THE SANKUSEM SUMMER MUSIC INSTITUTE AND FESTIVAL

The Sankusem Summer Music Institute and Festival will offer a formal, structured program of master class music lessons in late August 2020. Operating under the umbrella of Sankusem, our Ghanaian NGO, we are establishing a music institute in Ghana to help musicians improve their performance skills, technique, and general musical literacy. We plan to invite a faculty of professional musicians from Europe, America and Africa, and offer a level of teaching to our students, far beyond what is currently available in Ghana.

The initial participants will be musicians in Ghana, but we hope in time to be a resource for musicians in the surrounding West African countries such as Nigeria, Togo, Benin, Burkina Faso, and Cote d’Ivoire. We anticipate that we will welcome some students from abroad who will come to study with our distinguished faculty, and who will come to experience Africa, and to learn about African traditional and contemporary music. 

We will teach classical music repertoire (including those utilising African musical idioms), and we will also offer other musical genres like jazz and popular music. Rather than focusing on a specific style of music, the aim is to give our students the technical and performance tools to excel and innovate, not only as performance practitioners and composers, but also as entrepreneurs and promoters of their creative work. Lessons will include individual and group instruction on technique, chamber music, orchestral performance, choir, pedagogy and instrument-making and repair, and drumming and dancing. We are particularly proud to offer a performance and discussion class on chamber works by African composers, a choir to perform music from the African diaspora, and a class that exposes students to traditional African instruments.

A second goal we have is to offer local craftsmen and women an opportunity to learn instrument making/repair skills, including piano tuning and rebuilding. There are at most three of four piano tuners in Ghana, and no instrument makers at all. The situation is similar in other West African countries. Yet, local musicians need instruments, and those instruments need maintenance and repair. So we plan to offer periodic seminars and workshops during the year, taught by our faculty of instrument makers and piano technicians.

We also want to offer local musicians second hand instruments and instrument parts at extremely reasonable costs, or in some cases, no cost. We plan to reach out to instrument shops abroad through our faculty, asking for donations of gently used instruments or parts. Then we plan to ship these to Ghana, and to operate an Instrument shop throughout the year. We want to serve musicians in Ghana and West Africa who need instrument maintenance or new instruments. 

The Institute will be followed by a series of performances by faculty and students in public and private venues around Accra. Our goal is to grow local audiences who will appreciate quality music and pay to attend performances by local talented musicians.