Carnegie Hall PlayUSA: Reflections on Resilience
Beginning in April 2021 and culminating in June 2022, Carnegie Hall Artist in Residence, PUBLIQuartet, partnered with Carnegie Hall’s PlayUSA program to launch Reflections on Resilience, exploring music as storytelling for students who study instrumental music at PlayUSA partner organizations across the country.
Reflections on Resilience strives to capture the ways young artists in communities across the country have experienced this moment in history, creating art amid converging pandemics of a global health crisis and systemic oppression. By engaging in a yearlong project that explores musical improvisation, instrumental exploration, and multimedia storytelling, PlayUSA educators and students will approach two main questions, rooted in the theme of culturally responsive-sustaining education:
How do we tell stories, biographical or autobiographical, through a collaborative, creative process?
Who tells history? How does history change depending on who’s telling or writing it?
Reflections on Resilience is inspired by Reflections on Beauty, an original multimedia work created by PUBLIQuartet. In the 2021-2022 season, PUBLIQuartet worked with PlayUSA partners to support young artists in telling personal stories, either their own or those from community members, through story creation, musical composition, and performance.
In addition, PUBLIQuartet, in collaboration with Carnegie Hall, wrote and produced a series of educational videos to aide in learning skills within improvisation. The first of four is below. To see the full set visit the PlayUSA project page.