Africa

Bachtrack has released their annual statistics report on classical music performances around the world. The numbers are encouraging: while the top ten composers are still dead white men, there are notable increases in performances of living and female composers.

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The Boulanger Initiative, with the support of Sphinx, launched its newest project this past March: the largest open-access database of works by women and gender-marginalized composers. 

A few news hits from Sistema programs around the world:

By now, you’ve probably heard of ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence program that can “write” an essay or a song by synthesizing information from the Internet. Despite valid reservations about its role in art, some educators and musicians are considering whether they might want to team up with this technology rather than fight it.

The European Commission has set out to show how participation in arts and cultural programs positively impacts youth mental health in a recently published Brainstorming Report, “Youth, Mental Health, and Culture.”

During interviews, BFA Founder Jim Trott emphasized gender inequality as a prominent issue in the places where they work, citing data that indicates the problem has worsened during the pandemic. As Jim referenced several alarming practices—domestic violence, dowry violence, acid attack, forced marriage, sexual harassment, human trafficking, forced prostitution—it became clear to us that our imagined concert would need to raise awareness of this issue.

At first, the participation of the refugee community was meager, because the idea of a festival in a refugee camp was almost inconceivable. After the first one, however, the community got a sense of what a festival is like and what possibilities and opportunities might come from it. News of the festival started spreading all over Malawi and abroad.

In 2021, I started doing online research about great violinists, recorder players, and orchestras. On Facebook, I came across a gentleman named Roberto Zambrano, a great musician and educator and a good person. I said to myself: “I have just found someone with whom to share my ideas.”

Africa’s Great Lakes Region has long been a crossroads for migrations of people, from the Indian Ocean in the east to the tropical forests to the west to the headwaters of the Nile up north. It’s precisely these factors that made Kakuma an ideal location for a refugee camp to shelter peoples from the numerous conflicts along these routes. Almost nowhere else on the planet do musicians from so many different African cultures and countries live in such proximity.