• Be Both Tough and Tender: Headmaster Brennan Opens the Winter Term

    Be Both Tough and Tender: Headmaster Brennan Opens the Winter Term

    In a virtual Opening of Winter Term Hall on January 5, Headmaster Kerry Brennan welcomed students and faculty back from winter break, ushering in the new year and the hope that it may represent. At the heart of Mr. Brennan’s remarks was the notion—and the imperative for RL boys—of being both tough and tender. “Often the rhetoric of our school goes whizzing by… Today I want to pause on a phrase that can be found in our publications and on our website, but on which we rarely dwell. I say it when we are hosting prospective students and their parents at open houses. Others of us utter it too, as we describe our school: ‘We want our boys to be tough and tender.’ Today I shall dwell on that unlikely pair.”

    Through personal stories—of attending the funeral of a student’s parent, of admiring a student who struggled mightily yet persevered, of being with his own father when he died—Mr. Brennan offered descriptions of individuals who exhibited both grit and goodness, fortitude and empathy. He contrasted those against depictions of how masculinity used to be portrayed in films and on television—through gangsters and greasers.

    “Our signals about toughness don’t come from idolized movie characters or even the actors who played them…. Thankfully, our understanding of that term and our capacity for embracing it has to do with the realization that to be tough does not require that one not be tender. Not only are both possible; both are preferred.”

    “While it is not usually a matter of life and death, you exhibit toughness by persevering at RL through seemingly endless days with outsized demands of you physically, intellectually, emotionally… You seem to know that you can do it, and surely show that you want to. And somewhere within us there is the faith that whatever we suffer now will be in service to greater goals realized later, and, in part, the result of what we have been trained to withstand—with focus and determination and without complaint. Additionally, you are often tender. You dare to give evidence of being moved—at the Glee Club senior concert, at the end of a memorable athletic season (whether in the waning moments of a victorious or losing contest), in the way you reach out to reassure a down classmate, in choosing not to boast of an accomplishment—like a college admission—because that might be hurtful to those whose results were less sunny, and in countless other moments when, usually privately, you express discouragement, sadness, hopelessness, doubt. You also are spectacular at signaling a concern for a classmate who himself is on the brink of despair. You are tough in your willingness to make the classmate mad by reaching out to a helpful adult, but appropriately tender in your eagerness to right a sinking vessel, to save a friend’s life.”   

    “When we say that RL boys are tough and tender, we are not saying that each one of you is as tough or as tender as you are going to be, or as you would ideally be. As with all things, we are works in progress. Our aim is in the direction of becoming our best selves. And these qualities would contribute unfailingly to the realization of lives lived with purpose, with conviction, with compassion, and with effect. Having made the case for why it is best to be tough and tender, I not only hope that you will be both. But I give you permission to be that very thing. On the threshold of the New Year, what more could I wish you than that?”

    View the entirety of Headmaster Brennan’s address.

    Erin Berg

  • Pianist Andrew Gu (V) Selected for From the Top

    Pianist Andrew Gu (V) Selected for From the Top

    Andrew Gu of Class V was recently selected and recorded for NPR’s nationally-renowned From The Top program—a premier music radio show, which celebrates the stories and talents of classically-trained young musicians. The episode featuring Andrew’s performance—Show 393, with host Peter Dugan—aired nationally during the week of December 14. Andrew performed Beethoven’s Sonata No. 7 in D Major; he was the youngest of the five teenage musicians featured on the episode, which also included saxophonists and violinists—hailing from Chicago, Illinois to Underhill, Vermont—and performances of pieces by Stravinsky and Reena Esmail. Listen to and view Andrew’s performance—as well as the rest of the episode—here.

    Andrew, who has earned other accolades and honors for his skills as a pianist, started piano lessons with his mother, Helen Jung, and continued his studies with Alexander Korsantia and Hitomi Koyama. Andrew made his orchestral debut at age eight, performing Haydn’s Keyboard Concerto in D major at the Music Fest Perugia, Sala dei Notari, Italy in 2015.           

    Several Roxbury Latin student-musicians have been featured performers on From the Top over the years. From the Top is a national, non-profit organization that supports, develops, and shares young people’s artistic voices and stories, providing young musicians with performance opportunities in premier concert venues across the country; national exposure to over a half million listeners on its weekly NPR show; and more than $3 million in scholarships since 2005.

