Striking the right chord

Richard Berkeley, chairman of the New Chamber Orchestra Foundation (FNOK), pulls no punches when speaking about the state of musical education in Poland: "It's a disaster," he says. "All of the music education has been put into specialist schools. Ninety-three percent of Polish children don't have any contact with music because they're not good enough to go to music school." This year, to mark the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, special Mozart education projects have been initiated by opera theaters in every EU member state - except Poland. "How does this country expect to develop unless it develops its young?" Berkeley asks.

Music for the masses
FNOK is working to change this state of affairs. The foundation consists of a chamber orchestra and an amateur choir, and through its outreach program has organized concerts in schools in which up to 500 students have participated at one time. Last year FNOK, Empik and Polish Radio co-produced a recording of The Emperor's New Clothes - a musical for children written by Berkeley based on the Hans Christian Andersen story. "Everyone on the CD is ordinary schoolchildren," says Berkeley. "They were excellent."

This year the foundation plans a Don Giovanni musical theater program for local primary schools to fill the gap left by the absence of a national Mozart education program, and is working on building a whole music curriculum for Polish primary schools.

The group is also organizing a series of workshops to help to introduce teachers and musicians to new, proactive ways of teaching music. The workshops will bring music teachers from abroad as well as local schools, and are receiving modest sponsorship from Unilever and Kredyt Bank. So far the program has received zero support from domestic companies, who Berkeley says have no prior experience as to the value of investing in music education. "It's like trying to explain to King Alfred the Great how to drive a motor car," he says.

Benefit to business
Yet according to Berkeley, Polish businesses could benefit both in the long and short term from investment in projects like FNOK's. Studies have shown that music education is a means of developing intelligence, social skills, self-confidence and imagination, which can help to create a generation of more creative business leaders and responsible consumers. In the short term, instead of typical activities such as paintballing, businesses could use music to create more mentally stimulating team-building courses. "People are interested in things that engage them intellectually, things that have a link with culture such as music and drama," he says, adding that a training session he conducted for Unilever in Warsaw was so successful that a number of the participants took up dancing classes afterwards.

He also argues that business has much to contribute to Poland's musical institutions, whose quality simply can't measure up to that of their Western counterparts due to a certain amount of arrogance and resistance to modernization. He points out that while Poland's National Opera employs 1,100 people, The Royal Opera House in Covent Garden in London employs 430.

"Business could teach these institutions something about efficiency, and these institutions could teach business something about imagination," says Berkeley. "We offer a dialogue between the two."

More information can be found at http://www.fnok.pl