Pre-Texts North Nashville After School Music Education Program

Mural of a family walking and looking up next to the words: Freedom is not a destination it's a Journey"

A nascent after-school program spearheaded by Ira and Jewell Williams Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, Doris Sommer, and Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair of Fine Art at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Maria Magdalena Campons-Pons, seeks to intervene in North Nashville's school to prison pipeline with the power of music. Campos-Pons, a multidisciplinary artist and cultural strategist, began a Fall 2020 effort of artist interventions in the city with her “Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice: Living in Common in the Precarious South(s)”. Inspired by the Venezuelan after-school music education program, El Sistema, that trains young people to play in a national network of orchestras, this after-school program starts with two schools in North Nashville partnering with the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt. The program develops the El Sistema model by strengthening the core curricular needs of reading and writing through Sommer’s Pre-Texts method of pedagogy, that treats written texts as prompts for making art. This method aims to strengthen young people’s existing capacities for creativity and interpretation, here prompting the creation of music, an art that formally conveys community. Nashville is a particularly rich city in United States music history, particularly for the development of R&B, country, rock and jazz genres. The funding requested from Mellon Urban Initiative will support developing specific course material for the after-school program, taking a multi-disciplinary approach to disseminating and creating knowledge with students.

 

Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative Report

This report reflects on work done to remotely develop an after-school program in North Nashville during Spring Semester 2021. My main role as a student facilitator was to coordinate what institutional actors could offer with what community members challenging the prison-to-school pipeline in North Nashville needed. Ira and Jewell Williams Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, and African and African American Studies Doris Sommer and Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair of Fine Art at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Maria Magdalena Campons-Pons, sought to intervene in urban inequality with the power of art, specifically music, with the support of the Fisk University Art Museum (Jamaal Sheats) and the Frist Art Museum (Katie Delmez). The report details university and community efforts supported by Harvard's Mellon Urban Initiative, tragic setbacks (cw: death) and what the student facilitator learned from these efforts. 

For reasons of confidentiality, the full report is only available on request to HMUI; please write to the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative at hmui@harvard.edu

Researcher: Che Applewhaite