Second-hand shop
Instruments donated, repaired and resold in our shop at Centro Musica Trento. The best ones go to the schools.
The shopWhat we do
How you keep
a school standing
The music schools are one of the association's two souls. The other is our support for the artistic projects of young Italian musicians.
This page is about the first one: what it actually takes to keep a music school in Burundi or Cuba standing. Shipping instruments is not enough. It takes teachers paid every month, rooms, transport, materials — and it takes a way of finding that money. The second-hand shop and the concerts are that way, and at the same time they are how we get people playing here too.
Concerts and house concerts
Theatre concerts and evenings in people's homes. About forty so far, and some 1,200 people met along the way. Every hat passed round goes to one of the schools.
The concertsThe weekly jam session
Every week we run a jam session at Centro Musica Trento: people turn up, agree on a couple of chords and play together. It is open to everyone, with no sign-up and no right age: someone who has played for twenty years and someone who learnt three chords last month end up on the same stage.
It is the same idea we take elsewhere, applied at home: music does not do much good if it never leaves the room you practise in. It is also the easiest way to meet us in person, if you feel like giving the projects a hand.
To find out when the next one is, write to us.
What exactly
we pay for
These are the dull line items that decide whether a project lasts or fades out after a year. They are also the ones nobody wants to fund.
Instrumentscollected, repaired and shipped
Teacherspaid month by month
Rooms and rentwhere the lessons happen
Transportcontainers, minibuses, shipping
Materialspaper, printers, computers
Securitysomeone to watch the school at night
And the other soul
Artistic projects
We back projects that give young Italian artists room to work. The first is Van Session, a bus turned into a travelling recording studio.
The artistic projectsWhat we have already done
The Chiquitica, the charity auctions, the Ponte Radio house in Luserna, Kapuziner Strasse: projects that are over or on hold, worth keeping a record of.
The archive