El Sistema Fellows 2014 Graduation 16th May

The graduation of the 2014 cohort of El Sistema Fellows took place at the New England Conservatory on 16th May. The ceremony also heralded the transition between the end of the Fellowship Program to the Sistema Fellows Resource Center (see previous posts). It was a great way to end a fabulous year: we were able to celebrate the bonds and friendships we had formed by sharing tributes to each other and a multitude of in-jokes.

Read the write-up of the event on the TED Prize blog:

http://blog.tedprize.com/how-50-music-teachers-are-creating-5000-musician-citizens-across-the-us-thanks-to-a-ted-prize-wish/




 

Merida #2

 The system of orchestras within the Merida nucleo

Paper Orchestra – At this nucleo, teachers are responsible for making the instruments, they sing and imitate playing with the students and also demonstrate how to care of the instruments. They again emphasised the approach of 'Play first than read'! As with Suzuki's philosophy of music learning, they compared the process to first knowing how to speak, then read and write language.

Pre-Infantil – After six months of learning on an instrument, the children start in a beginners orchestra. Typically they spend 1 hour 30 mins each day rehearsing, and start a new orchestra with more complex repertoire each year. There is the creation of new beginners orchestra every school year (we saw many orchestras who have been playing for six months as we visited halfway through the academic year).

Infantil - In these rehearsals we were able to observe the role of sectional tutors in a full rehearsal: standing and pacing around the players of their section they mimic bowings, count aloud, help to maintain tempo, remind the children of technical details, relay & explain instructions from the conductor, tune & fix instruments, keep discipline and silence. The focus of all of this constant advice was the main principle of learning to play together – speed, expression, rhythms, etc.

Juvenil - The youth orchestra rehearsal was an incredible experience. The force of the sound of was as overwhelming as the orchestras in the nucleos in Caracas that we had visited. I decided to borrow a violin to experience being a part of one of these youth orchestras (it had been ten years since I had played the violin in an orchestra). The choice of repertoire was not kind to me, the 4th movement of Shostakovich's 5th Symphony 4th movt and Silvestre Revueltas' piece Sensemaya with rhythms that are almost impossible to sightread. The conductor of the Infantil orchestra, Joel Perez, came to my aid and sat down next to me at the back of the second violins section. The support that I saw being given to the children at the previous rehearsal, was now being given to me. Especially in the Revueltas piece that I was not familiar with, Joel counted aloud, sang the rhythms of the percussion section that I would soon join in with, and helped me to negotiate some terrible photocopied scores with pages missing! I found myself watching the bowing of the players in front of me, trying to keep up rather than feeling confident enough to watch the conductor - I was out of my comfort zone musically again. I think I managed about half the notes required of me, but I gained a sense of what it must feel like for a lot of the students who are being constantly challenged in this learning environment.

I was interested in the progression of the students through the different levels of the orchestra. My own experience has involved a more rigid system - we think more of progress on the scale of the individual e.g. this musician has reached a certain technical level and is ready to audition for the next orchestra up. Instead, in many nucleos they follow the progress of the group of children and make the call as to whether the group is ready to tackle more advanced repertoire, thus keeping the community of students together as much as possible. They simply change the title of the orchestra from Children to Youth.

It seems that the change in repertoire tackled is the most defining element of the identity of the new orchestra, for example the children know that if they are starting to learn Tchaikovsky's 4th and Shostakovich's 10th symphonies that they are at the next level. There are auditions as well, for the players at the first stand for example. They evaluate the players every week and change the section leaders every six months. There were auditions for the chance to go to Salzburg and for orchestras in Caracas. Many students were preparing for auditions when we were there - an El Sistema favourite, the 4^th movement of Tchaikovsky's 4th symphony was chosen as audition material, a piece of popular shared repertoire that everyone wants to participate in.

As I have mentioned before, the orchestral repertoire used is unified throughout the nucleos, so students have a clear idea of what level they are working at according to what pieces they are rehearsing. Also they have seen their peers and those before them model playing the same pieces and the community is familiar with them. How much of this approach is strategic or needs-based according to the resources available? Do students (and teachers) find the same repertoire being repeated each year and for each ensemble ultimately uninspiring? How much of the repertoire involves flexibility to community interests? Again it also seems that there is a problem in retaining students from the Pre-Infantil orchestra onwards, otherwise there would be an immense amount of students in the Juvenil orchestra if a new cohort is formed every year.

