Program Design

 
The Ensemble seeks to connect and inform all people who are committed to ensemble music education for youth empowerment and social change.

The Archipelago Project

04-01-2019

The Archipelago Project’s objective is to empower student creativity and ownership by supplying musical knowledge, performance opportunities, and professional models to inspire the next generation of engaged musicians. For the past 15 years, Archipelago Project’s iterative process in curriculum design has resulted in our Musical Leadership Academy, a summer music camp focused on providing a diverse population of students and teaching artists with opportunities to create music together, learn when to lead and to listen, and thrive in the ensemble as a metaphor for community.

Collective Composition

02-01-2019

At BRAVO Youth Orchestras, there are ongoing conversations about the impact of introducing collective composition–composing together as a group–often focusing on how it impacts the staff, our students, and our community, and on what it means to facilitate and support a collective musical voice. There’s an active effort to establish equitable practices that reinforce a supportive environment for BRAVO students during creative projects. BRAVO’s central goal is student empowerment to discover what it is they want to say through their music.

Supporting the Young Artist’s Initiative

12-01-2018

This fall marks the second year of an exciting new talent development program at Play On Philly! Our Emerging Artist Collective (PEAC) is a cohort of nearly twenty students who have demonstrated the utmost dedication and whose families have demonstrated the devotion needed for success. Unlike all other Play On Philly students, those in PEAC receive private lessons and advocacy as they navigate Philadelphia’s musical landscape. As director of this program, I work to show them that a life playing music and immersed in music is a true possibility for them.

El Sistema Opera Mediterranee: The First All-Opera Sistema Program

10-27-2018

Opera is one of the most complex accomplishments of our Western musical heritage, mixing vocal and instrumental musical with poetry, theater and visual arts.  In our times, freed from many elitist clichés, it can come back to its primal source and be experienced as a very popular form of artistic expression. Its mix of singing and acting, of costumes and lightings, can be a great attraction for young people, who can play and enjoy as they learn from the operatic experience.

French Government Gives Teens Money for Arts and Culture Experiences

09-10-2018

For Sistema teenagers, one of the hurdles to exploring the arts is the cost of tickets.  The French Ministry of Culture has rolled out a new multi-million Euro program intended to reduce that barrier for 18-year-olds across the country.

Batuta’s “Music at the Borders”

09-02-2018

The Colombian project “Music at the Borders” was created to improve the quality of life of the inhabitants of the border areas of the country.  The project is run by the country’s national Sistema program, the National Batuta Foundation, and financed by the Colombian Chancellery within the framework of Colombia’s Plan Fronteras para la Prosperidad (Border Plan for Prosperity). 

A Social Skills Curriculum

08-01-2018

Sistema Toronto is in its second year of a three-year project dedicated to building a detailed and integrated curriculum focused on musical and social learning outcomes for its 250 students, aged 6-12. The music curricula components include music and moment, strings, choir, and percussion. We are also creating an integrated social curriculum, developed by a team of our teachers and rooted in experiential learning pedagogy, that is intended to be woven into teaching and learning outcomes for all music classes.

El Sistema Kenya 2018 Updates

05-29-2018

El Sistema Kenya (ESK) has just celebrated its fourth year of working with children in Nairobi. ESK currently has three staff members who handle program logistics and finances, and six teachers who teach violin, clarinet, flute, recorder, singing, and music theory. They are working with over 200 children in three different slums in Nairobi.

Jazzing Up Sistema Relevance

05-01-2018

To many classically trained musicians, the El Sistema program model of learning in group classes and ensembles is very different from how we learned. However, the development of technique and discipline, and the understanding of music that comes with classical training, are just as important for playing in other genres. Classical training provides a foundation that can be used for learning any style of music. The notes, rhythms, and instrumental techniques are the same in classical music as they are in jazz. Professional brass bands may play the same notes and rhythms to Liza Jane as our students would, but in a different key, with open sections for improvisation and with a different sound.

Stronger Together: The Longy Sistema Side By Side

03-01-2018

At a Celtics game in Boston’s TD Garden this past January, the national anthem was played by an ensemble making their arena debut: the Longy Sistema Side By Side Orchestra, made up of graduate students at the Longy Conservatory and students from El Sistema-inspired programs in the Boston area and in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. For the young Sistema players, it was an unforgettable moment. For Longy, it was a milestone in its mission to support connections between music education and social justice.

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