The Orfeó Lleidatà Foundation has made this course, through the ‘Combo Jove’ project, its instruments and its facilities available to around twenty high school students from the Institut Escola Torre Queralt, a highly complex center in Lleida. The participants will demonstrate all their learning with a concert at the Orfeó.
The group of students has had the opportunity to study music “normally” and with “all the necessary infrastructure,” explained the executive director of the foundation, Xavier Quinquillà.
In this way, the initiative also wants to promote the educational success of students by having a “positive impact” on their motivation to learn and avoiding “premature school leaving,” he added.
Every Monday since the beginning of the school year, more than twenty secondary school students, between 13 and 14 years old, from the Instituto Escola Torre Queralt, which is located in the Secà de Sant Pere neighborhood, have traveled to the Orfeó headquarters. Lleidatà. The students have been organized into several groups (‘combo’) to teach classes, in which they have learned to play the electric guitar, keyboard, drums, singing or batucada.
The director of the Torre Queralt School Institute, Ángel Ibaceta, has explained that the project allows musical learning in a “field that is not as curricular as the classroom” and in an “idyllic environment like the Orfeó, with professional equipment and instruments”, to which that “a good part of the center’s students would not have access given their vulnerable situation.” Thus, the initiative has the “total predisposition” of adolescents, he said.
For his part, Xavier Quinquillà explained that the Fundació Orfeó Lleidatà has a long history of developing social projects that seek to vindicate music as a tool for “the inclusion and development of people.” In this sense,
Quinquillà stated that the Torre Queralt Institute-School offered a great opportunity to achieve this objective given that it is a center of “maximum complexity”.
The ‘Combo Jove’ project has allowed, according to Quinquillà, students from “vulnerable families and in a complicated social context” to have the option of making music “normally” and in professional facilities.
The project wants to guarantee educational success by “positively impacting the motivation of students to continue studying and in the fight against premature school leaving,” said the executive director.
Regarding the development of the project, the coordinator of the initiative and professor at the Orfeó Lleidatà, Carlos Cerezo, explained that there are students who have “made a lot of progress and could do much more” in the musical field.
Personally, Cerezo has noted positive “changes” in the students’ behavior as well as that the experience has helped them “to enjoy and live a little better.”