The Phoenix Conservatory of Music doesn?t care where someone lives, how much talent they have, or how much money is in the bank account. The nonprofit organization?s mission is simply to deliver the power of music to everyone.
Besides private lessons in many areas of music, the Conservatory branches out to the community to fill in the gaps of music education where needed. The Conservatory moved into a different facility three years ago, and it now reaches out to 46 different sites, including schools, parks and recreation departments, libraries, and museums.
?We?ve been around since 1998,? says the Conservatory?s executive director, Regina Nixon. ?Our founder, Bonnie Lou Toigo Coleman, was the head of guitar studies at Glendale Community College, and she was seeing a gradual decrease in the readiness of college-level students preparing for a professional career in music education or performance.?
Back then, the organization operated from the back of Music and Record Surplus by the Metro Center. They offered private lessons and facilitated a small amount of community programming. In 2004, Coleman retired, and Nixon was promoted to head the organization. Now, programming extends from 6-month-old babies and their families through senior citizens.
?We believe every person has the potential to enjoy and create music,? Nixon says. ?Arizona schools do not offer music instruction until fourth through sixth grades. It?s not bad, but not great. We all know the developmental assets when babies? brains are still developing are huge. We want parents to learn to interact with their children in a musical way for a building of a lifelong love for music.?
Two years ago, the Conservatory branched out even more and became a Berklee City Music Network School. At the heart of the partnership with this Boston-based college is PULSE (Pre-University Learning Systems Experience). This opportunity gives students a hip urban college preparatory curriculum that is completely interactive. Online instruction is readily available wherever the students are located. All it takes is a log-in, and they?re ready to take notes and learn about them.
The Conservatory competitively prices private and group lessons, and they can be considerably lower than other community programs. For instance, for-profit music teachers charge $30 to $40 for a half-hour lesson; the Conservatory?s rate is $18. The group lessons are even less?$10 to $12 a week, with small class sizes. Students get additional benefits such as the PULSE program, free tickets to events, and discounted prices to seasonal events, many performances, and recitals.
The programming is available to the students in their own neighborhoods and communities. More than 2,000 students throughout the area are involved in the Conservatory?s programming each year. Of those, only 300 are enrolled in private lessons. Many of the music programs are brought to the students inside their own schools or as after-school programs in nearby recreation and community centers.
?One of our goals is to build skills sets to make these students better people and give them the skills to be successful for the workforce of the future,? Nixon says. She comments that in today?s school systems, too much focus is placed on tests in which only one answer can be correct.
?In the real world, there are lots of answers and lots of questions we are still discovering,? Nixon says. ?The arts, including music, teach all of that. It makes students think creatively and outside the box.?
The Phoenix Conservatory of Music is located at 7801 N. Black Canyon Hwy., Ste. 6, in Phoenix. (602) 353-9900. phoenixconservatoryofmusic.org
About Lee Nelson
Lee Nelson is a freelance writer working for a variety of magazines, Web sites, businesses, and organizations. She spent twenty years of her career as an award-winning features and education reporter for a daily newspaper in Iowa.west virginia rob roy gaslight justin timberlake michael dyer bachmann bachmann
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