AMAZING News for the Music Students at PHSA!

From Midori and Brian:

We are extremely happy to announce that the D'Addario Music Foundation has graciously donated thirty metronome/tuner combo units to the Philippine High School for the Arts! The D'Addario Music Foundation is dedicated to supporting music education all over the world. They are a not-for-profit branch of D'Addario and Company Inc., makers of the "Planet Waves" metronomes and tuners that have been donated.

We are working on some more in-depth posts about our experience at PHSA, but this news became priority number one. We think about our experience at PHSA every day, and talk about it often. We had an amazing time there, and we both feel that the students there helped us grow as people and musicians just as much (if not more!) than we helped teach them. Every student there is very special, and we believe they are all good enough to get into some of the top music schools in the US. There was one other factor, though, that we realized might prevent their development to this level. On our first day working with the students in a master class setting, we asked for a show of hands of who owned a metronome and/or tuner. One student raised his hand, and explained that it wasn’t necessary that they each owned one, because he was willing to share his one metronome with the rest of the students at the school. Shocked at this, we explained that each student should have their own metronome and tuner, and that they would only cost around 800 Philippine pesos ($20). The students were heartbroken, and eventually admitted that this would present a financial hardship for most of them. Needless to say, we struggled at times during our residency to help the students improve their intonation, rhythm, and inner-pulse. Many of the students had hit a plateau where they had become frustrated at an inability to improve. We were positive they could overcome this if they simply had regular access to these tools. We want to reiterate, though, that we were tremendously impressed at how far they had gotten without these tools!

We explained to the students that EVERY music student in the world needs to have a metronome. We both use a metronome every day to improve our rhythm, tempo/pulse, and especially as a practice tool for working up difficult passages from slow to fast. It is useful for tracking progress while practicing: finding your "goal" tempo, your "start" tempo, and knowing which tempos you've gotten to in-between on each day. In addition, almost every musician can benefit from the use of a tuner (well, maybe not pianists:-)). Again, we use these every day while we are practicing to make sure that the notes on our instruments are in tune, and that we will play in tune when collaborating with other musicians.



We contacted around a dozen music stores and metronome manufacturers. Our goal was to provide one metronome and tuner for the school to check out to every single student at PHSA so that they have access to their own metronome at any time while practicing, without ever needing to borrow from another student. While we received some initial negative responses ("We are sorry but we are not able to make a donation at this time..."), within a couple of days, we heard back from Suzanne D’Addario Brouder with the D'Addario Music Foundation with the following e-mail:

"I am absolutely sure that spending time with these students and encouraging their development was both an educational and rewarding experience.  It always amazes me what others achieve with so little when we live in a country of such excess.  I would love to be able to donate some tuners and metronomes to these deserving students."

We are posting this blog post because just today, 30 metronome/tuner units arrived in the mail, free of charge! We are still working out the details, but we are hoping to get the metronomes to PHSA in the next couple of weeks. We will post a follow-up later in the year on how the metronomes are being used at the school.

We also wanted to add that we received a very positive and supportive response from Brian Charles at Charles Double Reed Company. While we no longer need metronome donations, Mr. Charles has offered his support in other ways. We are working out the details of this donation as well, and will update the blog with news as it comes.

From Midori and Brian, we want to give the most heartfelt thanks we can to the D'Addario Music Foundation. It was our number one goal after we left the Philippines to get these tools in the hands of the talented, passionate, and driven students who both need and deserve them. The foundation was so quick in responding, and so generous and cooperative, Project Philippines 2012 owes them a huge debt of gratitude. If any of our supporters would like to learn more about the work of the foundation, please visit http://www.daddariofoundation.org. Maraming salamat!

Midori Samson, Bassoon, The Juilliard School
Brian Gnojek, Clarinet, Freelance Musician in NYC

Articles About Project Philippines 2012

This is just a quick post about some of the articles and online posts about our trip, from certain fund-raising events through the trip itself. Please follow the links below.

http://thefilam.net/archives/6625
This is a great article summarizing the project and what we intended to accomplish on our trip. It also included some great pictures, including one from our Kickstarter video! The team agrees that we accomplished everything we wanted to accomplish from this article.

http://lifestyle.inquirer.net/45625/reaching-out-from-the-us-with-dance
This article was published shortly after the previous one, outlining more of our goals and summarizing the trip in a little more detail. Also includes some wonderful headshots of our dancers!

http://leytesamardaily.net/2012/06/welcome-to-eastern-visayas-juilliard-school-artists/
This article talks more about our trip to Catarman and mentions Erick Brocoy, one of our new friends who helped show us around Leyte (mentioned at the end of this post). Erick also introduced Midori and Brian to "balut", which they actually enjoyed! More on that in a later post... One correction to this post: Juilliard is not actually known as the "Harvard school for the arts." Maybe they meant, the "Harvard" of arts schools?

