Wednesday, September 1, 7:30
Quail Ridge Books and Music
3522 Wade Ave, Raleigh NC
On Wednesday September 1 at 7:30 pm, Executive Director Katie Wyatt will be joined in performance by KidZNotes’ community partners Ari Picker of Lost in the Trees, Bonnie Thron, Principal Cello of the North Carolina Symphony, and Scott Laird from the North Carolina School for Science and Math.
Katie will share stories, photos and videos from her time in Venezuela as an Abreu Fellow, and describe how El Sistema is taking root in NC through KidZNotes.
ALL DAY on September 1, Quail Ridge Books and Music will donate 20% of non-discounted sales IN STORE and ONLINE at www.quailridgebooks.com that day to KidZNotes. For the 20% contribution, you must mention KidZNotes when you make your purchase, or enter “kidznotes” into the Comments field when making your purchases online.
Get your holiday shopping done early, and support KidZNotes!
An incredible article in the Durham Herald about the power of volunteerism and the can-do spirit KidZNotes supporters have. To quote, we are “Basically, changing the world!”
Greetings! I’m currently in Stirling, Scotland working with Sistema Scotland’s
first nucleus, Big Noise Raploch. In order to give a wider understanding of Sistema’s global reach and a sort of “what’s to come” to KidZNotes in Durham, I’ll be reporting occasionally on my experiences here. Today was the first day of a month-long summer school for about 120 kids in Raploch. Raploch is the area just behind Stirling Castle where Big Noise delivers instruction during the school year for just over 200 children in their after-school program.
A team of 16 musicians (8 of whom started working yesterday) representing all areas of a symphony orchestra—strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion—lead the young classical musicians in full orchestras, sectionals, chamber groups, and choir. Currently all of the children play a stringed instrument, but winds, brass, and percussion are all to be introduced this summer.
Today, the children broke up into four orchestras—Purple, Orange, Red, and
Rinconada (named for Raploch’s sister-nucleus in Venezuela)—and jumped straight into rehearsal. The Purple orchestra is made up of the youngest kids (5-6 years), so they began working on learning the open strings of their instruments with help from the Red orchestra. The premiere Rinconada group (8-10 years) began sight-reading sheet music, a dramatic improvement from last year’s summer school. The children also rehearsed chamber music, played musicianship games, and welcomed the new teachers.
I got the chance to participate in Take a Musician Home for Tea—a miniature
concert in the living room of any kid who signs up. Ysla, Josif, and I went to a nursery- school boy’s house and played a few traditional Scottish tunes before he showed his mom the songs and activities he had been learning in Big Noise Nursery. TAMHFT is a great way to get the whole community—children, parents, grandparents, and neighbors—involved with Big Noise.
Last weekend, we put a few of the kids on a bus to Perth to see the National
Children’s Youth Orchestra of Scotland in concert. They played Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead, Kodàly’s Peacock Variations, and Gershwin’s Strike Up the Band Overture. Our kids were great audience members—in spite of the fact that Perth Concert Hall has some of the squeakiest audience seating anywhere—and really enjoyed seeing children only a few years older than them playing such difficult repertoire.
Earlier in the week, Carolyn Sparey came in to work with the children. She is a former principal violist of the Scottish National Orchestra and the BBC SSO, and she played a movement from a Bach Cello Suite and a piece she composed after watching her son at a skateboard park in Paris. The kids enjoyed learning some of the effects she included in her piece: slides, left-hand pizzicato, col legno bowing, and more. A few of the kids decided to write their own pieces, so we’ll see how that turns out.
Hopefully this serves as a good introduction to Big Noise’s summer school.
Inspiring article on the growth and mission of El Sistema USA and the Abreu Fellows.
By Jeremy Eichler photo: Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra. (Rainer Maillard/Deutsche Grammophon, via Bloomberg News)
I have never seen Symphony Hall erupt the way it did that night in 2007, with Venezuela’s Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra onstage. It was not the precision and polish of the group’s Bartok or Beethoven that set off the crowd, but the sheer expressive potency and exuberant physicality of the performance. My guess is that the music meant more to those in the audience that night because, at its core, it meant more to these players, some of whom had risen up beyond violent streets and poverty. Taking their final bows, musicians lofted their violins, trumpets, trombones, clarinets, and flutes high above their heads, as if to simply say, “Here they are: the instruments that saved us.’’ Article continues here “Catching the upbeat to a new movement”
Jeremy Eichler, The Boston Globe
7/11/2010 First in a series of articles that will continue next Sunday in the Arts & Entertainment section.
CARACAS — In the southern reaches of this city, La Rinconada music center is buzzing with a happy sonic chaos as music spills from rehearsal rooms into the hallways. A circle of 3-year-olds ponders the mysteries of the hand bell, older children pick through Venezuelan folk tunes on guitars, and a cluster of brass players sounds out the theme song from “The Simpsons.’’ In a large, packed rehearsal room, a seasoned Venezuelan choral teacher is warming up young voices.
