There’s a lot of money in private music instruction. It’s one of the most stable and lucrative educational markets, and could present a very valuable income stream to Sistema programs while diminishing the “poor kids only” perception, promoting integration and mollifying sponsors too.
January 1, 2012
Here is something completely arbitrary, compiled in an utterly unscientifically manner bereft of statistical methodology or evaluative metrics. Ten thoughts from 2011, ten memories or developments or events or discoveries that I think might be worth mentioning
December 29, 2011
A free logic model for El Sistema programs, usage of which is governed by a Creative Commons License.
December 18, 2011
Anybody who thinks I dwell in an ivory tower of music education, content to comment from afar, is sadly mistaken; as one of perhaps two Abreu Fellows who have at least one child, I’m aware how profoundly my daughter will be affected by all the choices my wife and I make for her.
December 16, 2011
We should pay children to read great literature. It has manifest educational and social benefits. It’s not a foreign idea to be immediately despised; it was hatched in America. It’s not socialist or morally objectionable; it’s just early exposure to capitalism in that it concretely rewards effort.
December 6, 2011
The answer isn’t a Marxian redistribution of wealth, but improving and leveling educational quality. Not achieving equalization of educational outcomes, the unobtainable and highly socialist fantasy of No Child Left Behind, but ensuring equalization of educational opportunity - a process that demands equal access to music education.
November 28, 2011
Orchestras are living, thinking organisms, all related biological entities of a clearly defined, if endangered genus, but each unique, with a distinct character and temperament. They aren’t mass-produced hunks of machinery, no matter how fine the engineering.
November 9, 2011
In an era of great social challenge, music educators and professional musicians have by and large been relegated to the sidelines, lacking not the will but the knowledge of how to help as society has bled out in front of them.
October 27, 2011
Instruments represent the number one capital expenditure of any Sistema initiative, even very few purchase them new. The default option, the “instrument donation drive,” has evolved into a rite of passage as part of a program launch. It’s excellent publicity, and it reduces start-up costs considerably, although not entirely. There’s no such thing as a free viola: the instruments that are donated always require some degree of maintenance or repair, especially strings. Even once restored to playing condition, they continue to need constant care, especially strings. They’re also extremely fragile…especially strings
January 14, 2012
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