Perspectives & Collective Action

 
The Ensemble seeks to connect and inform all people who are committed to ensemble music education for youth empowerment and social change.
 
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Is Culture the Missing Piece in Our Quest for a Greener and Humane Recovery? Five Ways the Cultural Sector Steps In

Katya Gorbatiouk, Advisory Council Member, Global Leaders Program; Board Member, London Music Fund; Advisory Council Member, London Symphony Orchestra

02-02-2022

Why does a composer venture into the Arctic? Perhaps because it is one of the places our global climate emergency is on clearest display. Auerbach’s collaborator, Enric Sala, the founder of National Geographic’s Pristine Seas Project, observed that if you look at our Earth from space, the Arctic appears as its heart, a white heart expanding and contracting. The expansions are getting noticeably smaller every year.

Sistema England to Merge with The Nucleo Project

01-19-2022

Sistema England is passing its activities and leadership role to The Nucleo Project in London. Founded in 2013 by Lucy Maguire, The Nucleo Project will now be known as “Nucleo” as it expands its local work and takes on wider youth development roles.

Suggested Reading: Teacher as Artist-in-Residence

01-19-2022

Here is an unusual book that presents teaching as an art practice: Teacher as Artist-in-Residence: The most radical form of expression to ever exist.

AIMing Forward: Introducing the Academy for Impact through Music

Eric Booth, Cofounder, The Ensemble; Senior Advisor/Lead Faculty, AIM

01-05-2022

The global field of music for social change is committed, smart, resilient, and brimming with talented teachers, administrators, and students—that’s a lot of assets! But it isn’t organized to learn well and get better as a field. Indeed, as I traveled during the past decade to 25 countries to observe good programs in action, I consistently heard that their two greatest challenges were finances and faculty. These problems haven’t been getting better.

Pandemic, Interrupted

Tricia Tunstall, Cofounder and Contributing Editor, The Ensemble

01-05-2022

On the first Thursday of December 2021, I did something I hadn’t done for the previous 20 months: I taught six piano students in a row in person, in my home studio. After 16 months of virtual teaching, I had been gradually reintroducing in-person lessons during the fall, one kid at a time, as they became vaccinated. This was the first day that every student on my roster was actually on my piano bench.

From Musicambia: Lessons from Teaching Music in Prisons

Nathan Schram, Founder and Artistic Director, Musicambia

01-05-2022

Teaching music in prisons is about doing the most with the resources you have. And everywhere we teach, we learn something new from our collaborating musicians; in many ways, we learn as much from our experiences as our students do. In the spirit of reflection and new beginnings, I want to share a few of the lessons that have shaped our work over the past seven years.

Putting Music at the Center of Global Development Conversations

Shain Shapiro, Founder and Group CEO, Sound Diplomacy; Executive Director, Center for Music Ecosystems

12-01-2021

Why is music almost entirely absent from global development conversations, outside of staging benefit concerts?

This is one of the questions that led me to launch two organizations in recent years, Sound Diplomacy and the Center for Music Ecosystems. I realized that in the key conversations that drive development decisions across the world, there is little understanding of the value of the music ecosystem and what it can bring to human development.

Collaborators in the Key of Change

Ken MacLeod, CEO/Founder, Sistema New Brunswick (Canada)

10-05-2021

Society’s highest goal for children in foster care seems to be keeping them out of trouble. But their social workers ache for more. In our conversations, they were drawn to the idea of offering children a path to rare and significant personal success, including new skills and disciplines that would change their future.

A September 2021 Resource Bulletin

09-21-2021

Venezuela’s El Sistema will hold a World Congress of El Sistema on September 28th, 29th, and 30th. The virtual event is designed to foster an exchange of ideas on topics of global relevance for like-spirited programs and projects around the world. The Congress will include discussions, presentations, workshops, and screenings, all with Spanish-English translation. Focal topics will include organizational and pedagogical issues, artistic vision, social impact, research in the field, child and youth protection policies, and fundraising.

Conductors Stepping up as Community Advocates

09-15-2021

How are young conductors breaking the traditional mold and learning to reach out to their communities in new ways? According to this article by Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times, it has a lot to do with Gustavo Dudamel. The Dudamel Fellowship Program, which he started at the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2009, has produced a number of rising conductors—many of them women—who think about “what is needed to serve diverse audiences…and what it means for an orchestra to belong to a community.”

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