Miremonde Arts Tackles Plight of Arts Education

Rebranding a business while overseeing upcoming concerts, hosting a daily radio talk show, organizing music workshops with children and adults and preparing for a feature on Channel 12 is daunting for even the most successful entrepreneur– but Elyena Miremonde doesn’t waver.

A native of Russia who also lived and worked in Italy and France, Miremonde's music education career dates back more than 30 years. Miremonde studied under Theodore Gutman at the Moscow State University and Conservatory, then worked with Dorothy Taubman after immigrating to New York City in the 1970s. Capitalizing on her desire to introduce wider audiences to the arts, Miremonde established The Music Garden Center more than a quarter century ago.

Last week, the company changed its name to Miremonde Arts, which according to Miremonde incorporates her and co-founder Julian Lampert’s broader vision for the project.

“This is a bouquet of different cultural traditions which we are introducing in a very artistic and musical way,” said Miremonde. “I want to make sure that our Miremonde Arts concept is part of everyone’s everyday life – that music and art is for everyone because every human soul has sensitivity, taste, and tremendous potential for the appreciation of arts and music.”

Fusing her background in music, journalism and university-level psychology, Miremonde and Lampert, her son and a renowned orchestra musician and composer, are in the midst of steering a four-tier plan for the growth of Miremonde Arts. Not only will they continue enhancing their concert series and adult and children’s workshops, but Miremonde hosts BBS Radio’s daily Lena Live!, a program about childhood education she plans to bring to the small screen in the coming months.

“[The TV program will] emphasize a younger generation’s interests, skills and gifts,” says Miremonde. “We are developing this program with a very thorough attention to detail, taking into account a child’s qualities of self confidence, imagination and other dimensions they perhaps don’t explore in an everyday school curriculum.”

In addition to Lampert and Miremonde, who has held teaching positions at the 92nd street Y and Rutgers University, Miremonde Arts boasts a distinguished board advisors, featuring Miremonde’s long-time compatriot and U.N. Human Rights Ambassador Jerome J. Shestack.

Miremonde explains she owes part of her professional development to collaborations and personal relationships with a group of esteemed colleagues. For instance, the Miremonde Arts concert series boasts a wide array of talent, including Conal Fowkes, who played piano in Woody Allen’s New Orleans Jazz band, and Michael Kopelman, a childhood friend and professor at the Eastman School of Music who is well known within the New York chamber music community.

Miremonde’s team works together to acknowledge that children in modern society are overly stimulated and challenged. Miremonde explains that children are hit with “too much too soon," a quality of contemporary educational systems that can be assuaged with exposure to the arts as a mode of self-expression.

“I find if I am addressing various forms of artistic expression simultaneously, every child can find his or her place,” says Miremonde. “No child will be left behind [or] feel deprived of self expression.”

With this attitude in mind, the company’s mission is to let the uniqueness of the individual dictate the educational approach. “I don’t subscribe to the ideology of a special gift of children in my approach,” says Miremonde. “My main effort is to open up every child […] so that every child becomes so enriched that he or she wants to come back.”

You can catch Elyena live on BBS Radio every Tuesday from 4-5  p.m.