Brazil

The story of Sinfónica Azteca begins about five years ago, when the world was just beginning to reemerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. Across the globe, music programs and youth orchestras were struggling to survive. The need to restore trust in live music and reignite enthusiasm among young musicians had never been greater.

In Mexico, this posed a double challenge, since we had always lacked a national youth orchestra capable of uniting the country’s young musicians in high-caliber, immersive artistic experiences.

When trying to renew an initiative that has existed for almost a decade, our great challenge is to find that precise balance between valuing tradition and proposing something new. At NEOJIBA State Nuclei for Youth and Children’s Orchestras of Bahia, this balance is fundamental to our continuous search for improvement—praising what already works, recognizing what can be improved, and having the tranquility to suggest something innovative without losing the essence of an idea.

It was in this spirit that in 2023, on a sunny afternoon during Bahia’s “eternal summer,” we began to redesign PROCEC, our collective teacher training program.

For over 27 years, the Brazilian nonprofit NGO Instituto Baccarelli has been supporting social work with children and young people in vulnerable situations in the favela of Heliópolis, in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. The Institute has a dramatic founding story: in 1996, after a massive fire devastated the favela, the esteemed choral director Maestro Silvio Baccarelli was moved to begin giving free violin lessons to children whose families had been displaced by the disaster. Shortly afterwards, the small string ensemble that originated the Baccarelli Institute was formed.