Support Music Scholarships for Mexican Youths

The year of 2014 has at last come to a close, and Arquetopia’s music programs have grown yet again. We are very pleased to announce the nearly completed renovation of our new, permanent space in Puebla and the beautifully finished music studio, music office, and library. The new music studio will serve as the much-needed and long-awaited rehearsal space for Arquetopia’s young students and collaborating adult chamber musicians in Puebla. This is a special accomplishment for Arquetopia as previously, our youth music programs operated only at our secondary space in Oaxaca due to having had no consistent space for music in Puebla. Eventually, we hope to expand this new studio space to include an intimate chamber music performance hall with a grand piano.

Our students have been learning many important, advanced concepts of music including theory, history, solfege, and, of course, performance. For some of the students, the emphasis is on performing solos with orchestra, while for others, it is on learning how to perform in small chamber ensembles. An integral part of this curriculum is the study of opera and the human voice, and how singing concepts dramatically affect a wind-instrument musician’s abilities and instincts regarding sound production. In-depth research projects are assigned on composers, pieces, and specific topics such as ways to minimize performance anxiety and prevent performance-related injury.

Our YouTube and Vimeo videomaking project also continues with the production of short clips of student rehearsals and performances rotated publicly on these two websites in order to increase student motivation to practice, maximize concentration, and to eliminate stage fright.

From generous donations from you, our Global Giving project supporters, Arquetopia was able to obtain more critically needed equipment for students: mouthpieces, reeds, instrument repair and maintenance kits, and more music stands. Numerous educational resources were also recently purchased for the program including method books, sheet music and scores for the music library, music notation books, and music learning software for the students’ use. We are having more instruments professionally refurbished and are always accepting donations of additional instruments (new and used) to build our programs. Now that we have obtained our permanent space in Puebla, we hope to eventually purchase a digital piano for the classroom, to be used both for teaching complicated theory and harmony concepts and for performances.

We wish all of you a brilliant 2015 and thank you again for your donations to our unique and effective educational music programs. Thanks to your caring and generosity, our extremely hard-working young students and staff eagerly face this new year with so much continued progress and new goals to reach.