    Erin Berg

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  • Fernando Rodriguez-Villa ’06 Speaks at RL’s Inaugural Innovation Exchange

    Fernando Rodriguez-Villa ’06 Speaks at RL’s Inaugural Innovation Exchange

    On December 3, Roxbury Latin hosted its Inaugural Innovation Exchange with keynote speaker Fernando Rodriguez-Villa ’06. Fernando spoke with students and faculty over Zoom, sharing his journey from RL student to co-founder of AdeptID. Students were able to engage with AdeptID’s technology during a group project, followed by a question and answer session.

    “One of the most valuable parts of RL for me,” began Fernando, “was getting an early education in not being the smartest person in the room. At RL, you learn pretty quickly that there are a lot of people out there who are sharp in ways that you are distinctly not. The faculty there know that I was a strong, good, fairly unremarkable student compared to some of the other students that I was lucky enough to share the classroom with. Whether I was at Dartmouth or in banking or beyond, I was never unfamiliar with being around people who were incredibly bright and had perspectives and insights that I wasn’t going to arrive at on my own.”

    Fernando is the founder and CEO of AdeptID, a start-up with an AI-enabled platform that predicts the success of transitions between different kinds of jobs. At RL, Fernando was active in theater and Latonics and played varsity football, basketball, and track. After graduation, he spent a year at Eton College before attending Dartmouth.

    Fernando left banking in 2014 to work at Knewton, which used machine learning to personalize learning, and since then Fernando—a self-described serial entrepreneur—has spent his career pursuing machine learning ventures around the world. In 2016, he co-founded TellusLabs, a satellite analytics startup that was quickly acquired by Indigo. At Indigo, he served as the Director of International Strategy.

    “I liked banking,” said Fernando, “but it was clear to me within a couple of years that it probably wasn’t what I wanted for my long-term career trajectory. I started seeing growing companies and leading companies on the operational side as exciting.

    “One client of ours was a CEO who had started his company from above his garage with two friends. They had grown to become a massive and important asset manager over 25 years. He was still close friends with the people with whom he had gone on that journey. He was beloved by that team, and in that camaraderie there was a lot that reminded me of RL. It was inspirational. 

    “Simultaneously, I was fortunate to start learning from friends outside of work, about some of the trends in technology. I got into what was called big data, which is now known as AI or machine learning. I learned of the potential this technology had to generate predictions or insights at scale—to put that into software that could, in real time, answer pretty interesting questions. So I became obsessed with this one startup based in New York called Knewton, which was using AI on education data.”

    Knewton was initially hesitant to hire Fernando, an investment banker with no professional experience in AI or education.

    “‘You have this other set of skills,’ they said, ‘and we wouldn’t pay nearly as much as you’re making now,’” said Fernando. “It took a fair amount of work to persuade them that I was excited about the mission and was prepared to face the learning curve of the technology. It took several tries to make them comfortable hiring me!”

    Knewton put Fernando in charge of international business development, sending him to Spain, South Africa, India, and Russia to expand the reach of the New York-based company.

    “Knewton was a good stepping stone into the world of entrepreneurship,” said Fernando. “Within the world of startups and technology, there are a lot of very early stage companies; AdeptID, which we started this year, is in its pre-seed stage. As companies get larger, they tend to raise more money, get more customers, and hire more people. Knewton was in this later stage when I joined, and so there was a fair amount of risk that had been taken off the table.”

    Fernando knew he wanted to get involved with an earlier-stage venture, so he quit his job and moved to Boston with his now wife, Emma.

    “That job hunt was not particularly easy or comfortable,” admits Fernando. “I had to go for a lot of coffees to get a sense of founding teams I wanted to join, and ideas I could get excited about. That’s how I found TellusLabs, where I was paired up with two great technical founders who had built algorithms that could—just by looking at satellite images of crops—predict the crop yield per acre. Those kinds of predictions of food supply were exciting, but the challenge was turning that technology into a business.”

    In two years the founding trio at TellusLabs had expanded to a team of 14 data scientists and engineers, attracting the attention of one of its partners, Indigo Ag, whose technology fit almost perfectly with the direction in which TellusLabs was headed.

