BRATTLEBORO — Ten-year-old Oak Grove School student Rei Kimura has been musical since her early childhood.
When she was 8, her grandfather, who played blues guitar, bought her a guitar, and she's been working to master it ever since. She plays in bands around Brattleboro, attends open mics at the Loft in Cotton Mill Hill, and takes private lessons from her neighbor Kevin Parry, who runs the open mics on Thursdays at The Marina restaurant.
This summer, Kimura joins a small group of other musically inclined girls at a unique music school in Goshen, Mass., called the Institute for the Musical Arts. Located in a large barn on a bucolic piece of land dotted with yurts where the girls sleep, IMA is run by two women, Ann Hackler and June Millington, whose mission is to empower girls and women through music.
The program Kimura will be attending, “Explore Rock 'n' Roll,” immerses girls age 9 to 12 in the collaborative experience of being in a band.
“The nice thing about it being an all-girls school,” says Kimura mother, Jaimie Scanlon, who grew up in the next town over from Goshen, “is that without boys around, the girls can be themselves. Girls in their early teens are beginning to develop self-consciousness and awareness of the opposite sex, so it is freeing to not have those distractions.”
Morning classes cover vocals, drums, percussion, and “music as a second language.” The remainder of each day is open for the girls to jam together on their instruments, write songs, and practice.
“We give the illusion of complete freedom,” says Hackler, “so that the girls feel comfortable doing things on their own. In reality, we are watching them carefully.”
“The school is awesome,” says Kimura, who visited IMA earlier this year. “They have a full stage and musical instruments all over the place: mandolins, guitars, drum kits, amplifiers. I can't wait to go.”
The barn also houses a fully equipped, professional recording studio designed by John Storyk, who designed Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland studio.
The idea for IMA started as a slow burn nagging at the minds of Hackler and Millington over many years.
Millington is a Philippine/American guitarist (her mother is from Manila; her father is from Burlington) who, with her sister Jean, formed the first all-girl rock band to be signed to a major record label.
The group, called “Fanny,” recorded for Warner/Reprise Records in the early 1970s and had two top 40 hits on Billboard's Top 100. Subsequent all-girl groups such as the Runaways and the Go-Gos were heavily influenced by Fanny, and David Bowie called Fanny “as important as anybody else who's ever been, ever.”
Music had been a life-saver for both June and her sister: a way to make friends in 1960s California, where they encountered widespread prejudice after relocating from the Philippines. When Fanny had run its course for Millington, she continued playing sessions and forming other bands - but she found herself spiritually dissatisfied.
It wasn't until she met Ann Hackler, an amateur cellist and longtime activist who'd been running the Women's Resource Center at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., that her vision for her future began taking shape.
In 1981, Hackler had invited Millington to give a workshop on women of color in the industry and the two hit it off, eventually becoming a couple.
“We took a trip out to California and talked about what we wanted to do,” says Hackler. “I had always wanted to start a school, and June had always wanted to create a place where young women could find a voice through music. You have to remember that in those days men dominated most businesses, and especially the music business, and June wanted to create a place where women would feel comfortable. That's how the idea for the original IMA came to be.”
In 1987 they obtained non-profit status. By 1990 they had rented a large space in Sonoma County, Calif. It was there that they started a concert and workshop series and built a community of musicians around them. Initially the participants were all women, but that changed when a mother approached them and asked if her daughter could join the program.
The girl had run away to San Francisco and then returned to her family, and the mother was looking for a way to help her daughter find herself. June and Ann let the girl hang around the workshops, and it was during this time that June noticed the girl's affinity for the drums.
“I said to her, 'Wow! You're a drummer!,' and she beamed. I could see that she finally felt she had found something that she owned.”
“When we worked with this girl and saw the change she went through while she was with us,” says Hackler, “we thought, This is great! And that's how the idea for workshops for girls began to take shape.”
Unfortunately for Hackler and Millington, the owner of their space decided to sell the building. With the dot-com bubble in high gear and rents soaring, it became impossible to find a space nearby that was affordable.
But in a stroke of serendipity, Millington and Hackler attended an event in New England and reluctantly, due to a friend's persistence, went to look at a large barn they had seen pictured on the cover of a real estate magazine. They decided it was a perfect spot for their school, and bought it.
“It was providence,” says Hackler. “Every door that could close in California did, and every door that could open here opened.”
The New England IMA has come a long way since its early days as a raw barn with tractor parts lying around, and extension cords running from the adjacent house where Hackler and Millington live, and where the girls gather to talk and eat.
Through hard work and aggressive bartering with musical instrument companies and recording studio equipment manufacturers, the school now has everything most professional musicians encounter in the real world.
Funded by its workshops, benefit concerts, private donations, paid sessions in its recording studio, and grants from places such as the ASCAP Foundation, it now offers three separate summer programs: the Explore Rock 'n Roll program for kids 9 to 12; two 10-day sessions of the Rock 'n Roll Performance Program for teenaged girls; and a Studio Recording, Engineering and Producing Program for girls and young women 16 through 24.
In addition, IMA offers workshops in voice and instrumental skills development; songwriting, composing and arranging; studio recording, engineering and producing; and booking, management, marketing, publishing and licensing.
The school's board now consists of quite a few heavyweights from the music industry, including Leslie Ann Jones, chief engineer at Skywalker Sound; Kathryn Willmore, former vice president and secretary of the MIT Corporation; record producer Roma Baran; and Emily Lichter, a music publicist and manager of the group Lake Street Dive.
Advisors include Bonnie Raitt, Christine Ohlman, and Cris Williamson.
IMA's impact is proven by the many alumni who have gone on to enjoy successful musical careers.
One of their first New England students, Sonia Kitchell, has recorded for Sony, worked with Herbie Hancock and the Trucks/Tedeschi Band, and was a Starbucks “Hear Music” Artist.
Other students have appeared on the music television show “The Voice.”
“From Day One, on which we teach all the girls - even the 9-year-olds - how to run the sound board, we immerse the girls in music and give them a sense of ownership of the place,” says Hackler. “They learn to take care of their instruments and to be responsible, and we stress to them that they will be inheriting the place when we are gone.”
Rei Kimura has taken this to heart: “I think it's great what they are doing,” she says, “and some day I hope to be a counselor or intern there.”
“I love that these girls are still in the years of magical thinking,” says Millington. “For Ann and me, this is not a job; it is a life.”