By Francisco Guevara | Co-Executive Director
Warm salutations from all of us at Arquetopia in Puebla and Oaxaca, southern Mexico! We are pleased to report that, thanks in large part to you, our Global Giving supporters, our young music students have had an exceptionally productive and memorable year.
One of the most exciting highlights of this year was the late-summer visit we received from Ms. Jenny Wright-Tolen, a respected professional clarinetist and prominent music director in Las Vegas, Nevada. We were privileged to have Jenny with us for a week during which she generously took time to work with our students intensely on the chamber music of Mozart. We are anxiously looking forward to Ms. Tolen’s return next year when she will be able to work even longer with the students.
Making remarkable progress since our last report is young protégé Ángel, who has recently completed one of the most important method books and is currently preparing to perform the virtuoso Concerto No.1 in F minor by C.M. von Weber, as soloist with a regional orchestra as well as a number of other standards in the clarinet repertoire for upcoming recital. He is becoming increasingly comfortable in playing jazz music, to which he has especially gravitated over the past year or so. His outstanding flexibility in this area is obvious from the outset. Though Ángel now receives instruction locally from Arquetopia director Christopher Davis at the Escuela de Bellas Artes, a music school housed inside of a former Catholic convent in the town of Oaxaca, Ángel regularly commutes via a five-hour bus trip and stays in Arquetopia’s residency center for several days at a time while receiving more intensive instruction in Puebla.
Another of the studio standouts, young Giovanni has now established himself in the local symphony scene, serving as principal clarinet in his orchestra since winning a full music scholarship to university this past summer. He performed in numerous concerts over the past several months and in a musical-theatre pit orchestra. Currently, he is working on a research project on the vast repertoire and composers of the clarinet as well as preparing a broad range of orchestral excerpts for upcoming auditions and pieces for public recital. He has made exceptional progress over the past several months and has shed the shy and timid nature he had when he joined the studio this past spring. Clear evidence of this can be found especially when he plays in his ‘altissimo’ range, the highest notes range of the instrument, with which he is now quite adept and confident. We are expecting great things from Giovanni over the coming months.
We were fortunate, since our last report, to be able to purchase numerous repair supplies for our students’ instruments (tools, pad sets, and other emergency items) with the donations we received through Global Giving, as well as much-needed sheet music and method books into which the students have graduated. As there are no qualified instrument repair technicians in this region of Mexico, the repair kits were especially necessary and appreciated; in the studio, when students are not receiving musical instruction or practicing, they are often learning how to repair and maintain their own instruments as professional musicians would. The workshops in repairs and maintenance that our students receive are not only to help the students save money but to help them in understanding the acoustics and science of their instruments, why even tiny things can cause either positive or very negative changes in the sound and response, and to prevent fatigue and discouragement that many young students face when their equipment inevitably falters or fails them due to its age or climatic changes.
Another wonderful benefit we are seeing is in how much our programs have grown. We are now ready to offer another open-enrollment term and scholarship auditions in Puebla in which more serious but financially marginalized young students will be able to access quality one-on-one instruction and ensemble training at little to no cost (more info on that to come in our next Global Giving report).
For your ongoing support of Arquetopia’s music programs and opportunities for young students through Global Giving, we sincerely thank you all again, and we wish the happiest of holidays to you and yours.
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