Barrios Orquestados, music as a tool for integration and social development
Barrios Orquestados is a social project with a clear pedagogic and social character but with an artistic ending. The original idea borned in 2005 in the mind of his director José Brito with the purpose of reaching culture and music to those sectors of the population who are less attended.
In 2011 a team directed by his daughter Laura Brito and Andrés Betancort, started a first approaching of this project in Tamareite (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria), a first step that began a path who is being continued nowadays in more than 5 regions of Gran Canaria, two in Tenerife and Lanzarote, one in Fuerteventura and other two projects in Chile and Honduras.
This project is based on creating an archi orquestra (violins, violas, cellos and double bass), with woodwind instruments (clarinets, flutes and saxophones), and they include even a choir. They want to bring orchestral music to those city areas that have been put in peripheral territories against music and culture. This project highlights the importance of these two main topics into the social and cultural context of the kids who are living there and their relatives.
The precedence of Barrios Orquestados emerges from the necessity of bringing culture to those villages where this is not a main topic of the village’s agenda, giving new opportunities and possibilities. The creation of these orquestras are beyond an artistic purpose, one of the main pillars of this creation is to teach music theory and knowledge to the students but most importantly, to teach students the importance and values of music as a tool of integration and social development.
This goal implies to empower values, to assume personal and collective commitments, perseverance while working, cohabitation in our own steps and with our neighbors’, and to grow a special sensitivity to reach the last skills we are trying to teach.
Barrios Orquestados keeps its steps with the same hope they had when they started: the conviction that relates music with a better society.
+ Info:
Director Jose Brito
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