After Gabriel Polycarpo graduated from Indiana University in 2015 and Peggy Houng graduated in 2016, they were two of the 34 musicians accepted into the 2016 YOA Orchestra of the Americas Global Leaders program. The annual program accepts applicants from 25 countries, and more than 250 students applied.
This month, Polycarpo and Houng were awarded the Hildegard Behrens Foundation 2016 Global Humanitarian Entrepreneur Award alongside two other members of their leaders group, Kate Clark and Jessica Ling.
The award honors top graduates of the nine-month program. The program is designed to form talented musicians into well-rounded citizens of the world.
“We saw these musicians who were graduating from our orchestra who were great performers but were having a hard time finding work, even the best ones,” said Mark Gillespie, co-founder of the Global Leaders program. “We thought if we could create the skills to enable them to succeed in this world of music education for social development, we thought we would be able to help a lot of people.”
At the end of the program, each student must complete their final project, which determines the award winners. Their project entails creating and executing a plan for an initiative designed to help a community through music, Gillespie said.
Polycarpo said via email that his idea is an online network to connect Brazilian musicians, called “Mural da Música,” or “Music Notice Board.” The forum would include music-related information such as jobs, education and instrument sales to raise awareness of opportunities and raise standards of music excellence in the country.
“It was one year of very hard work, learning how to work effectively towards building a better world,” Polycarpo said.
His time at IU was a turning point in his life, Polycarpo said, because he was exposed to high-level musicians and teachers for the first time.
“IU gave me a very solid base in both performance and pedagogy and gave me a clear understanding of what I can do with music,” he said. “And I can say, possibilities are endless.”
Houng’s concept is “Harp Wise,” a combination of harp lessons and concerts in a retirement community in Maryland. Gillespie said this brings together her interests in music, cognitive sciences and psychology by using music to combat dementia, hearing loss and arthritis.
Gillespie and Raul Vergara co-founded the Global Leaders program in 2012, after they realized sustained support in the communities where the orchestra toured was necessary.
In every country in which they performed, they said they saw music education startups in need of teacher training.
“We saw this need, and at the same time we saw that many of these programs were being run by musicians who were great performers as well as inspiring teachers and entrepreneurs,” Gillespie said. “We started to think maybe we could connect the dots.”
Each accepted member of the program goes on several missions abroad, where they spend 10 days to two weeks volunteering at local music programs.
They also complete two semesters of coursework, the first of which is overseen and certified by McGill University, and the second of which is overseen and certified by the University of Oxford, Gillespie said. The courses teach the students how to become teachers of music, how to become entrepreneurs and how to make ideas into marketable realities.
“This is part of a new wave of music education that is about multidisciplinary connectivity and thinking of these musicians as human beings,” Gillespie said. “It’s about thinking of their talent with their instruments as just the start of their potential, instead of thinking of it as the end.”
