Dreaming Big with Sistema New Brunswick Aaron McFarlane (CMW Violin Fellow, 2009-2011) lives and works in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, where he serves as Centre Director of Sistema New Brunswick’s Saint John Centre. Sistema NB is a program of the New Brunswick Youth Orchestra that aligns closely with the El Sistema movement, which originated in Venezuela and is sweeping across the globe. Here is his update: Students come five days a week, for three hours a day to the Saint John Centre and receive group instruction on orchestral instruments. This year we have more than 200 students in our daily program playing all of the instruments of the orchestra: violin, viola, cello, bass, flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, percussion. New in the past two years is our regional youth orchestra that offers our most advanced students the opportunity to continue their studies in a more intense manner, with weekly individual lessons, individual practice, and two rehearsals a week. We are delighted to see some of our students developing into excellent musicians, and to see that confidence start to trickle into every aspect of their lives.
  Still, challenges abound. Saint John has the highest level of child poverty in Canada. In the neighbourhoods we serve, almost 50% of the children live at or below the line of poverty. There exists so much demand for our program, so it’s difficult to continually challenge ourselves to dream big and try and reach as many children as possible.
 My clarinet quintet, Port City 5, continues to play shows that blend classical with non-classical covers. This week we play a concert pairing Prokofiev and Arcade Fire – it’s so much fun for us to help audiences break down genre barriers and think more broadly about how music makes you feel, not just what box it belongs in. –Aaron McFarlane
Centre Director, Saint John Centre |
