neighbors in the area who use it for passive recreation.
Lautzenhiser emphasized that this project has been a great partnership so far with the City of Worcester. By doing this now, he said, “we’re heading off potential worse issues in the future because, ultimately, wetlands are the liver of the natural world” — they can prevent the damaging effects of floods and neutralize pollutants.
Stems
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friends taught me but most of it is myself,” she says. “I do everything on GarageBand because it’s free and I’ve had the program for so long that I’ve come to be quite intuitive with it. For me, it works, it does what I want it to do and it has everything I could possibly want. Believe it or not, Stems started in 2001 just as a fluke. A friend of mine from college knew that I had played literally every instrument a band could require, we were listening to Depeche Mode or something from the ‘80s and he told me that during that era it must have been super easy to make an album with just a couple synthesizers, bass and vocals.
“I told him that I bet he’d be wrong and I was going to prove him wrong by making an ‘80s album myself and see if I can do it,” Conley said. “That’s how Stems got started, I was trying to answer a challenge to my friend about how easy or not it is to make an album. It took me about a year and I’m probably going to put it out later this year just to be like, ‘Hey, this is the first ever Stems album if you want to hear it.’ It’s literally the drum pattern on a synthesizer with me playing one or two synthesizer parts then vocals and that’s it.”
Conley views her music as the exuding of internal strife and putting it on audial canvas. She’s surprised by the positive attention Stems has gotten since she started uploading her music for the world to indulge, but she’s also grateful for it.
“I write everything with a lot of empathy in mind,” she said. “We’ve all been through a lot of stuff, especially lately. A lot of my songs deal with pain, overcoming pain, going through trauma or something or someone specifically so I can wrestle with those demons and exorcize them. Music has always been a diary for me, it’s a way for me to express my innermost thoughts and innermost feelings. With Stems, I didn’t share my music with anyone for years except for that one guy who challenged me in college. I only recently started putting these songs out there to the world because I was scared to share them.
“There’s so much darkness in there and so much emotion that I was worried someone would take it the wrong way or no one would listen to it or appreciate it after putting in so much work,” Conley adds. “All musicians would be lying to you if they said they didn’t want something from the audience for their music. After putting this project out into the world, I’ve been very, very lucky. I’ve been in a ton of different bands and this has been getting way more attention than I have with any band I’ve ever been a part of. It blows my mind because I’m asking ‘Are you sure?’ because this is some dark stuff and I have to wonder sometimes if people are listening but I’ve been proved wrong.”
When it comes to what she hopes people take from the new album, she hopes to inspire more compassion and thoughtfulness.
“It means so much when I’ve actually reached somebody and they get it,” Conley says. “The whole point is to build understanding and have empathy for each other because art needs to live so that everyone else can live.”
Worcester composer Stephen Murray and the cast perform a read-through of “Nellie: The Musical” at the Calliope Theatre.
PHOTOS BY ALLAN JUNG/TELEGRAM & GAZETTE
Nellie
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magnificent job with it,” Murray said.
The cast includes Jessica DePalo (Nellie Bly), Lorraine Hruska, Lisa Tierney, Paula Guilbault, Laura Gulli, Tracy Martino, Linnea Lyerly, Nicole Lian and Heidi White. The male roles in the musical are rather small, if sometimes unpleasant characters, which is why one person, Murray, will be singing them all at the piano.
Steltz will be unable to attend on Jan. 29, so Murray is hoping the live-stream will work and connect him to the show.
As for what the future might hold for the musical, “I’m very hopeful that this is going to be a piece that gives community theaters and high schools that have very talented women an opportunity to perform. This is a very educational show,” Murray said.
“I’m also finding that — hey I’ve got another voice as a writer. This was an experiment. We’ll see what comes next. You never know. Perhaps doing more historically based shows.”
However, “My next project is back to my old tricks, a musical called ‘Totally Awesome!’ about superheroes,” Murray said.
“Nellie: The Musical” will premiere in August at Calliope with a cast of students entering Grades 6-10.
Following the performance of “Nellie: The Musical” Jan. 29, there will be a brief “talk-back” session for feedback from the audience. Admission is free, but space is limited, and tickets should be reserved in advance by visiting www.ticketstage.com/T/CALLIOPE. A freewill offering will be accepted in order to defray costs. In case of a cancellation because of snow, the read-through will take place at 2 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 30. For more information, visit www.calliopeproductions.org.
Worcester composer Stephen Murray listens to a recent read-through/performance with the cast of “Nellie: The Musical” at the Calliope Theatre. A public read-through will be held Jan. 29 at Calliope Theatre in Boylston.
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