Luck, In Launching The Atlanta Music Project

The Atlanta Music Project Logo

After the Abreu Fellows graduated, my plan was to continue blogging as the Atlanta Music Project started coming together. I thought it'd be interesting for people to come along for the ride of the developments and ups-and-downs of launching an El Sistema program outside of Venezuela. Well obviously, those blogs never happened and I'd like to blame it on the fact that I was just too busy trying to start the program.

By now you may know that the Atlanta Music Project, the El Sistema-inspired program that I co-founded with our board chair Al Meyers, was successfully launched on October 4, 2010 in Southwest Atlanta, in partnership with the City Of Atlanta Office Of Cultural Affairs. I don't want to bore you with the all the details involved with starting a non-profit. Obviously it's a lot of work and requires a great team, which we have. But what I feel really helped us - and I'd be kidding myself if I didn't admit it - was quite simply, luck. A lot of it. Here's just a few examples from many.

As the new Mayor of Atlanta, Kasim Reed, started his term in January 2010, he announced plans to re-open all the recreation centers so kids would have somewhere to hang out after school. In July 2010, I got a phone call from Camille Love, the Director of the City Of Atlanta's Office Of Cultural Affairs. She wanted the Atlanta Music Project to be one of the after-school programs taking place at the Mayor's recreation centers, starting in September 2010. The Atlanta Music Project now runs out of the Office Of Cultural Affairs' Gilbert House, where we're given the space, administration staff and infrastructure to run our classes. It's a great partnership, that partly comes down to luck and great timing, because if it wasn't for the Mayor and Ms. Love's vision, the Atlanta Music Project may not have launched this quickly.

Me, Camille Love (Director of Cultural Affairs), Al Meyers (Co-Founder and Board Chair of AMP) at a press conference where Mayor Kasim Reed announced the launch of the "Culture Club: An After-School Experience".
The Atlanta Music Project is the provider of music classes in this after-school program.

Here's another one. In April of 2010, the 2010 Abreu Fellows left Caracas to go back to the United States. The first leg of the trip was from Caracas to Atlanta, so I opted to spend our spring break in Atlanta, where I would keep trying to get things going with the Atlanta Music Project. Showered, but unshaven and in need of a haircut, I rented a car at the airport and drove straight to the Woodruff Arts Center, home of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, where students of the Talent Development Program were performing.

Students of the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra and the Atlanta Symphony's Talent Development Program at the Gilbert House, giving a performance and demonstration of string instruments to the students of the
Atlanta Music Project.

At the reception for this concert, Melanie Darby, who is on our board of advisors, introduced me to Dr. Stanley Romanstein, the new President of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. I asked Dr. Romanstein if we could meet so I could talk to him about my plans for El Sistema in Atlanta. The meeting went great and at the end he asked "So, what do you need?" On the advice of my Abreu Fellows Program mentor, Don Jones, I was prepared for this question. I asked Dr. Romanstein for office space within the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra offices (I was tired of spending my days at coffees shops for their wifi and my evenings going to FedEx to print documents, spending money I didn't have). His exact response was "done." I was actually kind of confused for a second because I had prepared a bunch of reasons why I the office space was needed, but I never had to explain. I believe we were lucky that Dr. Romanstein, who is a former Executive Director of the Baltimore School For The Arts and a champion of music education, joined the Atlanta Symphony literally a few weeks before I arrived in Atlanta from Venezuela. Dr. Romanstein and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra have been strong supporters of our program from the beginning and I couldn't be more grateful for their support. The timing couldn't have been better.

 In February 2010, I went to TED2010 with some of the 2010 Abreu Fellows. I blogged about performing on stage, meeting Will Smith and Sheryl Crow etc. What I didn't tell you then, because I didn't know where it would lead, is that on the last night I walked into the elevator at our hotel and met two TEDsters who happened to work for Coca Cola in Atlanta. They had just seen me perform with the Abreu Fellows on the TED Stage and so they knew all about El Sistema, El Sistema USA and the Abreu Fellows Program. I told them I was planning El Sistema in Atlanta and asked if there was a Coca Cola Foundation I could apply to for funds. They put me in touch with the Coca-Cola Foundation and I met with them later in April. The foundation folks said it sounds like a good idea, but please come back when you have more traction. Fair enough, but not the answer you want to hear when what you need to get traction is, funding. But with the City Of Atlanta partnership developing, we were finally able to secure funding from Coca-Cola that essentially enabled us to launch the program. The Coca-Cola company is still our biggest sponsor to date and I'm thankful for them having taken a leap of faith to support our music for social change initiative. To see all our sponsors and collaborators, please visit this page and this page on the Atlanta Music Project website.

