The Young Organist Collaborative: Attracting Youth to the Organ
The Young Organist Collaborative is a successful initiative, launched in 2002, designed to “Invest in the Next Generation of Organists”. This presentation provides a detailed description of the Collaborative model, with information for replication. The Collaborative offers organ lessons to students ages 10–16 who demonstrate keyboard facility through a piano audition. The Collaborative provides first-year students with sixteen organ lessons, and second-year students with eight lessons. Students play in an annual May recital in May. To date, more than one hundred young people have participated.
- Bruce Adami
Bruce Adami is organist at Christ Episcopal Church, Exeter, New Hampshire. He has given solo organ recitals throughout New England. For more than thirty years, he has taught organists of all ages. From 1984 through 2004, he was director of music and organist at Brookside Congregational Church, UCC, in Manchester. He holds a Bachelor of Music in organ performance from the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, where he studied with Haskell Thomson. He is active in the New Hampshire chapter of the American Guild of Organists (AGO), for which he has served as treasurer and dean. In 2009, he was the faculty coordinator for the AGO Pipe Organ Encounter in Manchester. Since 2008, he has taught students through the Young Organist Collaborative, and currently serves on the Young Organist Collaborative Committee.