This year has certainly been a challenging one; however, our entire Brockton School community has been very diligent about following our provincial guidelines, and because of this, we have been with our World Music Program (WMP) students in person since September! We feel very grateful for this.
Here is a video of Brockton School's World Music Program (WMP) students, playing our own WMP arrangement of "Baba Yetu." Baba Yetu is the theme song for the 2005 video game Civilization IV. It has been covered by countless groups around the world, including the Soweto Gospel Choir, and it was the first piece of video game music to be nominated for and win a Grammy award. Here are our Intermediate Specialized Ensemble (ISE) students, who are all in the same school cohort, performing this in our converted music room/recording studio for what we are calling the "2021 Music Room Sessions." If you read the comments on our YouTube channel link, you will see that the composer, Christopher Tin, likes our arrangement and, in fact, he reached out to us last fall to ask us if this arrangement could be a part of their 15-year anniversary celebration of Baba Yetu.
This piece, along with 11 other newly-recorded pieces from these 2021 Music Room Sessions, will be used in our school's June 9th online fundraiser, in support of the organization One Girl Can, and our Kenyan sponsor student, Cynthia. So far, our school has put Cynthia through Grades 10, 11, and 12, and we have secured funds for her first and second years of university. We are now working on securing funds for her third and fourth years of university. Much of the fundraising we do for Cynthia comes from the efforts of our World Music Program students, who have busked in their local community, and on international tours. In June, we will team up with our school's visual arts department to launch this online fundraising event, and in the past, our music and visual arts fundraising festivals have raised a considerable amount for Cynthia's education.