Stephanie Anestis Photo
Neighborhood Music School and the New Haven Symphony Orchestra have created an orchestral fellowship program for the New Haven area’s high-school music students.
For Noah Bloom, NMS’s director of programs and community engagement, it’s another step toward greater collaboration among New Haven’s arts organizations to give New Haven’s youth more chances to be involved in the arts.
Under the program, some of the students in NMS’s Greater New Haven Youth Orchestra will get “specialized learning and performance opportunities from the NHSO,” according to the NHSO’s and NMS’s joint press release. Students who are already in the orchestra can apply to the program through a written essay. Students who aren’t in the orchestra, but who play French horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, double bass, or percussion, can audition for full scholarships to join the orchestra and enroll in the fellowship program.
The scholarship auditions take place at NMS this Saturday from 3 to 5 p.m. Students interested in auditioning can call Patty Boczer, the youth orchestra’s manager, at 203 – 624-5189 x11 to schedule a time.
“Our orchestra’s been evolving over the years to become what we hope is the best youth orchestra in the region,” said Bloom. After a celebrated five-year stint at the baton, Netta Hadari (also of Music Haven) stepped down. To replace him, NMS got Thomas Duffy, a professor of music at Yale, director of its bands, and a composer in his own right.
“Tom Duffy is kind of an iconic educator,” Bloom said, “and immediately brought new energy in. He just has so much musical knowledge and is so excited, and when he stands in front of those students, he just seems like he’s in heaven.”
Meanwhile, NMS had been talking to several of New Haven’s arts organizations, looking for opportunities to collaborate. One of those organizations was the NHSO. “We’d been having a lot of collaborative conversations,” Bloom said. William Boughton, the NHSO’s music director, “was really intrigued with the idea of being a mentor orchestra,” (“It has always been a dream of mine to connect students who are passionate about classical music with the city’s finest musicians,” said Boughton in the press release.)
For NMS, the excitement lies in having its students learn from working professionals. For its part, the NHSO is interested in cultivating young musicians, and expanding the audience for classical music — in short, to “create the next generation of listeners and performers,” Bloom said. “It seems like it all came together at the right time.”
