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Finding Their Voice: OrKidstra’s KidComposers

Margaret Maria Tobolowska, OrKidstra Cofounder and Teaching Artist, in collaboration with the OrKidstra Team

07-06-2022

When a dedicated youth music organization starts brainstorming, the sky opens with possibilities. Such was the lead-up to the creation of KidComposers, a natural extension of OrKidstra’s online Improv Explorers program.

GLP Imagined Community Concert: Reunion

Fredrika Brillembourg (author), Júlia Simões, Daniel Montes, Emmanuel Vukovich, GLP ‘22 Cohort

06-15-2022

During our conversations with them, CMW staff shared that they sometimes struggle to engage families to attend concerts. In considering how best to bring together all CMW families, students, and faculty, we came up with “Reunion,” an imagined concert designed to help CMW unite and celebrate their community’s many cultures and people.

Call to Action: El Sistema USA Response to Uvalde School Shooting

The El Sistema USA Board of Directors and Staff

06-01-2022

We do not accept the normalization of school gun violence in our country. As an organization, we commit to fighting against gun violence to ensure safe spaces for students to grow and learn and blossom. We also commit to supporting the field through providing trauma-informed training to teachers, cultivating youth leadership and voice, and advocating for equity in music education on the national level.

A Far-Flung Teaching Partnership to Keep a Namibian Music School Alive

Enrico Palascino, violinist, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin (RSB), Germany

06-01-2022

Recently, we have created an initiative whereby dedicated musicians from Germany fly to Namibia at regular intervals for the next five to six years to pass on their pedagogical knowledge to the YONA music teacher team. The initiative is already up and running; we recruited the German teachers by selecting them from different European music education programs.

The Black Teaching Artist Lab: Pan-African Cultural Exchange

Melissa Parke, Founder, The Black Teaching Artist Lab

06-01-2022

In 2020, amid a global pandemic and an extended and overdue reckoning with systemic racism in America, the Black Teaching Artist Lab was born. Founder Melissa Parke had been thinking about the idea since 2019, and she launched the organization at a time when many teaching artists were interrogating their own practices for the first time.

A Special Partnership Generates a Regional Residency

The Ensemble Editorial Staff in conversation with Gabrielle Molina, Executive Director of Project Music; Founder of Teaching Artists International, Inc., and Garrett Mendez, Artistic Director of Project Music; Performance Arts Coordinator and Director of Instrumental Music at King School

06-01-2022

Music students from many regions, coming together across distances to spend days of intensive music-making together—around the world, this has long been one of El Sistema’s most famous and valued traditions. For the past two pandemic years, that tradition has been largely shut down.

But it’s beginning to come to life again.

In Belgrade, a Specific Solution to a Complex Problem

Patrick Scafidi, Executive Editor, The Ensemble, in conversation with Dijana Opačić, Program Coordinator, Music Art Project

06-01-2022

Through a collaborative “Orchestra and Choir of Hope,” children from Branko Pešić get to perform with peers from two music schools with whom MAP cooperates. But Music of Hope leaders realized the students had multiple needs—they were hungry, both emotionally and literally.

GLP Imagined Community Concert: We Are the Change

Natalie Fasheh (author), Angie Joseph, Karen Rodriguez, Julian Bernal, GLP ‘22 Cohort

05-18-2022

Our group was inspired to see the singers shine while performing for their families and communities and saw an opportunity to celebrate their empowered selves in our imagined participatory concert, “We Are the Change.” Based on the lyric poetry book Change Sings by inaugural National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman, the concert melds aspects of choral music and teaching artistry to create an engaging, out-of-the-box community experience.

Agrigento: Advancing Music as Social Action 

Maria Lara, Founder and Trustee, Agrigento

05-04-2022

Music for social change is a field with enormous potential, yet one that has not been fully realized because of a central paradox: a common reliance on musical and educational practices that have little to do with social change.

Haitian Music Nation: Forging Pathways with BLUME Haiti

Janet Anthony, cello professor emerita, Lawrence University; Cofounder/Executive Director, BLUME Haiti

05-04-2022

Access to music education can be a potent antidote to despair for students and their teachers, families, and communities—one of the very few ways that people of vastly different social classes in Haiti can meet and interact as equals. As one of our scholarship participants stated, “music helps one become human.”

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