INCEPTION

Our most important duty as a species is to preserve and nurture our environment. Our most valuable function as individuals is in educating our younger generations.

These fundamental principles are reflected in a new project dedicated to sustaining the land and oceans of the Galapagos Islands: the Music for the Planet Learning Center, which is based in the Islands and was approved by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage of Ecuador in July of 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 how to play musical instruments, compose, do musical analysis, and perform chamber music at a conservatory. I received instruction in the humanities and introductions to science in high school. At university, I pursued mathematics. This resulting combination of music, science, and humanities therefore made a profound and indelible impression on my young psyche, giving me the tools to see and analyze the world through a variety of different lenses.

I started teaching music when I was seventeen years old. And, after ten years passed, I acquired great expertise in several artistic areas thanks to my studies at Yale University. I also reached a better understanding 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 of the current state of the environment, I would like to contribute to it by providing a different way of teaching musical education, combining it with the sciences and humanities. This mixture of disciplines will help students establish rational criteria for interacting with the environment, preserving the planet and its resources, and eventually becoming the leaders of a new approach to the arts, society, and conservation project.

The practice of music increases self-knowledge, develops dexterity, enhances bodily control, induces beneficial cortex connections in our brain, and promotes emotional understanding, among many other benefits. Orchestral playing can be seen as a fractal of society’s social interactions, as it mirrors its communal and interdependent activities. Every musician must preserve their own sound’s individuality while being able to blend it with others, within a generalized aesthetic. This is governed by a set of rules, through an established hierarchy within; therefore, a variety of interconnected functions reveal how a successful performance depends on individual dexterity, validation of others, empathy, collaboration, and common standards.

The teaching method of the Music for the Planet Learning Center includes instruction on musical analysis, music history, and interpretation, enhancing the student’s understanding of the musical arts. In addition to the average curriculum of a youth orchestra, MFTP offers a series of introductions to the sciences, humanities, law, and environmental studies on oceans and lands. Principles of math, logic, set theory, and the history of sciences will prepare students to utilize rational tools for critical analysis, as well as textual interpretation and comprehension. The history of philosophy, psychology, literature, and the arts will give pupils a broad view of world culture. An introduction to law will give them the knowledge necessary to interrogate rules in different societies and their inception. Finally, and most importantly, they will receive instruction on the many environmental issues regarding the oceans, wildlife, the protection of fauna and flora, the atmosphere, and the planet’s climate challenges.

The Galápagos Islands create a unique opportunity and environment to provide community aid and education: to unite arts and humanities with mathematics and environmental sciences, applying a set of disciplines to a new model for teaching young people. I want to provide our younger generation with elements that provoke creativity, collaboration, and individual analysis. The aim is to instill the conviction and awareness of belonging to bigger, planetary community – and therefore seeing the planet as a living 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. Having produced the movie Jane, which was centered around the life of 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 film’s soundtrack. I, Dante Santiago Anzolini, conducted the soundtrack live, giving Jane its South American premiere. The audience response was overwhelming.