Shanti Bhavan

Jul 18

Written By Ben Houghton

FAST FACTS

School Name: Shanti Bhavan Children’s Project

Location: Tamil Nadu, India

Programs: in person and virtual Vocal Music, Piano, Guitar, Violin, General Music

Participants: 283

Duration: 36 hrs/week year-long

Teaching Artists: Brittany Stone, Manuela Restrepo, Christopher Sierra, Bridgette Gan, Ida Jo, Rahul Jhunjhunwala

Partnered with BAE since: 2016

“After I started singing with the choir and I was just like, "why do I keep thinking I can't sing?" I feel like I can sing and I really have such a beautiful voice. I just started believing that if someone else can believe that, then why can't I believe and accept what I have? So I broke through that. I broke through the thought that I can't sing and I'm not a good singer. I mean, I accepted myself and I thought to myself that I can sing and I do have a beautiful voice.”
-Mercina, Class of 2023 choir student
“BAE was one of the coolest things I got to experience, both as a member of the choir and later when I helped as the vidoegrapher. One of the things I really enjoyed seeing (as a videographer) was how comfortable the Program Coordinators made the choir feel before practice. Ialso loved how BAE built character through music.
Another aspects of the BAE education that I believe doesn't get enough credit is that we gain a lot of knowledge through the music we learn. The songs taught in choir actually broadened our world view on current events and history, and it also taught us to appreciate other cultures.”

Vel Senthil, graduate and rising senior at Stanford University
I would never speak up much. I would say superficial things like shallow stuff, then I would never talk about what I am feeling, what I’m really thinking because I was afraid someone's going to judge me or someone's going to take it in the wrong way. And then when I joined the BAE team I realized that my opinions were important enough to share, regardless of what people might think!
Franclina, 11th grade piano and choir student
"My happiest memories from Shanti Bhavan are from choir, singing my heart out to songs with other students with the same enthusiasm for music. BAE has helped me develop my voice, through quality vocal training from the best teachers I could possibly have, but more importantly, provided me with a space where I can be creatively challenged and vent my emotions. I am really proud of the community BAE has been able to build on campus, bridging students from varying levels of music and creating a safe space for them to express their emotions through the arts, and I will forever treasure that. Because of the strong music program that BAE offers, I am now able to comfortably practice with other students in college who have gone through years of private musical training, and not feel, even for a bit, like I have had inadequate training. I am super grateful."
-Dhanush, graduate and rising sophomore at Dartmouth College
“I am the first in my family to play the piano. At home, I did not have access to a piano because my family can't afford it. When I grow up, I want to take care of my family…and I would like to buy a piano and leave it at my house and every night I would play it!”
-Arasu, 11th grade piano and choir student

REVENUE & EXPENSES

Programming was made possible thanks to support from Sing for Hope and individual BAE donors.

@broadwayforartsed Shanti Bhavan Music Class Takeover #BAE #art #music #musiceducation ♬ original sound - Broadway For Arts Education

@broadwayforartsed Welcome to Music at Shanti Bhavan #BAE #musiced #artseducation ♬ original sound - Broadway For Arts Education

@broadwayforartsed welcome to a day in the life of a Shanti Bhavan music fellow! #takeover #arts #musiced ♬ original sound - Broadway For Arts Education

IMPACT REFLECTION

In April 2023, Broadway for Arts Education completed its 8th year of music instruction at the Shanti Bhavan Children’s Project in Tamil-Nadu, India. Nearly 300 students, aged 4-18, participated in hundreds of hours of virtual and in-person private piano, guitar, violin, and voice lessons, general music classes, and choir rehearsals.

After 2 years of virtual instruction, July marked the return of BAE staff to campus. However, several hurdles related to recovery from a lockdown learning environment were quickly identified through observations, discussions, interviews, and journaling. These pain points included students seeing themselves as individuals instead of a part of a larger community/ensemble, struggling with time-management and punctuality, exhibiting stifling perfectionism coupled with an increased fear of failure, and expressing difficulty in stress management.

In response, staff and teaching artists set the following music program goals for the year:

Reestablish the importance of music as a community building tool
Using a “healing arts” approach to syllabus creation with lesson plans and activities that develop emotional regulation skills
Creating more leadership positions for students
Introducing policies and accountability measures for attendance at rehearsals and practice sessions
Creating more opportunities for students to feel comfortable engaging with audiences beyond their immediate “comfort zone” community through performances, workshops, and talkbacks

After a full team visit in July to record a virtual concert, Music for Good, teaching artist Brittany Stone kicked off the year as our first in-person Music Fellow since February 2020. Many of these goals were able to be fulfilled for the first time thanks to a brand new partnership with Sing For Hope. We were able to build a new piano lab and increase participation in the piano program sixfold, hiring local pianist and teaching artist Rahul Jhunjhunwala to manage the expansion and increased need. Virtual music lessons continued to thrive, with students studying with teachers from all around the world, including Harvard’s Dr. Christopher Sierra.

Students produced the 3rd annual Bhavan Brunch, a zoom holiday tradition that connects them with their supporters and former teachers from around the world. In January, BAE welcomed Manuela Restrepo as the new in-person Music Fellow. Her leadership and teaching style led students to continually express that the music room was a safe haven and stress reliever amidst high pressure to succeed academically (with several students referencing that even 15-20 minutes in the music room gave them positive energy to go back and tackle their math homework!).

The year concluded with the return of Arts Camp facilitated by a team of 6 BAE teaching artists who introduced the school community to art forms they wouldn’t regularly get to experience during the school year and prepared the student body for 3 days worth of graduation performances! During that time, they got to meet students from The Bronx through a special visit from Sing for Hope and participate in a talkback with 3 cast members from Broadway’s Life of Pi. We also awarded long time music program participant and graduating senior, Hemant, with a college scholarship. After taking a gap year, he hopes to attend Princeton in the Fall.

In June, students reflected on the impact of the music program over the past 12 months:

“I overcame other people's judgments. When I sing, I come out of my comfort zone. Others who like to judge so much, I think I got over that. I'm like ‘just be myself.’ ”
“I feel like I’m meant to live for music. I don’t know how exactly to describe it, but when I listen to music or when I just look at notes on a sheet of paper, somehow it just soothes me and makes me breathe again.”
“Through music, I’ve learned to be more energetic in class. It fills me with positive energy, so I carry that into class and then I’m able to focus and concentrate more. With my friends, I usually sing along with them or we jam together and we share the same space for mistakes.”
“It helped me improve with other people who don’t know how to sing. Sometimes, 3/4s of the [academic] class is in choir, so we just start singing choir songs. When we sing together, it shows how united we are. Choir is the only thing that shows that.”

Many students reflected that they continued to struggle with attendance and punctuality, but we saw students expressing increased awareness of the problems, and setting time-bound goals to try to overcome them. We will continue to work on that in the coming school year, and are currently formulating new FY24 goals from our most recent survey data.