Graeme Kennedy will be the second executive director in the history of 317 Main Community Music Center in Yarmouth. Photo courtesy of Peter Frank Edwards

The 317 Main Community Music Center in Yarmouth was opened in 2004 by locals who wanted a place in town where people of all ages could come together to learn and play music. Today, the nonprofit has more than 1,500 students annually across 61 towns and cities.

In January, Graeme Kennedy will succeed John Williams as executive director; Williams has been involved with 317 Main since its inception. Kennedy, who previously worked at the Portland Museum of Art, answered five questions about his experience with music and his hopes for the organization.

This interview has been edited for length.

I would imagine that 317 Main Community Music Center is a place where people might have their first experience with music or making music. What was yours?

My first love was music. My mother was a theater kid in D.C., and my father was a musician and in a psychedelic rock back at Bowdoin College in the ’70s. So I grew up in a household filled with music, filled with jazz and theater and really progressive types of music. That was really formative early on. I remember hearing Tom Waits for the first time and being like, what is going on?

How is music part of your life as an adult?

My children probably say I devote too much of my household space to musical instruments. We recently this summer acquired a 1984 Kawai DX900 organ, a three-tiered organ that I brought in off Facebook Marketplace, and getting that into the house was quite an ordeal. We have tons of musical instruments in the house. We have recording studio setups in the house. There’s just always music playing in the house, I think, at a reasonable volume. My children say it’s too loud a lot of the time. They also describe my music taste as “wacko.”

Both of my daughters do a lot of choruses and theater, and my 4-year-old son’s favorite song is a Tom Waits song called “Fish in the Jailhouse.” It’s so weird and wacky that it captures his imagination, and we listen to it every day on the drive to daycare.

317 Main Community Music Center completed a $6.5 million expansion in 2023. What’s going on with that space now?

So space for arts is at such a premium, and in a changing community like southern Maine, I think we really need to make sure that arts have physical space. I was really excited to see that 317 was able to build this expanded 200-seat performing space. It’s really a multi-use space and very flexible. It can do concerts and performances, but it can also do classes and ensembles and all sorts of things, as well as a recording studio and the additional classrooms. It’s really a community hub more than anything.

The organization is in the middle of the campaign that helped enable the building. With the pandemic, building costs and all sorts of things changed. And so like many organizations across the country, 317 is working to make sure that they can deliver the highest quality experience while staying true to mission and vision and budget. And so one of the things that’s really exciting right now is everything’s on books. It’s open to see, what kind of programming should we do? What kind of programming do people want? What are ideas that we can pursue to really lean into the need? It’s really at this tipping point as an organization to dive into what’s next.

Do you have specific programs or ideas that you want to work on as you get started?

The first thing I want to do is just really listen and be respectful of an organization that has built deep roots in the community over two decades. I’m coming in with my ideas and my passion and my excitement, but I’m not coming in with any sort of agenda or to-do list in that way.

What is something you don’t think people know about 317 Main?

I don’t think people know how easy it is to start experiencing the programs. There are dance classes. There are drop-ins. There are open mics. And obviously any instrument you want to learn, we have those classes as well, with an incredible array of teaching artists who are experts in their field, living and working musicians throughout the state who come to 317 to support that. It’s also not just for young people who are learning musicians. It’s also for people like me who played. It’s hard to join a band. It’s hard to make friends who do music. You start having kids, you have a job, you’re out in the world. It’s like, how do I reignite that spark? So for folks who might think that their performance days are past them or for folks who might think that it’s too hard to find like-minded musicians, 317 offers a lot of opportunities to start to get to know the musical community around you and start playing again.