Higher Education

The student-teacher relationship in classical music conservatories is unlike almost any other.

Do you know the history of music education?

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.

How are musicians creating social impact across European communities?

El Sistema USA (ESUSA) just released their 2024 Census Report, with data from 84 member programs serving over 30,000 young people—a 26% increase since 2022! 

With their decades of positive impact and wealth of institutional knowledge, it would have been easy for DWS to focus on maintaining their success. Instead, we at the Playing For Change Foundation were recently privileged to partner with DWS to bolster and expand their music program. The initial goals of our partnership were simple: identify and hire professional music educators who can help take the existing program to the next level, and maintain the standard of excellence that DWS has achieved in its other extracurricular programming.

In Elkhart County, Indiana, our goal is to provide all people with equitable access to quality music education from birth to young adulthood. We believe music is a birthright for every child in our community—that the extraordinary benefits of music education should be built into the fabric of every young person’s upbringing. It’s not a coincidence that the name of our program, ECoSistema (Elkhart County El Sistema), means “ecosystem” in Spanish: we believe that the El Sistema-inspired field can have the greatest impact when we take the overlapping systems already in place in our community and build music into them.