700+ students participated in cultural exchange and peacebuilding workshops as part of Carnegie Hall’s World Orchestra Week (WOW!) Festival.
Heddy Lahmann, clinical assistant professor and deputy director of international education at NYU Steinhardt, partnered with the education and social impact team at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute to design and facilitate cultural exchange and peacebuilding workshops for young musicians from around the world.
These workshops were part of Carnegie Hall’s World Orchestra Week (WOW!) Festival, which brought together more than 700 young orchestral musicians for nightly concerts, cultural exchange activities, and more from August 1 through 7, 2024.
WOW! included musicians from the National Children’s Symphony of Venezuela; the Africa United Youth Orchestra; the Beijing Youth Orchestra; the European Union Youth Orchestra; the Afghan Youth Orchestra; and Carnegie Hall’s National Youth Orchestra of the USA and NYO2.
“We developed workshops around the theme of a ‘Wish for Our World,’” says Lahmann, whose research interest is in using the arts for peacebuilding and cultural exchange. “Young musicians from across participating youth ensembles shared and exchanged their aspirations for the world’s future through theater, music, and visual art activities.”
Lahmann and a team of 10 trained teaching artists facilitated three 90-minute workshops with 150–300 students in each, ranging from the ages of 12 to 24. The workshops were organized to blend groups from different geographical areas while also offering translation services to help with language barriers.
“In a world that feels quite divided and focused on ‘othering,’ it was heartening to see the kind of connections and communication that music and the arts made possible with these young people,” says Lahmann.
Lahmann told one particularly striking story that summarized the effect these events had: “Toward the end of one workshop, a young Afghan woman talked about her wish for the world: for all girls to be able to go to school. She expressed her gratitude to be able to continue learning and playing music, while girls living in Afghanistan now are denied those rights. But, she missed her family—she hadn’t seen her parents in two years.” (The Afghan National Youth Orchestra has been living in exile in Portugal since the Taliban takeover in 2021.)
“Another young woman from the Beijing Youth Orchestra jumped up, ran over, and hugged her, and they cried together. The opportunity to be exposed to and connect with someone whose background is so different from your own, and whose experience is one you had never imagined before, can be a life-changing experience.”
During the workshops, students also learned a group-wide musical chant that incorporated elements from each of their countries, and collaborated on theatrical movement-based activities to help them “engage with each other in ways that didn’t necessarily rely on language,” says Lahmann. “Participants shared their wishes for the world and learned about the wishes of other young people from differing backgrounds and locations to consider how their wishes could come together to create something bigger. Students wrote their individual wishes on ribbons that were color-coded to each orchestra and tied them all together to form a massive wreath.”
This collective art piece was hung at the Jacob Javits Convention Center during a big play-in event led by conductor Gustavo Dudamel for all festival participants. Their handwritten wishes were also projected on the walls of Carnegie Hall’s Auditorium in multiple languages before each concert and during intermission.
NYU Steinhardt was a key partner for the WOW! Festival, with the Music Education program selecting concert pieces, coordinating on-campus housing for some of the students, and more.
Learn more about National Youth Ensemble cultural exchange programming in Carnegie Hall’s video.
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