Behind the bars: Kansas prison inmates connect through series of classical music concerts

Classical music filled the silence at El Dorado Correctional Facility in April as about 20 inmates sat in chairs forming a semi-circle to hear five musicians play.

The recital wasn’t a typical one. Not only was it held in a prison, but after every song, violinist Holly Mulcahy would pause and ask the audience how they interpreted each piece.

Making sure the inmates knew there were no wrong answers, they responded to the songs with tales of overcoming obstacles, forbidden love and even a “sad re-telling of a memory.”

The recital opened with two violin solos played by Mulcahy. The full set list included songs from Bach, Stravinsky, Mozart and modern day composers Del’Shawn Taylor and Peter Golub.

The concert was put on by a program called Arts Capacity, which brings these recitals to prisoners to help them cope with challenges. The program was started by Mulcahy.

An arts program born in Georgia

The El Dorado concert was the first in that prison and only the second in Kansas. In March, there was a recital at the Hutchinson Correctional Facility.

While Mulcahy has connections in Wichita as the concertmaster for the Wichita Symphony, she actually started Arts Capacity more than 1,000 miles away in a prison in Georgia about six years ago.

Mulcahy said she was initially going to perform her recital at a university, but got an opportunity through some mentors to perform it in a Georgia prison, and she didn’t know what to expect.

“I was very happy to share my time and, you know, bring in some very challenging music for, what I would consider challenging, for normal listeners,” Mulcahy told the Eagle in a March interview.

It didn’t take long to see the effect music had on the audience, however.

“One prisoner down in Georgia six years ago at the first recital said, ‘I’ve held these feelings for 27 years, and today was the first day it released.’ If that doesn’t speak to the power of, you know, meeting someone where they are and what they need, I don’t know what does,” Mulcahy said.

Those attending the concerts are given a survey to complete. Through those surveys, Mulcahy can learn more about how performances translate for the audience.

“Live music is to cope with challenges and and develop the capacity to experience change for good,” Mulcahy said. “What that does, what we’ve got data to support, is it helps you emotionally plug in to where you are, it helps filter out emotions.”

The goal is to provide prisoners with an understanding of using music as therapy to help them once they’re released.

“[Music makes] us better at feeling,” Mulcahy said. “That is exactly the kind of thing that we want to kind of impart on these people — because when they get out, you want them to be able to use music as a tool.”

Not a ‘one and done’

Mulcahy said the most important part of the program is building connections between the inmates and performers.

“It was a big deal for me to make sure this just wasn’t a one-off kind of thing,” Mulcahy said. “To me, that’s like virtue signaling. If you just say, ‘Oh yeah, I played the prison,’ check that box and then don’t return.”

The mission of connection would be lost if there was only one recital, Mulcahy said. Instead, Arts Capacity tried to form relationships with the inmates by asking for feedback and returning to play what the audience requested.

“We build a trust, a relationship that involves deep listening, which turns into a collaborative recital,” she said.

Relationships built within a Georgia prison led to prisoners collaborating with Arts Capacity on a full-scale opera.

Conversations to bring the program to Kansas started almost immediately, Mulcahy said, but work didn’t fully begin until 2022 after uncertainty around the coronavirus pandemic subsided. Planning the concerts began in earnest last fall.

The Wichita Symphony partnered with Arts Capacity once the Kansas dates were set, and the first concert was held in March in Hutchinson. Compared to the El Dorado concert a month later, the Hutchinson performance had a larger group of concertgoers.

Sue Stoecklein, chaplain at Hutchinson Correctional Facility, said she grasped at the opportunity to partner with Arts Capacity.

“Since it’s a men’s only facility, we work really hard on their other side of their brains . . . but we don’t then feed that other side of ourselves with things like art, drama, poetry, language. We don’t fill that,” Stoecklein said.

She said she was surprised to see how connected the inmates were to the music.

“They shared about the music, they shared emotions, and honestly this is a pretty tough group. I was really surprised with how deep they were digging and how much they were willing to share,” she said.“They thanked the ladies that played, they wanted to share things that it meant to them, and I’m still getting messages asking if or when they’re coming back.”

Stoecklein said she wants the partnership to become a “springboard,” where facility officials will be able to bring more arts opportunities in, like poetry classes.

While the program’s relationship with Hutchinson Correctional Facility and El Dorado Correctional Facility are still new, Mulcahy said she plans to stay in contact and return to the prisons.

Art for both prisoner and musician

Rachelle Goter played the clarinet for the two Kansas concerts. She heard about Arts Capacity through social media when Mulcahy posted about recitals in Georgia. When the concertmaster asked Goter to be a part of it, she was thrilled.

Seeing it in person was a different experience. Her first recital through Arts Capacity was at Hutchinson, and about 150 prisoners attended.

“Holly had said ahead of time, ‘I don’t know what to expect, I’ve done this before but you never know whether they’re going to like it, whether they’re going to want to talk about it, you just never know,’” Goter said. “But you could tell immediately when she started to talk that they were really soaking it up.”

The recital in El Dorado was smaller, with an audience of about 20, but it didn’t stop the prisoners from interacting with the music.

Goter teaches at Wichita State University. After participating in the prison recitals, she said she went back to her students to tell them about the experience, but nothing she could say matched how she felt.

“I just had wished they could have been a fly on the wall because there’s just no words that can convey how magical it honestly was, my students asked me what my favorite part was ... What I like is that hearts and souls were communicated with,” she said. “And that is, for me, what it’s about.”

Susan Mayo played the cello at the two Kansas Arts Capacity concerts. She initially found out about the program when Mulcahy asked her to participate in the Georgia recitals, but the coronavirus pandemic altered those plans.

Mayo said finally getting to play in the recitals was “unbelievable moving.”

“It’s really eye-opening for me,” Mayo said. “It was just a really powerful experience to be there and to be with these people ... they’re just folks, just like us.”

Mayo said the recitals are even more powerful because it’s solely about the audience and its needs.

“Holly is such a gifted facilitator,” Mayo said. “She’s very sincere, and she’s very straight forward and, you know, is always saying, ‘No right answers, no wrong answers.’ . . . It really is about them and what they’re feeling.”

Mayo said she did a lot of research on prison reform before the recitals, and being apart of the recitals made even more clear the importance of the movement.

“For me, it’s a big gift to be involved in this,” Mayo said.