Dear all, 

We hope all of you are doing well and are safe and sound! After these months of uncertainty and fear around the world due to the Covid-19 situation, we will like to continue posting some more news and updating our blog with some new interesting announcements. 

Online working

With the pandemic situation, we’ve definitely had some new changes to our working style. We’ve found that it’s been a great time to reach out and talk to many different people through online platforms. Our ensemble itself has already been used to working online, since all of us are living in different places at the moment. For the past couple months Cindy was in Helsinki, Sara in the U.S., and Antoine in the Canary Islands. In some ways it has been nice that everyone else has switched online more than usual, so that we can have remote meetings with people from around the world. We’re also trying to figure out new ways to use the internet to continue our activities, like webinars or online teaching. 

Haiti project 

Few months ago, through one of our side projects Collecting strings, reeds and accessories, we connected to a music school Symphonic Ecole in Haiti. Since COVID-19 pandemic hit the world, a lot of students lost the opportunities to have actual lessons with their teachers. It is the same situation in Haiti, Symphonic Ecole supposed to have a summer camp in the summer but due to the situation, it has been cancelled and postponed to next year.   

In April, the organizer of Symphonic Ecole asked if we could offer online lessons for the students during quarantine time. We first started from Cindy and Sara’s clarinet lessons, Antoine has been helping us as French translators as unfortunately there’s no saxophone students at the moment. We didn’t expect our project to gradually grow as big as it is now. We are now having ten volunteer teachers from 8 different nationalities involved (Spain, Australia, Finland, the United States, Taiwan, Italy, Canada, Mexico) in this project and have been teaching violin, viola, cello, flute and clarinet students in Haiti. 

Online teaching has been very challenging for all of us since none of us have enough experience for this, we also struggle on the unpredicted internet connection in Haiti as well as language barrier with students sometimes but we found most of our students are motivated and extremely talented. Some of the volunteer teachers also tried video teaching and we discovered it works better than online teaching and we were very happy to see our students are improving! Even though this is still an experimental project, we are still learning how to make it work better everyday. 

What’s keeping us inspired

Staying inspired has been more difficult recently due to not being able to perform music with others or go to live performances. We wanted to share some ways we’re staying inspired:

Talking with interesting people and organizations:

During the past couple months we’ve had the opportunity to talk to many different people! We’ve been inspired by what Gabrielle has been doing with her organization, Teaching Artists International https://www.taimusic.org/about . We’ve been in touch with BLUME Haiti and finding out about their activities http://www.blumehaiti.org so we can learn more about Haiti.  It was also great to have a chat with Erick and Daniel, composers from Mexico, and see how they’ve been doing! 

Online webinars

We attended some webinar sessions by the Global Leaders Program https://globalleadersprogram.com which was open to the public. It was motivating to be able to attend these as an ensemble and gain some new perspectives and ideas! They recorded their past webinars, so we recommend you to take a look! There were topics ranging from tips on online teaching to music as action. 

Brainstorming new ideas with our group

Another big part of our inspiration and motivation is our online group meetings. We always share any new ideas, resources, and things we’ve read that might be useful for our project. We’re also always on the lookout for anything else we could do as an ensemble. If you have any new ideas to collaborate or for our future projects feel free to reach out and talk with us! 

We got a grant! 

As probably all of you know, for this year we had planned to do our project Finland x Mexico x Guatemala. Our purpose consists of going to these countries to perform some new pieces we commission to local composers, such as Daniel Martínez and Erick Tapia. For supporting our project, we have asked for numerous grants and donors, and we are very happy to announce that we got  a Mobility Grant from the Finnish Culture Foundation in order to help us with part of our trip. At the same time, we would like to thank all the donors who donated us through our GoFundMe in order to support the fees of our project. 

Project postponed and webinars coming soon

Due to the COVID-19 epidemic situation, we decided to postpone our trip to next year in 2021. Even though we are not able to travel to Mexico and Guatemala this year, we are still keeping ourselves active and inspired and look forward to our trip next year!

Since we had to postpone our project, we have decided to do some lectures and webinars through an online platform in order to share some interesting topics, music and experiences with musicians from Mexico and Guatemala. Even though this year is not possible to go there, we would like to get in touch with musicians from these countries and start building connections and music through online lectures and activities. They will be available for whoever wants to join! Please stay tuned!

AEKI ensemble