The Abreu Fellows performing at TED2010. 

The City Of Atlanta Office Of Cultural Affairs, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Coca-Cola Company are three of our partners, without whom, the Atlanta Music Project couldn't have launched. When I talk about us being lucky, people often tell me it's not luck but the result of hard work. I certainly believe that is true. We have a board, volunteers and enthusiasts who work tirelessly on our behalf. But I think the two biggest factors in our successful launch are that we have a good mission and we've been lucky. So far, no one has told me (at least not to my face!), that what we're doing here is not both needed and positive. I believe that what El Sistema has done in Venezuela and what the Abreu Fellows Program has become in the United States, is extremely credible, and we at the Atlanta Music Project are just a small part of a huge movement to save lives with music. With all these elements supporting us, time and time again, my planning team and I found ourselves in the right place at the right time, with good fortune that helped advance our launch.

AMP students in a trombone group lesson with AMP teaching artist Ed Nicholson.

In the end it is most important that our luck as a planning team has found its way to the community. Our students now have the opportunity to learn an instrument, sing in a choir, learn musicianship and play in orchestra, right in their own neighbourhood everyday of the week. They're great kids and I'll tell you a little bit about them in my next blog. Comments, concerns and questions about my blog or the Atlanta Music Project are always appreciated. Thank you for reading!

Check us out at www.atlantamusicproject.org.

THE ABREU FELLOWS GRADUATE! WHAT NEXT?!!

Graduation Pic

Graduation Day. Just like that, a whole school year has flown by and my Abreu Fellowship colleagues and I have graduated. And we're now on to the reality of leading El Sistema programs outside of Venezuela.

For our graduation the New England Conservatory arranged a great little ceremony and reception for us. In attendance were many of the seminar leaders we had had over the year as well as NEC board members, faculty and staff. I enjoyed seeing both of my mentors in the audience: NEC viola faculty Martha Katz and NEC Vice-President for Institutional Development, Don Jones. The superb Marcus Santos, who led our Samba percussion workshop in January also showed up. And Martha, our spanish teacher was present with her new 3-week old baby boy. Oh, and how could I forget Anna Verghese and Amy Novogratz from the TED Prize! It feels like only yesterday they were interviewing me for the fellowship.

With the Amy Novogratz and Anna Verghese of the TED Prize production team

The ceremony opened with  Katie Wyatt and I playing a couple of movements from Bach's First Suite for Cello, and Katie encored with a beautiful rendition of a song we heard many, many, many, many times in Venezuela, aptly titled "Venezuela". I didn't do nearly enough concertizing this year so when we were offered the chance to perform at the graduation I jumped at it.

The two Abreu Fellows doing El Sistema in the South. Katie Wyatt in Durham and myself in Atlanta.

As this was my fourth post-secondary graduation, I selfishly decided I had earned the right to dress the way I wanted. I wore khakis, a collared shirt and on top of that a t-shirt that was hand-made and given to me by one of the mothers of a child from the nucleo in Acarigua. It read: "YO SOY100% FESNOJIV" (I am 100% El Sistema), and below that were the Venzuelan flag and Canadian flag side-by-side. I thought it was appropriate attire and nobody complained (to my face).

Following the music we began our group presentation, very similar to the one we did in Los Angeles, basically reflecting on our time in Venezuela through anecdotes, stories, pictures and videos. I again told the story of 10-year old Carlos in Acarigua, who, nine days after I gave him his first bassoon lesson, was thrown into the nucleo orchestra to play Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture in concert. It's a great story that represents what El Sistema is about in so many ways. I discuss this in more detail in my blog post on our time in Acarigua, Venezuela.

I have to say, after doing this presentation for Dr. Abreu in Caracas, in Los Angeles for 200 professional music educators, administrators and musicians, we had it down pretty good. I am particularly happy with having had so many opportunities to do public speaking throughout the year as I know it will come in very handy during the coming years doing this work. I'm still more comfortable playing the bassoon in public but compared to last October when just starting the fellowship, speaking in public is now a lot easier. In fact  I quite enjoy it and would be lying if I said it wasn't fun. It doesn't hurt to have something so inspiring as El Sistema to talk about. It practically pitches itself!

