Harold Shapiro/YSM Photo
Ruben Rodriguez, far left, with musicians from the YSM’s Morse Summer Music Academy
Music in Schools, a Yale School of Music program through which graduate students support local public-school music teachers and their students, has added a string orchestra to its roster of All-City Honors Ensembles.
Auditions for the new group, and for the band and chorus — which are in their third and fourth years, respectively — are scheduled for Jan. 9 through Jan. 12 and are open to middle- and high-school students.
A Yale School of Music news release indicates that the All-City Honors Orchestra “grows out of a collaboration between the Yale School of Music and the New Haven Public Schools, in partnership with Music Haven, the Neighborhood Music School, and the New Haven Symphony Orchestra.”
“We are really looking into the string area,” Rubén Rodríguez, the Music in Schools initiative’s lead teacher, said.
Three new string programs have been established this year, he said, at Augusta Lewis Troup School, Edgewood School, and Lincoln-Bassett School.
Rodríguez, who works part time as the band director at John C. Daniel Interdistrict Magnet School of International Communication, said 49 students played in the All-City Honors Band, and 51 sang in the All-City Honors Chorus throughout spring 2012.
Music in Schools was established in 2007 with an endowment from Yale’s class of 1957. The initiative’s goals, Rodríguez said, are to help provide a musical education to students in the city’s public schools and to give graduate students at the Yale School of Music hands-on teaching experience.
“Right now,” Rodríguez, a trombone player who earned a master of music degree in 2011 from the Yale School of Music, said, “we are serving 32 different programs” in 26 New Haven schools. Forty-four Music in Schools teaching artists — the above-mentioned Yale School of Music graduate students — work with an average of eight to 10 public-school students throughout the year, he said.
Of the upcoming All-City Honors band, chorus, and orchestra auditions, Rodríguez said, “We are looking for the best students” from the city’s public-school system, not just those whose schools are currently served by the Music in Schools initiative.
Detailed information about the Music in Schools initiative and its upcoming auditions can be found here.