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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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Rehearsal Mission: AIM-ing for Student Empowerment

Richard Mannoia, Advisor, The Academy for Impact through Music (AIM)

08-03-2022

In the plan, these Pillars come to life through the students, who personalize the articulation concept in order to motivate their skill-building and artistic performance.

Grant Awarded to International Study on Music and Displaced Youth

07-20-2022

Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has funded a groundbreaking multi-year project that explores how music and storytelling can support the wellbeing of migrant and refugee children.

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.

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.

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.”

High School Interns Power East Lake Expression Engine

Leyda Juarez and Libby O’Neil with Axel Gonzalez, Andres Lopez, Yordy Lopez, Ronaldo Lopez Lorenzo, Araceli Reyonoso Reynoso, Floridalma Reynoso Reynoso, Jafeth Ruiz, and Elisa Velasquez

05-04-2022

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.

Lessons from Firebird Fellows

Kai Jack, Teaching Artist in Jerusalem, Israel/Palestine; Daniel Bermúdez Tamayo, member, mentor, and FAR Lab Leader, Iberacademy; and Francis Gagliardi, Director, Young Leaders Program, El Sistema Greece

05-04-2022

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.

El Sistema School WHIN Expands Charter

04-20-2022

The U.S.’s WHIN Music Community Charter School, the country’s first school to be designed and founded on El Sistema principles, has renewed their charter for five years—expanding to a new middle school this September.

Inside the Piano Pedagogy Research Lab

Mikael Swirp, Research Associate, and Gilles Comeau, Founding Director, The Piano Pedagogy Research Laboratory at the University of Ottawa, Canada

04-06-2022

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.”

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