“The Inner City Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles (ICYOLA) … radically upends the standard assumptions about majority-white institutions… to bring musical opportunities to aspiring musicians in underserved communities,” writes Brian Marks in last Wednesday’s (10/10) Argonaut Weekly (Los Angeles). “Collaborating with the USC Thornton School of Music and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, ICYOLA has recently founded the Los Angeles Orchestra Fellowship, a program that allows four post-graduate string musicians to continue their training while providing mentorship to members of its youth orchestra. The fellowship’s goal: Prepare the fellows for successful auditions with elite orchestras, thereby changing the composition of orchestras musician by musician. Meanwhile, ICYOLA is rapidly growing its own ranks. ‘In 2009, a group of nine African-American high school instrumentalists asked me to work with them that summer on the development of repertoire and technique,’ says ICYOLA Executive Director Charles Dickerson…. ‘By the end of the next year we were almost 60.’ … In attendance at each [ICYOLA] rehearsal are the four new fellows: violinist Sydney Adedamola, violinist Ayrton Pisco, violist Bradley Parrimore, and cellist Juan-Salvador Carrasco. Their fellowship lasts two years, during which the musicians pursue graduate certificates at USC and perform with LACO musicians.”
Posted October 17, 2018
