Building From It

I didn't set out to acquire anything. When I sat down with Paul Katz, the cellist and longtime member of the Cleveland Quartet, I wasn't there to talk acquisition. I wanted to understand something he'd already proven through years of building CelloBello: that world-class teaching could be free, and that thousands of people would actually use it if it were.

That's roughly how CelloBello came to be part of Chamber Music America. CelloBello had grown into one of the most generous teaching resources in our field: free masterclasses, mentorship, and archived wisdom from some of the best musicians alive, available to anyone with an internet connection and the will to learn. I came to that first conversation thinking about what Paul had already proven was possible, and wondering what more of it could look like inside an organization with the infrastructure to carry it further.

The honest answer is that neither of us fully knew, at first. What we did know was that CelloBello's value was never really the platform. It was the belief underneath it, that world-class teaching shouldn't be gated behind privilege or geography. Preserving that belief mattered more to both of us than preserving any particular piece of software.

So we didn't shrink CelloBello into a subpage. We built forward from it. There's now a CelloBello corner in Accent, our e-newsletter, reaching more than ten thousand readers with pedagogical highlights from Paul's archive. Its masterclasses debuted at our 2026 National Conference in Chicago, taught by members of the Jupiter, Takács, and Borromeo Quartets, Paul among them, and will continue into next season at Eastman in Rochester, at the MTNA National Conference in St. Louis, and in New York, where CelloBello will be part of how we celebrate CMA's fiftieth anniversary. Paul remains closely involved in shaping what comes next, alongside a CelloBello Advisory Committee chaired by Brant Taylor and Jeff Zeigler, part of our own governance now, not an outside voice we consult occasionally. And this past November in Boston, at a Gala event that brought together artists, educators, and philanthropists who'd spent decades believing in Paul's work, we celebrated something that felt less like a transition and more like a continuation with more resources behind it.

I think about this whenever I hear people frame acquisition as something that happens to an organization, a kind of quiet erasure dressed up as growth. It doesn't have to be that. Done right, it's closer to a relay handoff: the same race, a runner who's given everything they have, and a next leg that only exists because of how well the first one ran.

Paul built something the field needed before the field entirely knew it needed it. Our job now is simple, if not easy: keep proving, year after year, that we understood what he built well enough to be trusted with where it goes next.