Mixing Culture with Composition

Performance Today, April 9 and 10

The last couple of days on Performance Today they had a story about the Native American Composer Apprentice Program (NACAP).

"Every summer a professional string quartet from New York City travels to the most remote area in the lower 48 states, the northeast corner of Arizona. They meet high school students from the Navajo and Hopi nations, as part of the Native American Composer Apprentice Project, which is part of the Grand Canyon Music Festival."

These students have a Native American composer who spends the entire year going school to school and working with these students. By the end of the school year, the students have written a string quartet which is then performed by a New York string ensemble.

Listening to some of these quartets blows me away. These aren't classically trained students by any means, and I believe that's a great thing. You can hear the influences of rock n roll along with their Native American culture and the music is pretty amazing. I encourage everyone to go listen to last Thursday and Friday's performance today segments on these composers. I feel that they embody something that has been lost by many musicians - they don't adhere to the classical rules, yet their music is a new incarnation of classical music. In my mind, this is how music should be started, not by reading notes, but by encouraging creation and composition.

I'm going to shut up about it now, because I can't do it justice.