Suddenly, she hands the floor over to three Boston visitors.
Rebecca Levi, 24, and Lorrie Heagy, 45, swing into action, teaching two songs in Spanish along with some complex hand movements. David Malek, 41, grabs a drum and lays down a beat. In minutes, all 80 children are on their feet, and the room churns with song and dance.
The Venezuelan phenomenon known widely by its nickname — El Sistema, or “The System’’ — attracts many visitors, but none quite like this. Levi, Heagy, and Malek are members of the inaugural class of fellows from El Sistema USA: a handpicked group of young, monastically dedicated American musicians, based at New England Conservatory, and determined to bring this revolution in music education to Boston and other American communities.
They have come to learn the secrets of El Sistema, the almost fairy tale-like way it has turned to music as a vehicle for keeping poor children off the violent streets, giving them self-confidence, discipline, and other practical life skills, and in the process building up urban communities around symphony orchestras made up of children. El Sistema now reaches 400,000 Venezuelan children, with 70 percent living below the poverty line.
Music educators from Scotland to Australia have been scrambling to import El Sistema’s principles to their own countries. Until now, however, there has never been a concerted effort to do so in the United States. That is changing, and Boston is emerging as a national center of these efforts.
With headquarters at the New England Conservatory, the recently established El Sistema USA is trying to jumpstart a national movement dedicated to music education not as extracurricular enrichment but as a vehicle for transforming the lives of children in underserved urban communities.
“Everybody is excited about it,’’ said Mark Churchill, a cellist, conductor, and dean emeritus of the conservatory’s department of preparatory and continuing education, who serves as director of El Sistema USA.
“I’ve been involved in lots of different aspects of music-making and music education over my entire career, and I’ve just never seen anything that has allowed — or demanded — that people rise above their personal and institutional self-limitations and think in an idealistic way that’s full of hope, energy, and this sense of rightness.’’
What a year! The Abreu Fellows shared their stories and photos in a presentation and awards ceremony at the New England Conservatory on Wednesday, June 16. We are happy to be finished, and each one of the fellows will be leaders in the El Sistema movement in the United States.
TED.com posted a wonderful blog on the ceremony, and quotes from each of the fellows on the future of El Sistema in the U.S.
The Abreu Fellows will be starting El Sistema initiatives across the U.S.:
I am so happy to be returning to Durham to start as Executive Director of KidZNotes on July 1. There will be so much news to follow, please stay in touch!
As an Abreu Fellow, I have been immersed this year in the history, life, challenges, myth, and no-holds-barred god’s honest truth about El Sistema. The hype is real. I left my very stable (that may be an exaggeration) job in orchestra management in one of the worst times in the job-market to jump off the cliff. I spent a year back in school and abroad, chasing this dream. I have returned inspired and obsessed. Here’s just one reason why.
El Sistema is not just a social program disguised as a music-education program, it is also a leadership program, disguised as a social program. I first encountered El Sistema in 2005, when I was touring as a violist with the Youth Orchestra of the Americas. We spent three-four weeks in Venezuela, rehearsing with our conductors Gustavo Dudamel and Carlos Miguel Prieto. In those days, half the orchestra still had their bets on Prieto as the favorite. Before this year in the fellowship, I thought there must just be something in the water in Caracas. My friends from the US, with masters degrees from CIM, Julliard, U Mich, IU, were all being beat out in the seating auditions by Venezuelan children of 18-19 years old. We never had a chance, these young Venezuelans were born to lead their sections. Why?
In returning to Venezuela this February as an Abreu Fellow, I was thrilled to see all of my friends from the orchestra again. And I was shocked. Many of my friends, while in our early 20s I had played with, toured with, and danced the night away with, were now in charge! These young musicians had been given the helm of a now international sensation, and they were running with it. Not a single member of the young team of administration of FESNOJIV is much past 30, and the large majority are musicians. Why?
Over the past 35 years, El Sistema has churned and churned to produce what is the now infamous Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela. Each musician in the SBYOV is a product of their “nucleo”, the community music center where they were cherished and nourished, challenged, protected, and loved. The musicians of the SBYOV are HIGHLY aware of their past, and of their obligations. There is a deep sense of history in them, traced back to Maestro Abreu himself. Many many of the musicians return to their nucleos to perform and teach on a regular basis, some of which are days of driving from where they live and perform in Caracas, deep in the middle of the desert, jungle, or mountains. When the SBYOV performs, I’ve asked a few of my friends where the energy comes from, what is it that lights them on fire. Why at every rehearsal and sectional it’s edge-of-the-seat playing. Here are a few quotes… “because everyone else is working so hard”… “it’s our job”…”we’re at the top, the kids, they look up to us”… There’s an iceberg and they are just the tip of it. So many kids (over 400,000 to be exact) are looking up to them as their inspiration to practice, to succeed, to change their environment. The musicians of the SBYOV and the musician leadership of FESNOJIV feel as though they have a huge responsibility to be the best, to carry the flag. They are leaders, all of them. Growing up in El Sistema has ingrained in them a sense of social responsibility, and an obligation to shape the futures of the children who are inspired by them. Can you imagine if we performed everyday as though the future of children in poverty in our community depended on it? It is a noble calling, and no small task. And for me, totally totally thrilling.
