– A MANIFESTATION DAY AGAINST CUTTING MUSIC LESSONS IN SCHOOL
Five schools from five countries presented their school music programs as part of a manifestation day in
the STOCKHOLM CONCERT HALL.
The manifestation was a protest against a governmental investigation in Sweden arguing for eliminating music lessons by community cultural schools during regular school hours. Students, teachers, principals and parents from schools in Michigan (the US), Finland, Norway, Sweden and England participated and demonstrated how music as part of the regular school day actually improves schoolwork in non musical subjects.
Every school was visited before the “manifestation day” and a mini-documentary film was made in each school and was presented on December 21 in Stockholm.
The manifestation was organized by Forum 21 · Children & Music, the same organization initiating this Study.
In 1997 we invited the violinist Gidon Kremer to be Principal Artist in a chamber music festival outside of Stockholm in 1998. This small festival project developed into a four day music festival and scientific conference at Nalen in central Stockholm, August 31 - September 3, 2000. Gidon Kremer brought his entire Kremerata Baltica - an orchestra with young musicians from the Baltic countries - to Stockholm and shared the stage with the Swedish percussion ensemble Kroumata and the Hungarian pianist Janos Solyom.
Professor Töres Theorell from the Karolinska Institute curated, together with Dr. Georg Matell and the American musicologist Steven Brown, a conference inviting musicologists, scientists, brain specialists, pedagogues, psychologists and doctors from Sweden, Italy, Switzerland and the US. Lectures were held about the role of music in school and Society.
An organization that, since the festival/conference project at Nalen in 2000, has been a platform for finding ways to present and argue for the right of every child to find their way to music.
The principal goal for the organization is to provide evidence that music can make a difference in the world! Especially music has a unique dimension that can reach and involve many children/people at the same time in music making. Music making can be done alone in one's chamber up to hundreds, even thousands of singers or musicians, in a classroom, in choirs and in various forms of orchestras. Every musical genre can be played and sung in arrangements for any kind of ensemble, from classical to popular music of today. Music is a formidable instrument for training abilities to express emotions of every kind.