Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: When Darius Lassiter sneaked out of his house to attend the 2012 Arts Greenhouse Martin Luther King Day show, he thought the risk of getting in trouble with his father would be well worth the reward of his first hip-hop performance.
Although it took nearly a year longer than expected, Mr. Lassiter, 15, finally had his Arts Greenhouse debut Monday with a song called "Ambition," which provocatively asks, "This world is getting messed up and who's to blame?"
Arts Greenhouse is a music education program affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University that gives local teenagers an opportunity to learn about race, music and social justice through hip-hop, and to compose and produce their own music.
2 comments:
Now I regret not going to see the Martin Luther King Day performance that we had here at CMU two weeks ago. The Arts Greenhouse program seems to offer a lot for young teens, and it would have been nice to see some of what results from the hard work that everyone involved puts in. It's interesting that they choose to combine discussions of difficult, controversial topics with lessons in music, because I think this is a wonderful idea and should be copied across the country. Music is a wonderful form of expression. Every teenager listens to some form of music daily; we are all attached to our iPods, and it has become a huge part of our life. It is what we escape to when we're sad, and what we party to when we're happy. So taking something that is so ingrained in every teenager's life and using it to help them express themselves is a fabulous idea.
I wasn't aware that this program existed, but I think it's wonderful, and integral to continue arts education. The CMU student who began as a high school student in the program and is not a junior is the perfect example. First of all, the university-sponsored program has the potential to expose high school students to a university that they may not have considered before (if they've considered going to college at all). Furthermore, the exposure to music and its transformative power is just as (if not more) important. It provides an outlet for these high school students and the college ones that isn't just math and science and is a great community builder.
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