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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.

In Belgrade, a Specific Solution to a Complex Problem

Patrick Scafidi, Executive Editor, The Ensemble, in conversation with Dijana Opačić, Program Coordinator, Music Art Project

06-01-2022

Through a collaborative “Orchestra and Choir of Hope,” children from Branko Pešić get to perform with peers from two music schools with whom MAP cooperates. But Music of Hope leaders realized the students had multiple needs—they were hungry, both emotionally and literally.

GLP Imagined Community Concert: We Are the Change

Natalie Fasheh (author), Angie Joseph, Karen Rodriguez, Julian Bernal, GLP ‘22 Cohort

05-18-2022

Our group was inspired to see the singers shine while performing for their families and communities and saw an opportunity to celebrate their empowered selves in our imagined participatory concert, “We Are the Change.” Based on the lyric poetry book Change Sings by inaugural National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman, the concert melds aspects of choral music and teaching artistry to create an engaging, out-of-the-box community experience.

Agrigento: Advancing Music as Social Action 

Maria Lara, Founder and Trustee, Agrigento

05-04-2022

Music for social change is a field with enormous potential, yet one that has not been fully realized because of a central paradox: a common reliance on musical and educational practices that have little to do with social change.

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.

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.”

Sharing Peace with a Piece

Amelie Jansen (New Zealand), Melis Erselçan (Turkey), and Nicolas Lau (U.S.), 2022 Ensemble Ambassadors

04-06-2022

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.

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