Harmony Project

"Les petits violons" is one of the Paris Opera's educational activities. For three years, the primary school students participating in the program have been benefitted from musical practice workshops for seven hours a week during school hours, as well as meetings with Opera professionals. They also attended rehearsals and performances. The effects of the program are extremely beneficial: teachers have noted an impact on the students' openness to all things cultural and creative, and the majority of students have expressed a desire to pursue an artistic practice at the end of the program. The program ended with a performance of "La Traversée" at the Amphitheatre of the Opéra Bastille.
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Launched in 2010, Démos intervenes where access to artistic and cultural education is made difficult by economic and social factors, or by the geographical remoteness of teaching institutions. It offers 3 years of free orchestral musical training for children aged 7 to 12 from disadvantaged neighbourhoods and isolated rural areas. After an initial phase of experimentation within the larger Paris region (2010-2012), a second stage (2012-2015) took place including two additional departments of France (Aisne and Isère) followed by a third (2015-2019) extending to the whole country. This social orchestral and musical education scheme now includes almost fifty orchestras in France.
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At the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan and Italy’s first center for medical research, the Fonds K supports a research project on “The effect of music on the maternal-fetal auditory-emotional cross-talk during the late fetal period”. When a pregnant woman speaks or sings, the melody and rhythm of her voice, transfer to the fetus through her body, carrying emotions. This maternal-fetal “dialogue” lies the neurodevelopmental foundations of a lifetime “medley” between cognition and emotion. The goal of our project is to understand how music, during pregnancy, can hallmark the footing of brain activity in the fetus, through fetal functional brain imaging. This project represents an important turning point for interlacing music with research and clinical interventions during pregnancy, aimed at safeguarding the cognitive and emotional tuning of any child further on in life.
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