March has been a very busy and exciting month at CMCB! With great community-wide events like our Kleshinski Concert and Community Conversation with Dunamis to our upcoming Lapin Competition for our Community Music School students, we have a lot to celebrate. One area that we are particularly proud to highlight this month is the work happening in our community engagement programs. Our community engagement team executed two events specifically tailored to our partner sites at Morgan Memorial Goodwill Industries and Hurley K-8. Continue reading to learn more about these exciting stories!
A Trip to The Record Co
Recently we conducted a listening tour with each of our partner sites where we discovered an interest from multiple programs to take more musical opportunities outside of their immediate communities. A recent example of our response in practice was last week’s field trip to The Record Co with music therapy participants from Morgan Memorial Goodwill Industries. Everyone had such a blast as we toured the studio space and explored different instruments like the electric guitar, piano, and triangle. The whole group even recorded takes of “Lean on me” with a couple of solos between each segment! This trip was such a joyful experience and we can’t wait to explore it in the near future with our Excel High School students! We are so grateful to provide the same access to high-quality musical instruction and experiences to all of our students and program participants, and we’re glad to be able to make more events like these possible in the future!
CMCB Faculty Concert at Hurley K-8
After a series of years in which in-person gathering has been hard to come by, if not next to impossible to rely on, we are excited to be able to recreate moments of community for our partner sites. Last week we got to do just that when CMCB faculty members Javier Rosario and Carlos Herrand Pou presented an interactive concert to our fifth through eighth-grade students at Hurley K-8. In this concert, they not only entertained the students with songs from a multitude of genres, but they also brought students on stage to play with them and learn more about the music they presented. The students even challenged Javier and Carlos to play something they hadn’t prepared – merengue. Though the rest of the band hadn’t rehearsed this music, Javier and Carlos, both teachers familiar with the genre through their individual lived experiences, stepped up to the plate and had the whole room cheering and dancing along! This concert was the first assembly of any kind at the Hurley since 2020, so we were glad to help provide a space of excitement and fun for all involved. Thank you to Hurley K-8 for letting us be a part of this celebratory gathering! We hope to continue to provide these special moments at all of our partner sites!
