MusicWorks Network
CMW has offered professional musicians opportunities to re-imagine the very foundations of a classical music career and to think more broadly about music as a way of engaging in and with communities. CMW has had the opportunity to deepen that work by presenting the MusicWorks Network Institute.
The MusicWorks Network Institute links 9 organizations serving over 650 young people and has convened summer gathering for workshops, discussions, and sharing around the theme of anti-racist practice.
MusicWorks Network participating organizations include:
Community MusicWorks
Música Franklin
MusiConnects
Music Haven
MyCincinnati
Neighborhood Strings
Newport String Project
Strong Harbor Strings
Youth Orchestra of St. Luke’s
The MusicWorks Network Summer Institute brought resident musicians and staff from network partners together for a multi-day retreat and is a powerful opportunity for reflection, learning, personal and professional growth, and planning towards action. Participants relished the safe but challenging space that the Institute created to help them reflect on their individual identities and the impacts that they have on their colleagues and students and families.
The Network focused on antiracist practice as the foundation of all work to support the development of young people of color, including college-going work, with each participant identifying action steps toward diversity, inclusion, access, and equity at their organizations and in their personal practices.
One participant reflected, “I had some very meaningful and important conversations with my program team, which triggered a number of important changes/steps toward evolution. The institute lays a fertile ground for those kinds of conversations to happen, so I’m grateful.”
In addition to the Institute for staff and musicians, a three-day Youth Institute created a student-centered space for learning and connecting and parallel conversations about music education and social justice. For three days, participants and alumni from network organizations delved into the same questions that their faculty were discussing, as well as envisioning concrete solutions for the future, as evidenced in this excerpt from a Youth Institute Report prepared by MusicWorks Fellow Andrew Oung and CMW Alumnus Liam Hopkins:
After sharing some of our reflections with the group we asked students to imagine an ideal music-making community five years into the future. A summary of some characteristics of those imagined spaces is as follows: developing strategies and teaching techniques to satisfy each student’s individual needs; more organized mentoring opportunities; games and fun, space for release!; mix of music genres and cultures: cultural communities (communities within communities); teaching strategies to facilitate better engagement. We then engaged a discussion around these future visions that asked students to consider which of these visions could be implemented in the next few years and how they could be worked towards.
These exercises support the development of teen agency and self-efficacy, allowing teens to provide direct input into their own education and envision concrete ways that students can be more directly involved in decision-making within their programs.