    “As we were a customer of theirs,” said Fernando, “they approached us asking if we were interested in joining their company. Initially we said no, because we wanted to build our own independent company, but they made a persuasive offer. Most of the people who were part of TellusLabs are still working for the company and are still happy there. I was also happy to have gone through that, but working for Indigo, a multi-thousand-person company, I learned that I loved that early stage—a couple of people and an idea, a promising technology, and the building and uncertainty that comes with that.”

    Fernando left Indigo early this year for his new startup, AdeptID, with co-founder Dr. Brian DeAngelis, to focus on emerging issues in the labor market.

    “There seemed to be a lot of dynamics in the labor markets that looked like a matching problem,” said Fernando. “That is very much what machine learning and data science tend to be good at—solving matching problems.

    “It’s incredibly hard to change jobs,” adds Fernando, “but something that’s made it easier for me personally is the fact that I have this very blue-chip education. I’ve had a lot of privileges and advantages that have resulted from that. People look at my story and say, ‘Perhaps he hasn’t done this thing, but because he went to these schools, and because he has these other stamps’ they’re willing to take a gamble on me.”

    A large portion of the workforce doesn’t have the education and background that Fernando has, and so changing jobs is difficult. Transitioning between industries can feel nearly impossible.

    “There are tens of millions of people who are unemployed right now who fall into this category,” said Fernando. “And then there are also people who are employed in industries in structural decline—job losses in hospitality and oil and gas and coal. We estimate around 35 million workers will need to find jobs in something very different than what they’ve done before.”

    The entrepreneurial challenge for Fernando and Brian was figuring out the business of solving that problem. Could they excite people by the economic opportunity of trying to address those issues?

    “There are certain sectors in which job growth or job demand is faster than the rate at which people can hire for them,” says Fernando. “In sectors like healthcare, renewable energy, and advanced manufacturing—roles like machinists, pharmacy techs—employers are struggling to find people who are certified or ready to do these jobs.”

    It is that complex dynamic of supply and demand that drives AdeptID, which uses big data to look more deeply at workers and their underlying skills to find potential cross-industry career matches.

    “Just because you’ve been a service unit operator for Chevron doesn’t mean that you can’t do one of these other growing jobs,” says Fernando. “In fact, some of the skills you’ve picked up are incredibly relevant and mean that you are more likely to fit into these new roles. That was our anecdotal perspective, but I had to go out and make it legible—to take these stories and put them into a data format that can allow us to support that perspective from an algorithm standpoint.”

    Fernando and his AdeptID co-founder, Dr. DeAngelis, work with employers and vocational training providers in New England as well as the Midwest and Sunbelt to acquire data on hiring patterns and placement rates to help train their models. During the recent session, RL students used sample data from AdeptID, which mapped the “distance” from jobs in one industry to jobs in another on the basis of skill, to work on group projects.

    “What we find when we do this,” says Fernando, “is that there are some jobs that are intuitively similar—for instance pharmacy aids and pharmacy technicians—and others whose connections are a little less obvious, like a cashier or food service worker with that same pharmacy technician role. It turns out there’s actually a fair amount of overlap. If the data starts to say that, we say, ‘Okay, can we confirm that?’ and the hiring managers we’ve spoken to at places like Boston Medical have agreed.”

    Erin Berg

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  • Rob “ProBlak” Gibbs On the Process and Mission of Art, and On Being a Good Person

    Rob “ProBlak” Gibbs On the Process and Mission of Art, and On Being a Good Person

    On December 3, students and faculty were joined in virtual Hall by Rob “ProBlak” Gibbs, a celebrated visual artist who has transformed the cultural landscape of Boston through graffiti art since 1991. Growing up in Roxbury during hip-hop’s Golden Age, Mr. Gibbs saw the power of graffiti as a form of self expression. The medium became a tool for him to chronicle and immortalize his community’s culture and history—a way to document, pay homage to, and beautify the City’s underserved neighborhoods. His remarkable artwork has brought him much notice and acclaim. Mr. Gibbs was featured last spring on the cover of Boston Globe Magazine for an issue titled “Why Art Matters.” In the spring, Mr. Gibbs also partnered with Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts as an artist-in-residence, in part creating a mural in his Breathe Life series at a vocational high school in Roxbury, not far from the Museum grounds.

