Dalouge Smith

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

Making Music to Make Healthy Minds

06-01-2022

There have simply been too many starts and stops, too many hours of social distancing, too many people sick and dying, and too many acts of violence for any of us to feel fully stable. And the combined forces of destabilization—COVID’s erratic disruption of our lives, the prevalence of violence, and the ongoing struggle to overcome racism and homophobia—are taking their greatest toll on young people.

Creating the COVID-19 Community Response Fund

07-01-2020

The Lewis Prize for Music, a philanthropic foundation established in the United States in 2018, is guided by the mission of partnering with leaders who create positive change by investing in young people through music. We were only two months past announcing our inaugural awards when the COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders took effect. At the time, we were finalizing our internal evaluation and identifying lessons learned. We were excited to nearly double the time frame of our process by opening the 2021 Accelerator Award letter of interest in late spring.

Principles of Scale for Growing a Sistema System

09-01-2019

In the early days of the U.S. El Sistema movement, Maestro Abreu regularly spoke at national conferences. Often during these events, he would state, “El Sistema is not a system.” Yet we all marvelled at the interconnected structure of neighborhood núcleos, regional seminarios, state youth orchestras, and the multiple levels of youth orchestras based at Caracas’s national conservatory.

Radical Musical Reciprocity

10-01-2017

The theater director Peter Sellars spoke four years ago at the L.A. Phil and Barbican-sponsored “Future Play: Music Systems in the 21st Century.” He called for the democratizing of classical music and music education. “I have to ask the classical music world to respect reciprocity, which is the basis of all human interaction. And not have this one-way flow of ‘all these kids will learn to play Beethoven.’…We have to move into radical structures of reciprocity.”

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