Community Building

Each summer for the past 18 years, Music Connects has brought 60 young people from divided and marginalized communities across the Western Balkans together in Skopje.

Carnegie Hall celebrates 15 years of its Musical Connections program with Sing Sing Voices, a new collection of video playlists featuring original music created by participants and alumni at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison.

TUTTI Passeurs d’Arts is a network of children’s and youth orchestras in France, committed to creating learning environments conducive to the development of children from all backgrounds. Our commitment naturally aligns with the global family of programs inspired by El Sistema in Venezuela and its founder, Maestro José Antonio Abreu. We share the deep conviction that orchestral practice transforms life paths and opens doors where none have seemed to exist.

One of our most accomplished initiatives, TUTTI Bretagne, embodies this vision in a particularly concrete way.

In arts education programs, we tend to work with our heads down. Doing our work every day is enough: it takes more time than we have to create our lesson plans, to build healthy organizational infrastructure that is adaptive and responsive, or even to collaborate with the colleagues within our own organizations. As artists and arts leaders, we forget to look up and out. But as various crises combine forces to pull us away from each other, our need for collective work is not something we can afford to have on a backburner. It needs to be a central focus. We need to build strong local networks and to diversify our collaborators. 

We need to connect—with fellow arts organizations, and with organizations we might never consider in our daily work.

For over 100 years, Britain’s Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) has supported music education in the U.K. and across the world.

If you are going to hire a staff member as your first dedicated fundraiser, Patrick Slevin (Executive Director of Austin Soundwaves) offers advice based on his personal experience.

The Art of Positive Fatalism – Lessons from Kinshasa is a new book by Lukas Pairon, the founder of the international research organization SIMM (Social Impact of Making Music).

The youth orchestra of the Brazilian program NEOJIBA has just returned from its 10th international tour, having visited Frankfurt, Germany, and four cities in China.

El Sistema Oman, a new youth orchestra program based in the Gulf area of Muscat, Oman, is completing its pilot year.

“Arts Plural: A Reader on Artistic Intelligence” is available free from the ELIA (European League of Institutes of the Arts) Biennial Conference 2024.