    In Hall, Mr. Gibbs began with a brief video of him and fellow street artist Marka27 completing a large-scale production beneath a bridge in Boston’s Ink Block, titled “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.” The clip of ProBlak and Marka27 creating that mural offered students a sense of the scale, paint application, and intention behind the artistic piece.

    Mr. Gibbs went on to answer questions from both students and adults, speaking about his start as an artist; his process; the challenges inherent in his medium; his inspirations and collaborations with fellow artists; and how his work has evolved over decades. The next day, Mr. Gibbs joined RL art classes, via Zoom, meeting with students from Class VI to Class I in Studio Art, Art & Technology, and Digital Design courses.

    Beyond his artistic practice, Mr. Gibbs is also co-founder of Boston’s Artists For Humanity, a non-profit that hires and teaches young people creative skills—from painting to screen printing to 3-D model making. For the past 29 years, Mr. Gibbs has mentored and guided countless burgeoning, young artists through the organization, and continues today as its Paint Studio Director.

    In his mentor role, he explained, one of the key lessons he hopes to impart is “how to honor a commitment. No matter what [these young people] commit themselves toward, that’s a transferable skill that they can put toward anything. If you have the will to sit in front of a painting, or a piece of paper, you can put that drive toward finishing school work, studying, staying focused. I want [these kids] to be better than they were when they came in, as human beings.”

    With a focus on arts education, Mr. Gibbs has conducted mentoring workshops for Girls, Inc., The Boston Foundation, Boston Housing Authority, and Youth Build, Washington, DC. He served as a guest lecturer at Northeastern for their “Foundations of Black Culture: Hip-Hop” course. He was the curator for BAMS Fest’s “Rep Your City” exhibition in 2019.

    Mr. Gibbs is the recipient of a number of awards, including the 2006 Graffiti Artist of the Year award from the Mass Industry Committee, and the Goodnight Initiative’s Civic Artist Award. In 2020, he was honored with the Hero Among Us award by the Boston Celtics. His work has been featured by NBC, WBUR, the Boston Art Review, and Boston Magazine, among many other outlets.

    View the entirety of Mr. Gibbs’s Hall presentation.

    Erin Berg

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  • Photographer Chris Payne ’86 Documents Martin Guitar-Making for The New York Times

    Photographer Chris Payne ’86 Documents Martin Guitar-Making for The New York Times

    Alumnus and renowned architectural photographer Chris Payne’s subjects have range. Chris has chronicled—in large format documentation—some of America’s most venerated industrial heritage, from New York City substations to Steinway pianos, from pencil-manufacturing in New Jersey to abandoned mental hospitals across the country. On November 28, Chris’s work was featured in The New York Times Magazine in “How to Build a Guitar”, a feature for the monthly publication The New York Times for Kids that explored the Martin Guitars factory to share “how humans and machines make music.”

    Chris was one of five alumni artists who visited campus in January 2020 as part of RL’s 375th Anniversary celebration, contributing to an alumni art exhibit and meeting with students in classes throughout the day. Several of his images from the General Pencil Company in Jersey City, New Jersey, were featured in that exhibit. A self-described “city kid,” Chris has always had an eye for urban architecture; while a student at RL he studied obscure buildings and explored almost every inch of the Boston subway system. Chris earned degrees in architecture from both Columbia and UPenn. His training as an architect led to his fascination with design, assembly, and the built form. His photography celebrates the craftsmanship and small-scale manufacturing that perseveres in the face of global competition and evolutions in industrial processes. Chris has been awarded grants from the Graham Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. His work has been featured in publications around the world and several times in special presentations by The New York Times Magazine.

    Erin Berg

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  • Professor Dehlia Umunna on Making Your Life Count for Good

    Professor Dehlia Umunna on Making Your Life Count for Good

    Each year, Roxbury Latin begins the last school day before the Thanksgiving break with a tradition that is distinctly RL. Thanksgiving Exercises are an opportunity to, as Headmaster Brennan says, “turn our heads and hearts to the proposition of gratitude—for the country in which we live, for the freedoms and opportunities that are guaranteed by our being Americans, for our families and friends, for this community and others, for intelligence and discernment and deep feeling. For our gifts and aspirations, for good sense and hoped-for-dreams. Indeed we should live with an attitude of gratitude.”

