What is the Give Something Back To Berlin - Open Music School?
The OMS creates spaces for people to take time out of their day to simply be with each other and communicate through their mutual love of music. It is a musical skill-sharing community with a focus on the integration of newcomers into Berlin's world famous and diverse, but sometimes intimidating and confusing music scene.
What does the OMS do?
1. Music Tuition.
On one level, we offer a variety of completely free, weekly group classes run by talented volunteers. These groups focus on providing supportive and creative environments for people of any gender, nationality, ethnicity or migrational 'status' to learn together. More advanced students are often encouraged to act as teachers' aids or translators. We currently run groups and workshops in Acoustic Guitar, Piano Keyboard, Bass-Guitar, Social Singing and have an Open Music Lab (workshops around all things electronic). This list seems to grow every month!
2. Meet-Ups for Musicians.
In addition to these weekly classes, we also work in collaboration with other community groups, to organise events and concerts. We seek to create events at which people can meet, create new connections and share information about all things musical in Berlin. There are a lot of talented musicians living in refugee camps and other isolated parts of the city and we want to enable them to become active parts of this city’s music scene and culture in general. These “meet-ups” have already proven very popular and meaningful new collaborations are common!
3. Advocacy
We are creating a kind of database of recording studios, music venues, professional music schools, private tutors, youth centres, funding-advice-services, and anything/anyone else that may be able to assist Berlin’s musical newcomer community. A lot of people take part in Give Something Back To Berlin’s projects, and we want to be ready and able to advocate for individuals with anything musical as fast and effectively as possible.
Music is a wonderful communication tool. It is an important part of every human culture on earth. We believe it is a wonderful way to bring newcomer Berliners together with the city. Also, playing music is just fun.
