Musiqa

A recent report from the Arts Access Initiative of Houston Young Audiences states that 79% of Houston Independent School District children are economically disadvantaged. In this survey of more than 200 campuses, only 53% had any exposure to music in their programs. Every year, our education programs impact nearly 6,000 underprivileged schoolchildren. 95% of the schools we serve are designated Title l. For many of these children, their experience with Musiqa is their first exposure to a professional musical performance in a concert hall setting. Musiqa's 2020-2021 Education Programs are available online and free of cost. Our education programming consists of a highly engaging concert experience and a composition workshop: Around the World (grades 2-4) presents dynamic and interactive arts-learning experiences for students. Participants learn how modern composers make folk songs come to life in personal and imaginative ways. Using modern arrangements of folk songs in Zulu, Portuguese, French, Spanish, and English, participants learn musical concepts and diversity. MusiqaLab for Young Composers offers participants an introduction to music theory, notation, and history, in addition to how to write and prepare their individual works. The program ends with a public performance of the young composers' works by world-class artists.

The Loft Concerts is a series of free outreach performances designed to create a dialogue between new music and contemporary visual arts. The concerts are organized at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and are presented in conjunction with CAMH exhibitions. This season we will premiere new works from Flannery Cunningham and Will Healy, winners of Musiqa's Emerging Composer Commission. These shows regularly attract overflow crowds. We work with CAMH to record each Loft Concert and create an online audio tour, where museum visitors can follow a QR code, put in their earphones, and simply press "play" to listen as they tour the exhibit. Interspersed with facts about the artist and his/her work, the audio tour connects each piece of music in the concert to the art itself. This series is presented for free to make modern repertoire accessible to audiences of all backgrounds.