 

 

Kirstein & Amelia Combrink 31st May 2014

A short break away from blogging and a name change...

 

Creative Connections #3

Creative Connections #2

This year's course in a nutshell:

Participants:

Creative Leadership Team from Guildhall, Peabody Conservatory Students, El Sistema Fellows, City Neighbours High School (about 7 kids), Booker T Middle School (20 kids, choir and band), LB Jazz Band (15 middle schoolers), New Song (30 K&1^st graders), HEMS (20 1^st graders), MAWES (20 1^st graders), Tchaik strings (18 1^st -?graders).

Inspiration: Colours

Process: Launch event, daily composing sessions, dress rehearsal and two concerts

The Fellowship has been an incredible space to reflect on how music can create social change. Collectively, we have thought a lot about the merits of ensemble-based learning, intensive study, community engagement, peer teaching and other concepts that would make music education a more democratic and social experience. How can we encourage ownership, personal agency, and motivation in a world where the master-apprentice, maestro-orchestra model is predominant?

More recently, it has been our visits to projects in other disciplines in the arts that have struck us as being so engaging, full of vibrancy, vitality and utilising the student’s experiences in the world they live in. Essentially, it is the balance between creating and re-creating, engaging with different styles, genres and world traditions where the music education world can be inspired by others in the arts.

The experience of the Creative Connections course, fed into all of these thoughts and more. The atmosphere created is accepting of all musical genres and backgrounds, and participants have the delight of being a ‘musician’ first and foremost. Others expressed the same feelings I was experiencing of being rejuvenated and reinvigorated as a musician - put back in touch with our innate creativity and drawing on our own musical history.

As a general music teacher, I have done a fair amount of composing with young children using a variety of starting points but this project was so different in many ways. Being outside of the classroom freed all the participants from adhering to expected outcomes, created an informal atmosphere and removed the pressure and stress on the students. The process also allowed me to see how a teacher can work more as a leader or facilitator in a very effective way, and lessen the distance between teacher and pupil. It requires a deal of faith and a huge amount of expertise to allow such a process to happen without a detailed structure, and yet to combine so much material to end up with a high quality piece.

During the composing sessions, there was also great sense of trust in the students from the creative leadership team who waited patiently for ideas to arrive, and for participants to gain the confidence to share them. All and any material provided by the students was positively received and used as much as possible in the final piece. The composing process encouraged participants to follow their immediate feelings and gut reactions, without having to explain and overly discuss their thoughts. Those who have had conservatory training in composing mentioned the stark contrast between the ‘over-thinking’ they are used to and attending to intuitive responses and spontaneous reactions that was involved in this process.

El Sistema Fellows in the past have talked about encouraging a multiplicity of roles as a musician; citizen, artist, teacher and scholar. The Creative Connections experience has added the additional roles of composer, improviser, facilitator, rapper and dancer! I now can’t imagine being a music educator without encouraging all of these roles in my students, and I am excited by the possibilities of the musical boundaries that will be pushed by trusting in the immense creativity of children and youth. Most importantly, by involving students, parents and leaders in the same process, the community was brought together in a powerful way, and the end result celebrated the diversity and musical expressions of the participants.

Creative Connections #1



 

After the LA Take A Stand conference, I was very keen to pursue the idea of collaborative creativity in bringing communities together. The guardian angels at the Sistema Fellows program office made it possible for 5 of us to participate in this year's week-long Creative Connections course in Baltimore. This project has been going for a while and I think this year was the sixth time that graduates of the Guidhall School in London had facilitiated this course with Orchkids and Peabody Conservatory students.

 

Here is a video from a previous project:

 

 

The project's founder, Jill Collier-Warne, describes the project at this link below:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/285348735/creative-connections

All the members of the 'creative leadership team' are graduates of the Masters in Leadership course at the Guildhall School of Music and Dance in London. They are all involved in working with various members of the community in creative projects and also have their own ensembles that they compose, record and perform with:

http://www.gsmd.ac.uk/music/principal_study/leadership.html
Jetsam - http://www.jetsamsound.com/
Future band - http://network.youthmusic.org.uk/resources/practice-write-ups/exploration-collaborative-composition-young-musicians
Lazy Habits - http://lazyhabits.com/


 

El Sistema Kenya

The wonderful Karis Crawford has just launched El Sistema Kenya! Can't wait to visit. This will be the first music program modelled on El Sistema in East Africa. She is focusing on building up a strings orchestra. So awesome!

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/el-sistema-kenya