Reunirnos

When the Academy for Impact through Music (AIM) suggested bringing the Fire Up! residency to Athens, we felt both excitement and a strong sense of responsibility. Our space is deeply meaningful to us; El Sistema Greece is a vibrant community grounded in trust, creativity, and daily collaboration, and inviting colleagues from across Europe into that community felt acutely personal. The residency itself was intense and demanding, with constant transitions between workshops, rehearsals, peer exchanges, and shared experiences. It also afforded us a rare opportunity: a chance to be students in our own teaching spaces, and to see those spaces through the eyes of our peers.

On May 30, Ohio will join two other U.S. states (Colorado and Arkansas) in starting a statewide instrument-donation program, sponsored by a number of collaborating music education organizations and a lot of volunteers.

Creative Capital for Artists is a free resource that announces, grants, residencies, and award opportunities for artists in all disciplines.

Each summer for the past 18 years, Music Connects has brought 60 young people from divided and marginalized communities across the Western Balkans together in Skopje.

Carnegie Hall celebrates 15 years of its Musical Connections program with Sing Sing Voices, a new collection of video playlists featuring original music created by participants and alumni at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison.

In arts education programs, we tend to work with our heads down. Doing our work every day is enough: it takes more time than we have to create our lesson plans, to build healthy organizational infrastructure that is adaptive and responsive, or even to collaborate with the colleagues within our own organizations. As artists and arts leaders, we forget to look up and out. But as various crises combine forces to pull us away from each other, our need for collective work is not something we can afford to have on a backburner. It needs to be a central focus. We need to build strong local networks and to diversify our collaborators. 

We need to connect—with fellow arts organizations, and with organizations we might never consider in our daily work.

For over 100 years, Britain’s Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) has supported music education in the U.K. and across the world.

If you are going to hire a staff member as your first dedicated fundraiser, Patrick Slevin (Executive Director of Austin Soundwaves) offers advice based on his personal experience.

The Art of Positive Fatalism – Lessons from Kinshasa is a new book by Lukas Pairon, the founder of the international research organization SIMM (Social Impact of Making Music).

The youth orchestra of the Brazilian program NEOJIBA has just returned from its 10th international tour, having visited Frankfurt, Germany, and four cities in China.