The extra money, provided by the Childhood Trust and various individuals, will offer young people from under-represented groups the opportunity to partner with inspiring, diverse, emerging professional musicians. The Abram Wilson Foundation‘s Future Sound programme helps its students develop musical skills through live, after-school workshops and short online music tutorials and interactive workshops.
The award-winning programme is designed to offer an extracurricular provision that adds greatly to music lessons within the school curriculum. Previous examples have included taking groups of school musicians into recording studios to write and record with established musicians. The students questioned about their experience were unanimous in saying it influenced their likelihood of considering a career in music and 70% said it helped them decide to take GSCE music or A-Level.
Mossbourne Community Academy is one school that has embraced the Future Sound programme and its Head of Music, Sophie Sayer was effusive about its outcomes. ‘Future Sound is just an amazing opportunity,’ she said, adding that it offered an ‘Extracurricular provision that is just not possible in schools. And this amazing opportunity to work with young professional musicians who are really exciting and really inspirational. There’s just nothing like it otherwise.’
The Abram Wilson Foundation was founded in 2012 by Jennie Cashman Wilson, in memory of her late husband, the American jazz virtuoso and musical director who died of cancer at just 38. Based in London and inspired by Abram Wilson’s own values, the foundation inspires, connects and opens doors to the music industry so that young people from disadvantaged and diverse backgrounds have an equal chance to realise their creative potential.
The Future Sound 2021 fundraiser is hoping to achieve £10,000 by Wednesday, 16 June 2021 and match-funding will be added to any donations made before noon on Tuesday.
