November 2018

We start with the premise, “Get comfortable with the uncomfortable.” Collaboration is not a simple process – it is so much easier just to insulate your organization and do everything in exactly the way you would like. But then the larger purpose that so many of us are working towards – life-changing opportunities for young people that are made possible by equitable music education for all – will never be achieved.

More than the sum of our parts. We tell our students that’s what an orchestra is. Violins plus clarinets, trombones plus marimbas plus cellos—all those disparate musical essences combined create something that is unimaginable when hearing each of them separately. The whole is of a different order.

Last August, I had the good fortune to be the only U.S. musician in the Sistema Europe Youth Orchestra. SEYO generously offered me that opportunity because I was born in Birmingham, England – the site of the “SEYO 18” Festival – and was back visiting the city after living in the States for 14 years.

Opera is one of the most complex accomplishments of our Western musical heritage, mixing vocal and instrumental musical with poetry, theater and visual arts.  In our times, freed from many elitist clichés, it can come back to its primal source and be experienced as a very popular form of artistic expression. Its mix of singing and acting, of costumes and lightings, can be a great attraction for young people, who can play and enjoy as they learn from the operatic experience.

The Turkish Sistema program Barış İçin Müzik (Music for Peace) inaugurated our third site in November 2016, in Adalar (also known as the Prince Islands), an archipelago off the coast of Istanbul. With the support of Adalar City Council, we began the new site with 25 children on stringed instruments.

The Philippines-based Orchestra of the Filipino Youth (OFY) made its Middle East debut last month.

On Saturday, 27 October, Sistema in Norwich, England teamed up with a circus!

Watch a moving 4-minute tribute to Jose Antonio Abreu by Mexican conductor Alondra de la Parra, who was invited many times by Maestro Abreu to guest-conduct the Simon Bolívar Orchestra of Venezuela.

Xiquitsi is celebrating its fifth anniversary, and is using the marker to share its work with a wider audience and public, in its home of Mozambique and in other countries.  They have had a five concert series in this celebratory year—an ambitious expansion of their previous concert offerings.  This anniversary year has been one of new accomplishments.