    This year, given the pandemic’s realities, Thanksgiving Exercises took place virtually, as students, faculty, and staff enjoyed pre-recorded renditions of the traditional hymns We Gather Together, For the Splendor of Creation, and America the Beautiful. The Hall featured the resonant Litany of Thanksgiving—which includes a boy from each class—reminding us all of our “blessings manifold.” “The only thing wrong with Thanksgiving as a holiday,” Mr. Brennan asserted, “is that it may suggest that this is the only time to give thanks, or at least the most important. Each day, virtually each hour, offers an occasion for gratitude.”

    Delivering the morning’s Hall address was Ms. Dehlia Umunna, a clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School, where she became the first Nigerian faculty member at age 42. In addition to teaching and conducting research focused on criminal law, criminal defense, mass incarceration, and issues of race, she is also the faculty deputy director of the law school’s Criminal Justice Institute. Through the Institute, Professor Umunna supervises third-year law students in their representation of adult and juvenile clients, in criminal and juvenile proceedings, in Massachusetts courts, including the Supreme Judicial Court. 

    Professor Umunna began her remarks by transporting her audience to the inside of a jail cell, where she found herself defending a nine-year-old Black girl named Anaya who had been charged with assault with a dangerous weapon, having thrown a book at the floor of her classroom, in the direction of her third-grade teacher, out of frustration. Prof. Umunna went on to describe what sparked her interest in studying law: immigrating to Los Angeles from London in the midst of the 1992 Watts Riots, and having witnessed her brother’s run-in with the law back in London. Prof. Umunna pursued a career as a public defender, “a lawyer who’s paid by the government to defend people in court if they cannot afford to pay for a lawyer,” she describes. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, Prof. Umunna was a public defender in the District of Columbia for close to a decade, where she represented indigent clients in hundreds of cases from misdemeanor charges of theft, assault, and drug possession, to kidnapping, child sexual abuse, and homicide. Some of her cases received nationwide media attention.

    “As a public defender, I truly entered spaces where I witnessed firsthand the realities of what it meant to be impecunious. I saw many families battling mental health concerns and learning disabilities while fending off aggressive police intrusion, harassment, and brutality. I observed firsthand the role of race and racism in the criminal legal system—understanding how unjust, unfair, and inequitable the system is.”

    Prof. Umunna used her example—her commitment to making her life count for good—to implore RL students to do the same in their own ways, and to develop, always, the feeling and expression of gratitude for all the gifts and privileges we have been given, even in this particularly challenging year.

    “This year has sent shockwaves through our psyche,” she said, “and as Thanksgiving approaches, we are exhausted and wondering, What do we have to be thankful for? We wonder if our lives have meaning, if our lives have purpose. There’s so much that we took for granted pre-pandemic, but as I say, every traumatic event, every setback, is an opportunity to reset for greatness. So how can you make your life count for good? First recommendation: develop gratitude as a virtue.” She went on to thank many individuals in the Roxbury Latin community who have enhanced her life and that of her son, Edozie, Class I.

    “If you’re going to live a purpose-driven life, you must develop an attitude of gratitude for the privileges you have. When you develop gratitude as an attribute, you in turn develop empathy and compassion for others. You become less selfish, less judgmental. You recognize that but for your privileges, you could be that person sitting in a jail cell. That person standing in line at the food bank. That person without heat. Gratitude compels you to take stock of what you have and be truly thankful. Gratitude compels you to ask the question, ‘How can I serve others? What can I do to make a difference?’ Not just on Thanksgiving, but every day.”

    View the entirety of this year’s Thanksgiving Exercises, including Professor Umunna’s remarks.

    Erin Berg

  • Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, the Year’s Senior Play, Premieres Virtually

    Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, the Year’s Senior Play, Premieres Virtually

    In planning for the school year, Director of Dramatics Derek Nelson knew that he would have to be creative in order to stage a drama production during a pandemic. His solution elegantly responded to two realities of 2020: The isolation and social distancing forced by COVID-19, and the uprising against racial injustice that marked the spring and summer, specifically. Mr. Nelson’s solution was to enlist Roxbury Latin’s oldest students—and their Winsor School and Boston Arts Academy counterparts—to stage Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, a work of documentary theatre by playwright and actor Anna Deavere Smith.