Our presentation was followed by the presentation of the Abreu Fellows Program certificates, a reception in the office of NEC President, Tony Woodcock and tons of pictures.

At the post-graduation reception with El Sistema USA Director Mark Churchill and El Sistema USA Managing Director, Stephanie Scherpf.

AND NOW FOR NEXT YEAR...

This year of training went by very fast and has come to an end for us, the first class of Abreu Fellows, but the journey of playing our part as ambassadors of El Sistema has really just begun.

I should mention that I'm thrilled to learn that 10 new Abreu Fellows have been selected to form the second class. We've met quite a few of them already and read their biographies. As you will see soon when they are officially announced, they are a stellar group and I look forward to getting to know them better and working alongside them in the future. Remember, Abreu's TED Prize wish was to train 50 fellows, so this program will be around for at least the next four years and hopefully more. If you're thinking of applying, don't wait until the fifth year because it's going to get harder and harder to get accepted as more and more people apply for the fellowship.


Abreu Fellow and my "El Sistema in the South" partner in crime, Katie Wyatt, performs at the Abreu Fellows graduation ceremony.

As for the the first class of Fellows, we're taking our training and experiences to the real world. After spending the year searching for job opportunities, being recruited, doing interviews and tons  of travelling, we'll be playing leading roles in El Sistema program all over the United States. Here's how it's breaking out:

Lorrie Heagy is returning  to Juneau, Alaska to initiate Juneau Music Matters, Dan Berkowitz is Manager of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's YOLA, Christine Witkowski is leading YOLA's second site called YOLA at HOLA (Heart of Los Angeles), Alvaro Rodas is founding the Corona Youth Music Project in Queens, NY, David Malek and Rebecca Levi are co-directing a program in Boston at the Conservatory Lab Charter School, my main man Stanford Thompson is director of Tune-Up Philly, a program of the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra, and Katie Wyatt is executive director of KidzNotes in Durham, NC. As for me, I will head to down to Atlanta as executive director of the Atlanta Music Project.

The Atlanta Music Project will launch its pilot year in late 2010 in an underserved community in Atlanta.  I have a great team in Atlanta and we've been working hard all year to get this program off the ground. It was hard to balance learning a bunch of new skills in the fellowship while applying them literally at the same time to a real world project.  Several times I found myself in Venezuela working late into the night on the Atlanta Music Project. Balancing the fellowship curriculum, the Venezuelan residency and working on next year's project was a handful  but at the same time it was exhilarating to be able to watch something spectacular in Venezuela during the day and then go back to the hotel at night and immediately apply what I had seen to a real-life project. I can assure you that all the other fellows were doing the same routine as me this year in order to have their programs launch on time too. El Sistema is very nice and all but no one ever said it was easy. A few times I asked myself what the hell I had signed up for. This year was a steep learning curve and sometimes I feel like we're all crazy to be jumping into this. But then again everyone thought Dr. Abreu was crazy too...

You can read all about the Atlanta Music Project on our website and you visit our page on http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1833375224/the-atlanta-music-project-music-for-social-change-0 to learn how you can represent the Atlanta Music Project by buying t-shirts, medallions, DVDs etc. We're also on Twitter and Facebook where you can follow our developments daily.

The Abreu Fellows back at the beginning of the fellowship in October 2009.

For me, the best thing about the Abreu Fellows Program is that it has given me the opportunity to engage in something that I felt was in me all along but was going to be hard to manifest itself from me simply playing the bassoon. I've always been sort of impatient and had low tolerance for injustice and inequality but I felt I couldn't do much about that by simply playing in orchestra, and this always bothered me. But thanks to the Abreu Fellowship, I now have a way to use music as a vehicle for something even greater.

Towards the end of our first meeting with Dr. Abreu in Caracas, he began to thank everyone for helping make the Abreu Fellows Program come true. Then, he sort of jokingly thanked himself for thinking of the idea of the Abreu Fellows Program. Later that day, one of Dr. Abreu's aids mentioned to us that that was the first time he'd ever heard Dr. Abreu give himself credit for any of the work he has done. I think he's right to thank himself, and I thank him too. Nobel Peace Prize for Dr. Abreu?

As I said, the real fun is only just beginning for my colleagues and I. Of course I will continue blogging about all things Atlanta Music Project, El Sistema and Abreu Fellows for (hopefully) many more years to come. Thank you for following my blog this year and please stay tuned for more!

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