Children in the Orkidstra quintet rehearse Bach at the Bronson Centre. The group will perform a series of concerts throughout Ottawa during the summer.
Across Centretown, school-aged children are tuning donated cellos, clarinets and violins in an innovative after-school program designed to empower kids and build communities through music.
Tina Fedeski is the executive director of the Leading Note Foundation, a charity born out of her and her husband’s music store on Elgin Street, The Leading Note. Eight years after opening shop in 1999, the Fedeskis started the foundation and the after-school program, OrKidstra, in 2007.
“The focus of the program is to give children who wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity the chance to learn an instrument and sing and play together,” she says.
On March 21, the OrKidstra Chamber Players held a concert at Trillium Hall, in the Chinese-Canadian community centre.
The chamber players are a group of 20 upper-year students, who presented the “Cultures in Concert,” a fusion of Chinese music.
They were joined on stage by four professional musicians, three from the National Arts Centre quartet, Silflay. They even had a traditional Chinese erhu, a string instrument, to play alongside the chamber players.
“I like that the orchestra is able to experience different cultures and I’ve always been interested in travelling the world, so being able to express that through music is great,” says Kafele Bernard-Edwin, a Grade 11 student who took part in the concert.
Fedeski says she wants to expand the concert into a series, but hasn’t started planning for it yet.
While the idea of a concert series is still at a formative stage, Fedeski says it’s an “exciting proposition” and with support for the proposal coming from the National Arts Centre and the greater Centretown community, she says she’s humbled.
Local residents donated all of the musical instruments the group uses, Fedeski says, totalling about $140,000 in value.
When the Centretown program was first introduced, three schools took but it’s expanded rapidly from 30 kids in 2007, to more than 300 now. The children range from age five to 18.
Fedeski says the program’s impact on the community is more than just the musical outlet it provides for the kids of Centretown.
El Sistema, a similar program in Venezuela, inspired OrKidstra. The social development program encompasses a half million children world wide, Fedeski says, and so she wanted to bring a comparable project to Ottawa.
Last year, Leading Note started a pilot project with three elementary schools.
“The kids love all arts. This program incorporates the music and dance so beautifully that it’s not just a dance class,” says Lisa Sgabellone, the Grade 2 teacher whose class receives a music and dance lesson from a Leading Note once a week.
“For these kids to be given a recorder and be given the opportunity to be taught by a professional who knows what they’re doing, it’s fantastic.”