Erick Brocoy

http://philippines.ucanews.com/2012/06/08/juilliard-dances-to-boost-cultural-ties/
This link is similar to the last, but it's included for completeness sake.

http://xavierlobos.blogspot.com/2012/07/julliard-school-of-new-york-reaches-out.html
This is a really great post by another friend of ours, Xavier Lobos, who paints a really great picture of what we set out to accomplish, and why we were doing this project. Thanks, Xavier! (Same correction about the Harvard school of the arts.)

http://wencano.com/music/uplb-artists-exchanged-ideas-with-project-philippines-2012-volunteers/
This is another great post from a blog by one of the students we worked with at the University of the Philippines in Los Baños, focusing more on what Brian and Midori taught the musicians. It does a really great job of explaining what we taught, and the whole concept behind the (Pa)Salubong. More on the (Pa)Salubong in a later post!

http://www.lawrence.com/news/2011/dec/29/musical-heirs-son-ku-sax-professor-performing-reci/
This is a wonderful article written about Brian Gnojek's musical family, including mention of the benefit recital he did with Midori Samson. The Gnojek family is truly a part of the musical community in Kansas, and thanks to Brian and Midori, they've expanded their influence to the Philippines as well!

Individual Expression and Empowerment

by Kendra Samson

My broad goal was to empower individuals and to feel empowered by the end of this trip, and it was a goal we absolutely accomplished. In Samar, I had an opportunity to assist in creative movement classes and teach a Limon class. The creative movement class is inspired from, and would progress from humane values such as exploration, trust and respect. It would play between investigating movements as a group, then with partners and finally into the individual. It was incredible to observe their experiences as they deviated from their comfort zone of being part of a group or having a partner to discovering creativity for themselves. It was a proud moment for me. In the Limon class, I intended to teach the sectioned exercises as part of one long phrase which I would teach in detail. With the technique being quite far from their usual doses of popular forms like hip hop, it took them a while to understand the philosophy of harmonizing breath, of embracing weight and of utilizing less muscular effort in movement, however it was precious to see when they eventually did. I treasured our experiences in Samar – even the random ones of judging for the pageants and talent shows!

In the city of Manila, I taught improvisation and the Taylor technique collaboratively with Chelsea. Since our students at the Philippine High School for the Arts (PHSA) and the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) had more training in art and dance, we challenged them more with exploring past the boundaries of technique and in discovering their core identities through the art of dance. They were still very self-conscious during our first classes and would hardly communicate any questions or thoughts. When they started seeing us more as their contemporaries, I found that they opened up more, however they were still generally reserved. Their dancing also became more uninhibited as our classes progressed, and as we also got to know them better, which made us so happy. Our teaching days would often begin with either a game, or a circle warm-up, followed by either a technique class or an improvisation class and the remaining time would be spent in rehearsing for our culminating performance ending with journal-writing.

While teaching at PHSA, we were invited to do a workshop for one day at the University of the Philippines in Los Baños. Our experience at UPLB was one among many experiences that stood out for me since we were able to speak and relate with influential teachers and artists. 

 

Our culminating performances in both Samar and at PHSA were some of my most memorable experiences from this trip. It surprised me how the act of performing really brings out the most in a person in the truest moments of their lives. What other kind of experience can replicate this? I was particularly proud of our last-minute planning to make an improvisatory dance score with our PHSA dance students in collaboration with the music students. As a PHSA student, I never performed to live music or was challenged to improvise to a piece that was made within a day! It was so thrilling to offer them such an experience.

As a former student of both PHSA and CCP years ago, I really wanted to share the broadness and joys of moving and exploring identities that I learned during my experiences in New York. I wanted them to fall in love with dance and I hope that I was able to influence and encourage them because they in turn have made me feel inspired to re-discover my love for dance during this process. Their pure motivations for learning and in pursuing what either interests them or what they love, without complications of income or status – things that I find usually hinder a contemporary artist – are truly inspiring. Teaching such limitless young minds and bodies also taught me the potential and unique individuality of the self in creating something of beauty and good. Outreach programs such as this are truly relative acts of giving and receiving. I love our team and what we were able to make in 4 weeks. There were definitely challenges, but how it all unfolded was something beautiful and profound…Let’s keep on doing this!