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Santa Fe New Music Youth Opera Project—The Language of Birds

Educational and Community Impact

Click here for scores for music teachers!

Click here to access the statewide educators' Bird Blog!

Click here for a downloadable flier about the Bird Blog (.pdf file)

Santa Fe New Music's The Language of Birds will be Santa Fe’s first fully-staged youth opera production to involve children from throughout Santa Fe of many ages, backgrounds, and abilities, performed with professional production values and a professional orchestra.

We choose this medium because opera is the apotheosis of performance mediums, encompassing music, dance, theater, costumes, lighting, and other artforms in ways that stand-alone disciplines do not. We also believe exposure to contemporary artworks through this medium is especially appealing to children, families, and new audience members.

1. Give a large group of community children an intensive and rich  creative experience with demands of mastery.
2. Achieve true diversity and access by keeping the program tuition-free.
3. Provide Santa Fe with a premiere family opera event at affordable ticket prices.
4. Support new explorations emanating from real-life peer performance opportunity, and relating them to other curricula including science, conservation and language arts learning.
5. Deploy a new and successful paradigm of collaboration between public school teachers, students, and a performing arts organization.

1. Provide a gateway to inner growth through performance and personal achievement.
2. Provide cast members a joyful, loving, and reflective learning experience about music, the arts, the environment, and themselves.

1. Demonstrate that children can perform demanding music at a high level of accomplishment.
2. Expose children to a (non-commercial) family-oriented art experience with resonating values.

1. Enhance educational experience through real-life exposure to opera and the technical aspects of preparing for performance.
2. Provide a high-level performance opportunity in partnership with creative professionals and guest artists.

1. Link classrooms and educators (particularly in remote areas of the state) to an exciting performance and learning event that is taking place in Santa Fe with their peers.
2. Use this model as a point of departure for inspiring additional learning in their individual classrooms and schools.
3. Give teachers a means of exchanging innovation around an engaging theme with a real-world application (the lesson of the opera being that compassion and stewardship of nature and wildlife imparts special knowledge that literally saves the town.)

1. Performance of the opera and production of all related components
2. Student-created DVD and educator outreach package
3. Statewide blog directly engaging at least 200 educators and/or classrooms across the state
4. Collection of teacher and classroom-created materials for future dissemination through the blog.

1. Direct enhancement of visual arts, music curriculums
2. Enhancement of language arts and science curriculums
3. Reflective learning and classroom participation enhanced
4. Tying production/teamwork experience to social action to benefit the community and engender a sense of civic responsibility.
5. Develop cooperative relationships across demographic barriers
6. Inspire new paradigms for classroom and student project-making and documentation
7. Lead to additional academic and personal success (mid-range outcome, for youth opera program will replicate biannually)

1. Self-documentation portfolios by cast members.
2. Peer portfolio evaluation.
3. Portfolio “bests” will be posted online (anonymously) at SFNM’s website.
4. Finally, the DVD documentation project will also comprise evaluation elements.