    In the play—performed as a series of monologues—Ms. Smith uses the verbatim words of nearly 300 people whom she interviewed after the Los Angeles riots—which were sparked by the beating of Rodney King and the subsequent trial—to expose and explore the devastating human impact of that event. “Given the political and social unrest of the last eight months,” says the play’s director Mr. Nelson, “it is stunning, revelatory, and tragic that Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 speaks to us 28 years later.”

    Twenty-one Roxbury Latin boys have been working on the 22 men’s monologues since September, both in-person and in Zoom rehearsals, along with 12 girls from Winsor and one girl from Boston Arts Academy.

    The monologues were filmed individually at both schools, and the resulting film was edited by Evan Scales, a Boston videographer. The production premiered on the evening of November 20, via livestream and YouTube.

    Roxbury Latin boys in the cast:

    Jake Carroll (I)…………………..Stanley Sheinbaum
    Colson Ganthier (I)………………….…..Charles Lloyd
    Ale Philippides (II).…………………Anon. Man, Juror
    Aydan Gedeon-Hope (I)……………….…Keith Watson
    Matt Hoover (III)………………………….……Joe Viola
    Edozie Umunna (I)…………………………Cornel West
    David Sullivan (II)……………………Shelby Coffey III
    Alejandro Denis (II)…………………….…Paul Parker
    Michael Thomas (III)…………………….…Talent Agent
    Emmanuel Nwodo (III)……………….……Twilight Bey
    Ryan Lim (I)………………….…Chris Oh, Jin Ho Lee
    Eli Bailit (II).………………….……….…Peter Sellars
    Will Grossman (III)………………..…..……Daryl Gates
    John Austin (III)…………………..……Reginald Denny
    Frankie Gutierrez (II)……………..………Ted Briseno
    Esteban Tarazona (I)………………..…Rudy Salas, Sr.
    Ben Crawford (I)………………………..…Bill Bradley
    John Wilkinson (I)………………..Sgt. Charles Duke
    A.J. Gutierrez (I)……….……….…Octavio Sandoval
    Krishan Arora (II)……………..…Federico Sandoval
    Daniel Sun-Friedman (I).………..………Walter Park

    Watch the production in its entirety here.  (The production runs two hours, 15 minutes.)

    Erin Berg

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  • Chamber Trio Earns First Place in International Competition

    Chamber Trio Earns First Place in International Competition

    The chamber trio of Daniel Berk (I), Heshie Liebowitz (II), and Alex Yin (II) entered this year’s international Great Composers Competition having never played together as a trio before. Yet this summer—looking for opportunities to make music with others, safely—the three boys wanted to fill the musical gap they were feeling on the heels of the spring’s quarantine. Initially, their plan was simply to play together, but when the opportunity arose to participate in the online competition, they took it.

    The Great Composers Competition is a series of international music competitions for young performers organized in categories—for instrumentalists (piano, strings, winds, percussion), singers (opera, sacred music, art song, musical theatre), and chamber groups.

    Daniel (French horn) plays with Alex (violin) outside of school, and Heshie (piano) had performed with Alex before; each admired the others’ musical skills. Though repertoire that involves the horn is limited, they selected Brahms’s Horn Trio, Op. 40. When they were pleased with how well the piece turned out, Heshie took the initiative of submitting the recording on the group’s behalf.

    Knowing they needed large spaces in which to practice and perform while maintaining a safe distance, the boys were lucky to secure rehearsal space first in an auditorium on the Brandeis campus, and second, at a new Steinway piano retailer showroom in Newton, prior to the store’s official opening.

    “This was my first time playing in a chamber trio,” says Daniel. “As Alex says, there’s not much to play for horns, but this piece is a hallmark of the repertoire, and it put me in the hot seat. I wasn’t used to minimal rehearsal—we only had two rehearsals before we recorded—so that was a new experience, just getting the music and rehearsing on our own. We put it all together more quickly than any of us would have liked, but we were really pleased with how it came out.”

    All three boys have been playing their instruments since they were very young—Heshie playing piano since before he can even remember. “When it comes to chamber music, what I enjoy most is playing with other people,” he says. “It’s fun to play with your friends, first of all, but it’s also rewarding because you get to explore with different sounds that you can’t make by yourself on your own instrument.”

    “One thing I love about violin is the flexibility of the instrument,” says Alex. “You have so many options available to you. For instance, I can play solo music, I can play chamber music, or I can play in an orchestra.”

