Students make a beeline to the right of the Trinity Basin Preparatory Ledbetter Campus, their black bulky cases traversing up to knock and enter the portable door.
Photography by Lauren Allen
Since it’s late into the afternoon, prime time to hurry home for a snack or to watch cartoons before grinding on homework, you may expect the hustle to be leaving the campus. But these students aren’t done for the day. They’re getting ready to learn even more.
As you enter the portable, the acoustics fill with a variety of music from woodwind and brass to strings and percussion. The portable building holds less than 10 classrooms, dividing students into sectionals based on their instruments. The strings spill out into the main hallway to make space for all the students, a pair of flutists work on a duet in the middle of the hallway as well taught by a teaching artist.
Music education is not readily available for every student, but thanks to a collaboration with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, students from first to 12th grade have the opportunity to learn and perform in an orchestra through the Kim Noltemy Young Musicians program in our neighborhood.
Established in 2019, Young Musicians provides music and arts education programs in southern Dallas schools that lacked the funding to include music education in their daily curriculum, serving over 2,150 students.
“Young Musicians is one of the most comprehensive and intensive programs we offer,” DSO Director of Education Jen Guzmán says. “We pay for the instruments, we pay for the teachers to provide the services, and in return, the school provides the spaces for us to use and the support that we need to function on site.”
The program provides orchestral music education, instruments, performance experience and mentorship opportunities at no cost to students and families throughout two southern Dallas schools, Owenwood Farm & Neighbor Space and Oak Cliff’s Trinity Basin Preparatory Ledbetter Campus.
The Ledbetter Campus hosts two orchestras with 165 students total — the beginner and advanced orchestras. During the week, Tuesday through Thursday, all student musicians meet after school. The advanced orchestra participates in the same rehearsals with beginners, with advanced students attending additional Friday night and Saturday morning practices.
Young Musicians is inspired after El Sistema, a program from Venezuela that provides intensive musical training to bring radical social change, Guzmán says.
Jorge Milla previously worked in Venezuela for 25 years and now serves as the Young Musicians Site Leader for Trinity Basin Ledbetter campus, along with several teaching artists that help to train the student musicians.
He says he continues this type of work here because it is his passion to teach and decided to join the program in Dallas after meeting with Roberto Zamrano, the artistic director of the Young Musicians program.
“I love seeing the progress that you can see the first (day) you know them and see (them) probably three, four months later, and you can see that they are playing like a musician. They are strong. They are more secure about themself. I think this is the most amazing work. I’m really inspired about seeing how to grow this program,” Milla says.
Young Musicians is more than just playing in an orchestra or learning to read treble clef, but impacting the students overall wellbeing.
“Personally, you made better citizens,” Milla says. “You are doing a social program. You are taking the kids from the iPads, the cell phones, the TV, and they are learning a new language that not everybody knows.”
The students feel that difference, too. Veola Johnson, an eighth grade violin player in the orchestra, joined the program last year.
She says her mom was looking through different music programs in the area because of Johnson’s interest, but many of them came with a hefty price tag. Once she found Young Musicians, Johnson quickly joined and has been involved ever since.
“I just love it. I love all the teachers. I love the students,” she says. “I love being able to play in an orchestra and really try my best. It’s helped me personally with my confidence especially because I second guess myself a lot, and it’s helped me to not do that so much.”
Seventh grader Graciela Doan has played the French horn for three years. She joined the program after seeing her friend practice the violin at home.
“I always loved music, and I always wanted to play music,” she said. “So she said that I could come and see their practice, and I decided that I really liked it. I wanted to come and join.”
Doan is now entering her fourth year with Young Musicians and aspires to play professionally, specifically to make the French horn more well known. She has not only gained skills with this local opportunity, but national experience as a horn player at the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles National Festival, a 14-day intensive summer orchestra program, where she was joined by two other Oak Cliff student musicians.
“They invite all the best musicians from around the country to play in LA for two weeks and learn music and play in Walt Disney Hall,” she says. “That was a really fun, really, just big experience for me.”
Like Johnson, Doan says she has grown through this experience in more ways than one. She serves as a mentor for students just starting out, just like other advanced students did for her when she was a beginner and says it has helped her become better at speaking and finding her voice.
“I just remember being in their shoes, it’s a strange new program,” Doan says. “You don’t have your parents here to help you, and you’re just like, ‘Oh, no, I don’t know how to do this.’ And I just really needed someone to help me,” she says. “I like knowing that I can be someone there to help them.”
The Ledbetter Campus orchestras are working on literature for upcoming performances for the year. The first of six for the year took place Nov. 1.
“This is music that you, a few years ago, just can hear when you go to the Dallas Symphony concerts, or the Chicago Philharmonic, or pretty high levels of orchestra,” Milla says. “And now, you can see a group of young musicians playing Beethoven.”
