A New Type of Conservatory: Music, Science, and Environment on the Galapagos
Our most important duty as species is to preserve and nurture our environment. Our most valuable function as individuals is educating younger generations.
A new project dedicated to sustaining the land and oceans of the Galapagos reflects these fundamental principles: the Music for the Planet Foundation, based in the Galapagos and approved by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage of Ecuador in July 2023.
I grew up in a family that taught me work ethics, and empathy, nurturing my individuality by giving me access to the best education they could provide with their limited funds. I was taught musical instruments, composition, analysis, and chamber music at a conservatory. I received instruction in humanities, and introductions to science in high school. I pursued mathematics at the university. The combination of music, science, and humanities have made a profound and indelible impression in my young psyche and gave me tools to see and analyze the world through a variety of different lenses.
I have concurrently taught music since age 17. Ten years later I acquired great expertise in several artistic areas thanks to my studies at Yale University. I attained a better comprehension of our current planetary risks, issues, and perils during my years as a Professor at MIT. As an educator, I imparted musical training to several groups of youngsters in the USA, Europe, and South America.
Given my multi-faceted background, and my assessment on the current state of the planet, I would like to make a contribution through teaching a different way of providing musical education, combined with sciences and humanities. This merger of disciplines will help students establish rational criteria for interacting with the environment, to preserve the planet and its resources, and eventually to become leaders of a new approach to arts, society, and conservation of our planet.
The practice of music induces beneficial cortex connections in our brain’s functioning, increases self-knowledge, develops our dexterity, enhances body control, and promotes emotional understanding, among other benefits. Orchestral playing may be presented as a fractal of society interactions, as it resembles its common interdependent activities. Every musician must preserve their own sound’s individuality and be able to blend with others within an accepted quality. This is governed by a set of rules, through an established hierarchy within: a multifold of functions reveal how a successful performance depends on individual dexterity, validation of others, empathy, collaboration, and common standards.
Music for the Planet Foundation encompasses instruction on musical analysis, music history, and interpretation: it will enhance the individual’s understanding of the musical arts. The curricular addition to the average youth orchestra is a set of introductions to sciences, humanities, the law, and environmental studies on oceans and lands. Principles of math, logic, set theory, and history of sciences will prepare students to utilize rational tools for analysis, text comprehension and interpretation. History of philosophy, psychology, literature, and arts will give pupils a broad view of our world culture. An introduction to law will give them a necessary knowledge to the inception of rules in different societies. Finally, and most importantly, they will all receive instruction on the several issues concerning the oceans, wildlife, protection of fauna and flora, the atmosphere, and the planet’s climate challenges.
The Galápagos provide an ideal field for an unique trial on a social experiment: to unite arts and humanities with math and environmental sciences, applying a set of disciplines to a new model for teaching young people. I want to provide them with elements that provoke the use of creativity, the practice of collaboration, the need for individual analysis. This will result in the conviction of belonging to our species within a bigger community–the planet as a live organism that needs to be nurtured and protected by humanity.
The inspiration for the Music for the Planet Foundation was a concert held in the Galapagos in the summer of 2019. The event was the largest known human gathering in the history of the Galapagos. The National Geographic had produced the movie “Jane” centered around the life of the great primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall. The National Geographic partnered with Philip Glass, the foremost American composer of the past fifty years and commissioned him to compose the soundtrack. I, Dante Santiago Anzolini, conducted the soundtrack alive, giving”Jane” its South American premiere. The audience response was overwhelming.
Dante Santiago Anzolini . www.mftpgalapagos.com
Today the Galapagos and its natural habitat of land and water are under threats like never before: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/01/13/ecuador-violence-galapagos-cocaine/
