Featured

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.”

At Expression Engine, we hire our students. Our students are our expansion plan, our growing capacity, and our future. We hire them as interns at 14, and, since they have already been participating in peer teaching, they are ready to step up. “The Engine” belongs to them, and they know it.

Ensemble editors spoke with three Firebirds about which teaching muscles have been most transformed, asking them to describe a specific change that they attribute to their experience in the Fellowship. Their responses were rich, thoughtful, and relevant in any classroom.

The Piano Lab does not look like your typical research laboratory. We want visitors to feel welcome and creative; as piano virtuoso Jon Kimura Parker said after visiting, “The first thing that hits you when you walk in is how inviting and colorful and friendly it is here.”

We want to create a piece that sings, “We don’t want war and greed.” We want peace. In that spirit, our piece is a symbol of solidarity with those who are living through war in their home countries. War has ravaged many nations, including places where fellow Ambassadors live.

Having established a grant program, we have learned from the music educators and researchers we fund. We have attended online conferences and seminars and reached out to a number of musicians whose work has intrigued us. In doing so, we have observed a field that is in a state of uncertainty, shifting and evolving. And, because of this state of uncertainty, we have also observed change taking place.

Six thousand children participate in field bands across South Africa. These bands operate in rural and peri-urban communities that have little in the way of cultural, educational, or public health infrastructure. After-school activities are few. And yet, within these communities’ growing bands, people are growing, too.

During my graduate studies at the Longy School of Music at Bard College, I studied intergenerational learning—that is, how both young people and adults learn. I discovered that despite the generational and cultural divides between Gen Z-ers, baby boomers, and millennials, there were more similarities than differences. I wondered how I could foster authentic connections in an intergenerational space where everyone learns more about one another.

Shortly before our concert design was conceived and written, Eric Booth spoke to the GLP ‘22 cohort about using movement as a tool in teaching artistry. The message resonated with Emily, Natalia, Sandra, and me—we each had a story about how we taught someone, or learned from someone, using movement. We knew that movement had to fit into our event proposal El Sistema Greece (ESG), the organization we had been partnering with and learning from.

I came to identify the issue as one of perception. Music should be seen as a tool for building up communities, for connecting people; for creating bonds of empathy and acceptance between them. And then, in late 2016, these thoughts manifested Superar in my life. “Superar” is a Spanish word that means “to overcome boundaries/obstacles.” What a wonderful and strong word, I thought immediately.