Louisa Stonehill faced a row of kindergarteners. Their eyes were closed, their necks craned forward, and each one was doing his best to feel the music she played on her violin — with their ears, and also with their faces, their jaws, their chests.
“I can feel it,” one girl said, her eyes still closed.
That is what Louisa and her pianist husband Nicholas Burns came for. They are a kind of missionary, evangelists for music, answering a call.
The couple, founders of Ashuelt Concerts, moved to New Hampshire from Greenwich, London, in 2016, with two suitcases, a 2-year-old and no real plan.
Nine years later, they’ve built a thriving international chamber music concert series, playing 18 concerts a year, bringing world-class performers to tiny New England stages — and, even more remarkably, to area schools. The couple, along with a revolving roster of musicians, will travel to any school within 45 minutes of their base in Keene, New Hampshire, to introduce kids to classical music.
Nick and Louisa, the parents of two boys, ages 7 and 10, reach something like 5,000 children a year, many of whom might never otherwise encounter classical music, much less in a concert played live and up close just for them.
“We literally put a 5-year-old from a rural area a few feet away from one of the best musicians in the world, playing one of most valuable, famous instruments in the world,” Nick said.
A visceral response
Nick and Louisa make a point of not condescending to kids. They play movements from larger pieces, from seven to ten minutes each. It’s a big ask for little kids, but they help the children understand what they are hearing.
Sometimes they wonder if they’re expecting too much. Louisa recalls a “horrendous” musical passage by Shostakovich that evokes prisoners forced to dance before their own graves. They didn’t share that detail with the kids, but the music made its point. How did it land?
“They went absolutely bananas,” Nick said. They said it was like a horror movie, and they loved it.
He added, “We’ve been shocked to our core –“
“– at how viscerally the children respond,” Louisa finished. “We don’t dumb it down. We give it to them real.”
Real, live music brings out an emotional, vibrational delight like nothing else.
Along with the music, the couple delivers lessons kids will need to know no matter where life takes them.
Lessons, for instance, about talent. While some people take to instruments more readily than others, talent alone is not sufficient.
“Talent is the product of learning, practice and discipline, and the act of humility and the act of being honest,” Nick said.
The kids are skeptical, but Nick and Louisa insist: Three weeks before the concert, they couldn’t play the piece. They practiced, they slowed themselves down and they had faith they would prevail. And once you have put in the work to learn something, it’s inside you for good, Louisa said.
“It’s really freaky. You can literally not have played a piece for a year or two, and when you open it up again, it will just take you a second to find that pathway in your brain.”
In faith as in music
Here is where the couple’s Catholic faith asserts itself, even though they do not speak overtly about religion.
“Everything we talk about has parallels with the faith. It’s a living embodiment of our faith,” Nick said.
They both emphasized how vital it is, in faith as in performance, to begin with humility, to accept how little you know and not to get ahead of yourself.
Another parallel: It’s normal to go through a stage of questioning, of rebelling against rules that seem senseless and discipline that feels tiresome. But this stage is worth conquering, because through the discipline of practice, something amazing comes about. You learn to become a vessel for something greater than yourself.
“When you stand up on stage and you’ve got a big audience and they’re all staring at you in expectation, you have to put yourself to one side. It’s not about you anymore. It’s about communicating this great piece of art,” Nick said.
Louisa, an adult convert, describes the almost mystical experience of sharing with kindergarteners the voices of long-dead musicians.
“You’re connecting these two souls in such a unique and special way. You’re bringing these composers down from the heavens, almost, into their arms,” she said.
Great musicians and Catholics share a sense of humility, self-awareness and a generosity of spirit, Nick said. And both groups recognize the flash of genius as a gift, something they’ve been blessed with from outside oneself.
Called to a new community
But even with these overlaps, the “aggressive secularity” of London’s chamber music scene was one of the things that drove the couple away. How did they land in New Hampshire?
“There’s nothing that makes sense about any of it,” Nick said.
Just as he pushes his piano students to counterintuitive exercises, he and Louisa made a choice that wasn’t quite logical, moving from a dense hub of culture to a semirural, lightly populated New England town, and deciding to stay.
“I credit the parish for that,” Nick said.
The couple was exhausted from traveling, performing and recording, and the idea of raising a young Catholic family in the heart of London felt as daunting as the endless traffic. One especially ragged night, Nick suggested looking further afield.
Louisa is an American citizen, so they started looking at the United States, Googling “best small towns to live in.” Keene, New Hampshire, looked pleasant and was within a day’s drive of New York and Montreal, so they planned a 10-day visit, and discovered St. Bernard, a small but thriving downtown church nestled between a college and a pizza parlor.
As Louisa stood in the foyer of the church, bouncing a baby on her hip, a parishioner approached. It was Mary Grace Nelligan, mother of nine, teacher at the parochial school, and lover of babies. She said to Louisa, “I’m sorry, I just have to know who you are, because you’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen.”
People don’t do that in London.
“It was one of those ground-moving moments. I’ve never quite known kindness like this,” Louisa said.
Nick and Louisa flew home to ponder their experience. Weeks passed, doubt crept in and they had a massive argument about whether to move. Literally while they argued, Nick’s phone went off. It was a message from Mary Grace through the Ashuelot Concerts website, saying she was thinking of them and wanted them to know they’d be so blessed to have Nick and Louisa in the community.
They looked at each other, looked up at the heavens and said, “OK, we get the message.”
So they moved. By the time they found a house, the doubts were gone.
“The parish has grounded us all the way through,” Nick said. They kept meeting families who didn’t just profess their faith, but lived it. Food, for instance, arrived at their house, courtesy of the parish, when their second child was born.
“There are so many families who are people we completely trust,” Louisa said, “and who ask nothing of us, but are so willing to give themselves.”
Sharing transcendence
That’s what they’ve been trying to replicate with their own mission: offering something good and true, in the form of great music. They insist that the multi-sensory, participatory experience of a live concert is essential — almost sacramental in its urgent physicality. It doesn’t work unless you’re in the room, invested bodily.
Nick said, “Kids have to go and see the real thing. They have have to be close enough –“
“– that they feel it, literally feel the vibrations,” finished Louisa.
Not even an excellent recording can reproduce the experience.
“It’s the room vibrating, or your chest vibrating in the loud bits,” said Nick.
“And when you’re in the hall, it’s almost like the sound creeps under the floor and up the walls, and the audience becomes part of that live experience,” Louisa said.
“It raises the hairs on the back of your neck,” said Nick.
Occasionally, kids will chatter their way through school concerts, or ignore the music altogether. Sometimes they’re too tired or distracted or hungry to receive what music has to give. But other times, something life-changing happens. Once, a young man came up and said that, years ago, he heard them play the slow movement of a César Franck violin sonata, and he couldn’t even look at them, because he knew he would cry.
It was similar, Louisa said, to what she felt when she first started going to Mass with Nick.
“I fell in love with the Mass and with the Eucharist. I was all in,” she said.
This is why sharing with children that visceral, vibrational, in-person encounter with transcendental beauty feels so important to them.
“It’s like a call to prayer,” Louisa said. “I would say music has saved me in the way my faith has.”
“We have the opportunity to invite a hugely diverse group of people into the world of the transcendental. And our belief fuels that,” Nick said.
There are many days when their life feels overwhelming.
“But it is our vocation; there is no question,” he said.
