MUSIC FOR THE FUTURE

PROGRAMS FOR INCARCERATED STUDENTS

THANK YOU NOTES FROM PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS

MUSIC FOR THE FUTURE

PMHU’s musical courses and music engagements in prisons and jails span from single day housing unit concert tours, to semester-long, college-accredited music composition courses.

PMHU’S COLLEGE-ACCREDITED MUSIC COMPOSITION COURSE

We are thrilled to announce that after two years of conception and production, PMHU's lead teaching artist Brad Balliett has begun teaching the pilot semester of the Music For the Future music composition course Composition and Analysis: Beethoven String Quartet for Bard Prison Initiative students at the Green Haven Correctional Facility. The in-person core of this course is supplemented by an 11-part on-demand video library, giving students the creative tools they need to write their own pieces of music based on the composition methods of Ludwig van Beethoven, a man who throughout his life attempted to imbue his music with messages of brotherhood, joy, and triumph in the face of familial abuse, mental illness, and impending deafness. 

RIKERS ISLAND HOUSING UNIT CONCERTS

This season, PMHU has relaunched its in-unit concert programs with the NYC Department of Corrections on Rikers Island and the Vernon C. Bain jail barge in the Bronx. Throughout the year, PMHU artists bring interactive programs encompassing collaborative music performance and discussions, song-writing workshops, and improv “jam sessions” together with our incarcerated listeners. 

BACKGROUND

With the overwhelmingly positive audience response during our first healing concert at the Radgowski Correctional Institution in May 2016, the PMHU team moved to make music outreach in carceral facilities one of its primary missions, expanding its reach to local, state, and federal prisons throughout California, Connecticut and New York.  For this work, PMHU was awarded the ProMusicis 2017 Father Eugène Merlet Award for Community Service, supporting a week-long musical immersion pilot program at the Danbury Federal Correctional Institution in January 2018. 

For this first extended residency, PMHU musicians collaborated with Carnegie Hall's Daniel Levy to present an interactive, conversational, and educational musical program, and facilitated creative workshops through which participants were able to compose their own musical pieces. This residency eventually grew into two full year-round programs led by PMHU’s lead teaching artists Brad Balliett and Daniel Levy, bringing such celebrated ensembles as the Juilliard, Dover, Miro, Calidore, and Orion Quartets into musical workshops with PMHU’s program participants, delving into the compositional processes and inspirations of Ludwig Van Beethoven as seen through his string quartet literature. The resulting musical creations and responses were extraordinary, and reinforced to all involved the power of music to bridge the divide between people of different cultures and circumstances. 

When all of this work was put on indefinite hold due to the pandemic, PMHU’s leadership decided to take the final step to develop these year-round programs into a college-accredited music composition program. PMHU’s lead teaching artist Brad Balliett worked with the PMHU team to write, film, and edit the on-demand video library that delves into the life, times, and music of Ludwig van Beethoven. 

The PMHU Team is now in the process of bringing this course to correctional facilities across the country in collaboration with the music departments of local universities and conservatories.

“Thank you so much for the warmth and enthusiasm for life and art you express through your music. Your music brought to me a sense of normalcy I can only call ‘home’. Thank you for that gift.”

— Program Participant, Danbury Women's Prison