    “Horn and brass are pretty different from other musical families, because they rely a lot less on finger technique and a lot more on trusting yourself and taking leaps of faith,” adds Daniel. “It feels like more of a mental game than a physical one. So when I play with instruments that demand a lot more technical skill—like piano and violin—it’s awesome to help produce that contrast of the long tone of the horn—which is not extremely complicated—with the sounds of the piano and the violin, which are just going a mile a minute, lightning fast. That combination of sounds is just a beautiful thing to help create.”

    Now that the boys know what they can create together as a chamber trio, they hope to play together more in the future. The Brahms piece they performed has four movements, and the boys played the middle two. “The most iconic parts are actually movements one and four,” says Daniel, “and we were hoping to save them for when we can play in person together, and perform in person—hopefully on the Roxbury Latin stage!—as well.”

    Watch the boys’ prize-winning performance, in full.

    Erin Berg

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  • Swami Tyagananda on Light—Both External, and Internal

    Swami Tyagananda on Light—Both External, and Internal

    “On Saturday, members of the Hindu faith—including many in our own Roxbury Latin community—began the celebration of Diwali, one of the most popular festivals of Hinduism, which symbolizes the spiritual victory of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance—virtues to which we can all aspire,” began Headmaster Brennan in virtual Hall on November 17.

    The morning’s Hall continued a time-honored RL tradition of recognizing, and celebrating, the particular faith lives of members of our community. Joining the RL students and faculty on November 17 was Swami Tyagananda, who spoke about the tradition and celebration of Diwali, as well as the virtues of spiritual strength and how we might all work toward it. The Swami is a monk of the Ramakrishna Order; he is head of the Vedanta Society in Boston, and he also serves as the Hindu Chaplain at MIT and Harvard. He became a monk in 1976, soon after graduating from the University of Bombay, India. He has presented papers at various academic meetings and offers lectures and classes at the Vedanta Society, MIT and Harvard, and other colleges in and around Boston.

    Swami Tyagananda acknowledges routinely that some people in the West find his name unusual. As he explains: “’Swami” is the epithet used for Hindu monks, and the word means master. It points to the ideal of being a master of oneself, or being in control of oneself. The second part of his name was given to him when he received his final monastic vows. “Tyagananda” is a combination of two words, tyâga and ânanda: tyâga means detachment or letting go; ânanda means joy. Taken together, the word means “the joy of detachment.” It points to the ideal of letting go of all the nonessentials in order to focus on and hold on to the essentials.

    In Hall, the Swami not only enlightened his audience to the history of the Diwali celebration, and the story of King Rama’s defeat over Ravana; he also reminded us that while the body and mind have limitations—that they can feel weak or strong—the spirit is limitless, and perfect. He spoke about the virtues of focusing on one’s spirit, and sharing that internal light with the world. He also reminded us that while our external markers vary greatly—our genders, skin colors, languages, religions—our spirits are universal, and it is often in learning about this great diversity of the world around us that we can help to understand our own identities and traditions anew. You can view the entirety of the Swami’s Hall presentation here.

    Erin Berg

  • Hari Narayanan ’20 Wins First Place in Poetry Contest

    Hari Narayanan ’20 Wins First Place in Poetry Contest

    This fall, newly-minted RL alumnus Hari Narayanan received a message from the West Roxbury branch of the Boston Public Library. The library staff was reaching out to inform him that he had won first place in the library’s annual poetry contest, in the high school submissions category. This year was the 31st of the Intergenerational Poetry Contest that the library hosts each spring. Because of the pandemic, the competition was postponed until the fall. “The theme for the contest this year was space,” Hari says. His winning poem, “The Liminal Space,” focuses on his transition from high school to college.

    “I’ve been writing poetry for this event every year since the fourth grade, and I always attend the awards ceremony, even if I don’t win anything!” says Hari. “The judge, Professor Mary Pinard of Babson College, is a wonderfully engaging reader and speaker. Typically, she will read aloud and discuss each of the winning poems, contributed by members of the community ages five through eighty-five. The library is truly a lovely community, and it has had a profound impact on me before, during, and after my time at Roxbury Latin.”

    In the high school category this year, Hari actually tied for first place with another student, Morgan Frost, who wrote the poem “covid-19.” This year, the award ceremony was celebrated on October 22 over Zoom.

    Erin Berg

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