Since returning from Venezuela, the road trip has not stopped! The Fellows prepared for a major presentation for the national symposium on El Sistema in early May, presented in Los Angeles by the LA Phil, El Sistema USA and the League of American Orchestras. I met a number of inspired citizen-musicians, who were in the beginning stages of building El Sistema programs in their city, and those for whom El Sistema is just a twinkle in their eye. All agreed that there is an intoxicating passion that follows El Sistema wherever it appears, and that there is no ignoring the movement afoot. Change is a’coming.
Dudamel with YOLA, onstage at Walt Disney Concert Hall
The symposium, Composing Change, was dreamed up one year ago, when Gustavo Dudamel challenged the fledgling El Sistema inspired Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles (YOLA) that they would perform in the very next year on the stage of Walt Disney Concert Hall. And so a spectacle was born! As a finale to a week of discussions about the untapped potential inside children living in poverty, their performance evaporated any clouds of doubt. These young musicians from South Central LA are beginning to have an idea of the future that is ahead for them, and it is beyond their wildest dreams, seguramente.
Following LA, I flew straight to New York City to spend three weeks with the Harmony Program, an El-Sistema inspired organization with nucleos in Brooklyn and Harlem. Led by Anne Fitzgibbon, a member of the national
Me with the strings class at PS 129 in Harlem. Led by City College student-teacher Megumi.
advisory team for El Sistema USA, Harmony is a program of the City University of New York, the largest urban university system in the country. Harmony embraces the students-as-teachers concept of El Sistema by partnering CUNY campuses and music students to their local elementary school, starting with PS 129 in Harlem and PS 152 in Brooklyn. The sites are environments of learning, where 2nd-4th graders are learning dedication, how to make choices and their consequences, goal-setting, and CUNY young music students are learning how to lead and teach.
I jetted down to Durham last weekend for a very special event. Paul Tough, author of Whatever it Takes addressed a crowd of curious and eager East Durham residents on the challenges before us as we attempt to create a model of the Harlem Children’s Zone through the East Durham Children’s Initiative.
Paul Tough, author of "Whatever It Takes" speaking at Holton Center for EDCI
Mr. Tough described the successes of the Harlem Children’s Zone, and the principles that would be essential to impart in communities where it is duplicated:
-Connection – “bringing together services in a reliable safety net”
-Accountability -”ending the cycle of no one being responsible for when a child fails”
-Outreach- parents are hugely involved and the grassroots advocacy is intense
-Educational pipeline- starting in early childhood, with an extended day, that continues through middle and high school
-Collaboration- with philanthropists, non-profits, and government entities that are committed to a single defined purpose: the education of our “Zone’s” children
KidZNotes and the East Durham Children’s Initiative will be working together to embrace these principles whole-heartedly, and I for one can’t wait for the fall!
Tonight we’re taking Harmony Program kids to the LA Phil’s first US tour with Gustavo Dudamel at Lincoln Center, and we hope to sneak backstage! Just imagine Khaliq’s smile then…
Khaliq, a star of PS 129 in Harlem. He keeps that smile when he plays!
Durham can close its achievement gap through the East Durham Children’s Initiative. Join us for a talk by Paul Tough, New York Times Magazine editor and author of Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America. Tough’s book tells the true story of Geoffrey Canada, the creator of the Harlem Children’s Zone. Recently featured on CBS’ 60 Minutes, Geoffrey Canada’s approach to fighting inner-city poverty has attracted attention and praise from policymakers and educators across the
political spectrum—including President Obama who has pledged federal funding to support the replication of Canada’s ideas through the creation of Promise Neighborhoods throughout the nation.
Free and open to the public
Co-sponsored by Durham County Library and GlaxoSmithKline
East Durham Children’s Initiative
Days after she returned from Venezuela, Katie was interviewed by Tara Lynn for WCPE. She recounts stories of the children and orchestras she worked with in El Sistema in cities all over Venezuela, and how KidZNotes will be the first El Sistema organization in North Carolina.
Also, the further adventures of Abreu Fellows are featured in Symphony Magazine, On the Road to El Sistema Part II, authored by Katie with fellow Fellow Rebecca Levi.
