5 December 2018
The reported success of a New Zealand Youth Orchestra demonstrating where there’s a will there’s a way.
Next Monday evening in Wellington, New Zealand, 50 school children, members of a youth orchestra called ‘Virtuoso Strings’ with step onto the stage in the city’s Opera House to accompany award winning New Zealand’s operatic bass Johanthan Lemalu.
The youth orchestra is made up from children of a dozen or more schools around Porirua.
Your readers will know of my own interest in seeing young people in the Solomon Islands form an orchestra but I am still waiting for the encouragement and support of the various ministries of the Solomon Islands Government to grasp and run with such an idea.
I understand that music education might be provided for in the National Youth Policy and I very much hope that someone might take up the challenge.
Very often it is just one or two people with the right degree of ‘get up and go’ to see to the initiation of a worthy endeavour beneficial to young, budding, and musicians and to the wider youth community.
This was very much the case in New Zealand when two teachers felt that financial barriers should never get in the way of a child picking up an instrument and they began providing free music tuition for the young people in East Porirua.
Virtuoso Strings has gone on to become of the best youth orchestras in the country and one of the original teachers was recently named New Zealand’s Music Teacher of the Year.
The story reminds me of the volunteer teachers doing similar dedicated work with children who are members of the Piano Association of Solomon Islands (PASI)
Yours sincerely
Frank Short
