Gather Together

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Thirty-eight members of this year’s Global Leader Program cohort traveled to Chile for two weeks last month to learn, collaborate, build relationships, teach, and put into action their passion for harnessing the power of music to serve community and education.  Each one came away with a deeper commitment to their aspirations and heightened zeal for their work as cultural agents, social entrepreneurs, and teaching artists.

Here are a few new Sistema ideas in the United States, and an invitation to the join the El Sistema USA National Symposium at the end of January:

La Red de Escuelas de Música de Medellín (The Music School Network of Medellín) toured the East Coast of the United States in November. Eighty students from La Red’s 27 music schools across Medellín, Colombia were selected through auditions to be part of this creative journey. These students had the opportunity to analyze and reflect on the city they live in, and to produce a 60-minute musical suite called “Medellín Canción Viva” [Medellín, A Living Song].

On November 13, a combined orchestra and choir composed of students from three Balkan countries performed a concert at the Vatroslav Lisinski Councert Hall in Zagreb, Croatia. Over 300 students from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia came together for this performance; it was the first joint performance of these three Balkan El Sistema programs. The Bosnian program “House of Good Tones Srebrenica” was the organizer of the event.

In October, ten teachers from Musica Para la Vida (Music for Life) in Mexico traveled to Berlin, Germany to participate in an international seminar, organized in part by the Federal Association of Cultural Education for Children and Youth of Germany.

Registration is now open for the 2019 El Sistema Academy in Stockholm, Sweden!  The 3rd annual El Sistema Academy will take place at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm on 25-27 January 2019.

On Saturday, 27 October, Sistema in Norwich, England teamed up with a circus!

The creation of the forty-member Junior String Ensemble for this year’s Take a Stand Festival was a new step for the TAS Festival – and its success was beyond all expectations. The student musicians came wonderfully prepared. Our curriculum for them went beyond learning the concert repertoire to include leadership skills, chamber music skills, and interaction with a living composer.

Students from Ghetto Classics in Nairobi have created a new music video that you can view below. For this video, students partnered with SAWA, an organization that partners with local Kenyan women to make beaded decorations for technology like headphones (which can be seen in the film).