Community Music

El Sistema USA just opened the applications for the 2027-28 Youth Leadership Institute (YLI), a year-long cohort that brings together program leaders and young musicians as co-learners.

The image is jarring: a vibrant green lawn scattered with brass instruments in various forms of disrepair, some rusted, others broken or bent. A few rest in old cases with broken hinges. This video was shared by Kyewalyanga Fredrick (Freddie), founder of Saved by Music Foundation, a nonprofit in Uganda that serves 111 children between the ages of 8 and 16. Alongside shelter, food, healthcare, and school fees, the program teaches music through the Elgon Youth Brass Band that rehearses every day. Unfortunately, like a majority of programs in the region, Saved by Music Foundation does not have enough playable instruments for all of its students.

In Nancy Fraser’s framework, social justice requires both redistribution (economic resources) and recognition (cultural and symbolic status). Symbolic recognition is the validation of one’s identity, dignity, and self-worth within a broader socio-cultural context. And in 1990s Medellín—our time—young people faced material deprivation and severe symbolic misrecognition, viewed solely through the lens of urban violence, stigma, and invisibility. 

When the team at Community MusicWorks built the program’s new home, they brought their longtime luthier into their building.

One of our longest-standing members asked a question at a meeting this year that I still cannot answer well. He had rehearsed four or five pieces for our concert last December. On the afternoon itself, he participated in playing only one of them. He wanted to know how that had come about. He put his question to everyone in the room.

SIMM (Social Impact of Making Music) is calling for applications to participate in the 14th SIMM research seminar, happening February 24–26, 2027 at Vienna’s mdw-University of Music.

Last month, my daughter’s choir director needed parents to take tickets to the year-end concert. I had been a choir singer and director myself, so I know the invisible work it takes to put students on a stage. When the request came, I wanted to be the kind of parent who showed up.

Then, my week got overwhelming. By the time the concert arrived, I was no longer deciding between helping and not helping. I was deciding which responsibility would boil over first if I took my attention off it.

The first chapter of a Lullaby Project song is usually written in a room where strangers have just met. Professional composers sit beside a mother who has never written music before. A child wanders around the room, curious but unsure. Participants may speak through an interpreter. Others may communicate more through gestures than words. At first, there are introductions, hesitant smiles, and long pauses. There is no score, no lyrics, no expectation of what the music should become. 

Bombs destroyed the well-equipped buildings of the Palestine National Conservatory and war displacement scattered its faculty. But that didn’t stop them.

In my small Portuguese village of Pousos, between the giant waves of Nazaré and the Shrine of Fátima, we had a community band. I joined at age 8, playing flugelhorn. I’m forever grateful for this decision, which launched a life in music. But it wasn’t until years later, when I served as the director of several conservatories, that I began asking why it took so long to get started.