“Marquise Bradley is a clarinet player, a 17-year-old with talent, good grades, and a dream to play in a top orchestra someday,” writes Kristen Graham in Friday’s (11/16) Philadelphia Inquirer. Project 440 is helping Bradley “sharpen his focus, develop leadership skills…. Project 440 … is the brainchild of Joseph Conyers, assistant principal bassist with the Philadelphia Orchestra…. Conyers has long had an appetite for community work, fed in large part by a trip through an impoverished Georgia town his family took when he was a child. He recalled his mother looking at a group of children playing and saying: One of these kids could be the next Albert Einstein or Yo-Yo Ma, and we won’t know, because they lack opportunities. ‘That haunted me,’ said Conyers.… Project 440 staged its signature event at the Kimmel Center this week, a college fair that connected 400 students with 40 colleges, from Juilliard and the New England Conservatory to Rice University and Johns Hopkins University…. Chloe Cooper, a flute player … who volunteers with Project 440 after going through its programs, has started her own nonprofit, Generation Music…. Cooper said, ‘I want other kids to have the same things I had.’ ”
Posted November 19, 2018
In photo: Joseph Conyers, assistant principal bass of the Philadelphia Orchestra and founder of Project 440, speaks to families at Project 440’s annual college fair.
