The Youth Outreach Initiative.
For more than seventy years the Cape Ann Symphony has run a youth program — bringing classical music, and the orchestra players themselves, into 4th- and 5th-grade classrooms in advance of a full Symphony concert built around the music students had been studying. The Initiative has been on hiatus for the past year while we search for a new Program Director to lead it forward.
Help us bring the Initiative back.
We’re looking for a music educator with classroom experience, a love of orchestral repertoire, and the energy to coordinate musicians, teachers, and curriculum across more than a dozen schools. Part-time, paid, on Cape Ann.
Built by Bruce Bradshaw.
A 38-year veteran of public-school music education in Piscataway, New Jersey — and a French-horn player — Bruce shaped the Initiative into what it is today over fifteen seasons.
Bruce’s connection to the Symphony goes back to the very beginning. His father, Robert G. Bradshaw — a Rocky Neck artist and the 1933 New Jersey state flute champion — played in the orchestra’s first concert in 1952. Bruce grew up watching him from the audience.
“I’m very comfortable walking into a classroom. I feel right at home,” he said in 2018, on the eve of his final Initiative cycle. By then he’d overseen 32 youth concerts, 173 in-school demonstrations, and reached roughly 15,000 students.
The program he shaped runs on a revolving three-year cycle — so a student moving through the elementary years encounters new music, new instruments and new repertoire each visit, and arrives at the culminating Symphony concert primed to recognize what they’re hearing.
“The kids are fun to watch during the demonstrations — when their mouths and jaws just drop open.”
— Bruce Bradshaw
From the classroom to the concert hall, in three steps.
A blueprint for whoever picks it up next — the structure that took the program from a few classrooms to thousands of students a year.
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01Curriculum packet
Teachers in participating classrooms receive a comprehensive packet of materials — and a recording of the pieces to be performed — to use in advance with their students.
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02Musician visits
Members of the Symphony — including soloists, orchestra players, and Music Director Yoichi Udagawa — visit classrooms to demonstrate their instruments and answer questions.
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03The Youth Concert
Classes attend a special concert built around the music they have been studying — performed by the full Cape Ann Symphony.
Thirteen schools at the program’s peak.
When the new Program Director comes on, we’ll be reaching back out to these schools first. If you taught a 4th- or 5th-grade class that participated, we’d love to hear from you.
Schools beyond Cape Ann — in Beverly, Salem and Ipswich — were added on a rotating basis each season.
- Beeman Memorial Elementary
- East Gloucester Elementary
- Plum Cove Elementary
- Veterans Memorial Elementary
- West Parish Elementary
- Manchester Memorial Elementary
- Essex Elementary
- Cove School
- O’Maley Innovation Middle School
- Rockport Elementary
- Rockport Middle School
- Manchester-Essex Regional Middle
- Sacred Heart School
Youth Concert 2019 — Peter and the Wolf.
The Cape Ann Symphony, Yoichi Udagawa conducting, performs for Cape Ann’s 4th- and 5th-grade classrooms. Peter and the Wolf narrated by Heidi Dallin; State Senator Bruce Tarr guest-conducts the Star-Spangled Banner; Michael Coelho guest-conducts Eine kleine Nachtmusik.
What the program looked like.
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2019Peter and the WolfProkofiev · narrated by Heidi Dallin
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2018Classics for KidsRossini, Grieg, Mozart (Stathos, flute), Tchaikovsky
Two ways to get involved.
We’re actively recruiting a Program Director to relaunch the Initiative — and we’re raising the funds it’ll take to put musicians back in classrooms across Cape Ann. If either is in your wheelhouse, we’d love to hear from you.