home    contact    members   



FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Katie English, 267-974-1250

Tune Up Philly Debuts New Ensembles at World Café Live

Philadelphia Youth Orchestra’s 80 elementary-school student orchestra performs final concert of its first season on Saturday, July 30th in Philadelphia, Pa.

Philadelphia, PA – July 26, 2011 (Download PDF). Maestro Louis Scaglione, President and Music Director of the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra organization (PYO) today announced that PYO’s Tune Up Philly program will perform a special summer concert on Saturday July 30, 2011 at 2:00 p.m. at World Café Live in Philadelphia, that will conclude the 2011 TUP Summer Session.

Led by Tune Up Philly Director Stanford Thompson, 80 elementary school students will hold a free concert that is open to the public, featuring performances of works by Bach, Handel, Tchaikovsky and Lecuona by the TUP wind ensemble, string orchestra and symphony orchestra. Tune Up Philly will also debut its brass, woodwind and string chamber ensembles and the new Tune Up Philly jazz combo ensemble.

“The Philadelphia Youth Orchestra organization believes that music education is a powerful vehicle for children to master skills that will enable them to acquire valuable tools for cooperative learning, teamwork, academic success and self-esteem,” said Maestro Louis Scaglione of the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra organization. “In our first year of the Tune Up Philly program, we have watched the inaugural class grow and learn, exceeding our expectations. We are delighted to introduce the new ensembles at the free concert at the World Café Life, a wonderful venue for musical performances.”

Tune Up Philly is the after-school musical education program of the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra at St. Francis de Sales School in southwest Philadelphia designed to nurture urban children living in challenging social and economic conditions by keeping them engaged in success through weekday out-of-school hours musical instruction. The program commenced in September 2010. Instructed by a dozen local, professional musicians, the students in Tune Up Philly trained five days a week during the school year and during a special summer program, with concentrations in woodwind, brass, strings, percussion, choral and general music education.

World Café Live is located at 3025 Walnut Street in Philadelphia, Pa. For information about the concert, please call the PYO Office at (215) 545-0502.

About the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra: Founded in 1939, the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra (PYO) is one of the nation’s oldest classical music training and orchestra performance programs for gifted and talented students from the Tri-State region. Lead by Maestro Louis Scaglione, PYO’s companion ensembles include the Philadelphia Young Artists Orchestra (PYAO), formed in 1996; Bravo Brass, added to the program in 2003; Philadelphia Region Youth String Music (PRYSM) created in 2007; and the Musicopia String Orchestra partnership, which began in 2008. Young musicians from ages six through 21 are selected by competition audition and have represented the United States on five continents. The Philadelphia Youth Orchestra organization offers classical musical performances to the Greater Philadelphia region each year and supports musical education to children from Philadelphia’s more challenging neighborhoods through its newest after-school program launched in 2010, Tune Up Philly.

###

Back