We were honored to receive 2010 and 2011 Access to Artistic Excellence grants from the National Endowment for the Arts that will help make possible our educational work this year with both college and middle-school students.
One grant, for $60,000, will support our Silk Road Ensemble members as artists in residence at Harvard University. This first year of our five-year affiliation with Harvard will bring a variety of music workshops with students and performances for the University community—including a preview of the Texas and West Coast tour concerts by the Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma this March. We also look forward to taking part in the naming ceremony for the Harvard Humanities Center in April, as well as the Center's festival on Faust in September.
The other NEA grant contributes $75,000 toward an event (similar to "Connect Live!" last year) that will culminate our second pilot year of Silk Road Connect in New York City. We have even bigger plans for this year's celebration, which will give students and teachers a real public stage for a collaborative performance with Yo-Yo Ma and members of the Silk Road Ensemble and the Knights chamber orchestra. We've been especially busy in our four pilot schools as we gear up for the big day. Teachers have attended professional development trainings, learning how to integrate the arts into their curricula across all disciplines, and planning visits to the American Museum of Natural History, the Met, MoMA and the Rubin Museum of Art. We recently held a workshop for our teaching artists, who visit schools to bring the curriculum to life through their art. The aim of these visits is not just to illustrate a lesson's content, but rather also to spark connections for students between their own lives and what they're studying. Interactions build on previous teaching artist visits by Sandeep Das and oud player Hadi Eldebek. This month Silk Road Ensemble members Shane Shanahan and Mike Block visited schools in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens to introduce percussion traditions from India, the Middle East and Africa. Students learned clapping polyrhythms and played Shane's frame drums and bells, and shakers they made themselves.
Sponsors of the 2011 culminating event include Pershing Square Foundation, Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Slideshow photographs © Allison Trombley |