Orchestra of New Spain

With 22 years of concertizing experience, the Orchestra of New Spain was approached by the Dallas ISD Performing Arts Division in 2011 to create and conduct an annual Summer Strings Camp. By the end of the second Camp, our musicians realized that the typical DISD youngster had simply not learned well enough, if at all, the basics of string playing. With new funding ONS created the In-School Lessons program which takes our professional musicians—tutors we say—into the classroom where, in the company of the music teacher, we provide that basic skillset as well as tutor the particularly gifted students. 

In 2013 the Orchestra presented its first staged production in the newly opened Moody (at the time City) Performance Hall, a baroque Spanish operetta —zarzuela — the critics noted “reviving the acting styles, costumes, and sets of early eighteenth-century Spain; every opera and theater fan should attend this production.”

ONS professionals form the heart of the ONS In-School String Lessons program. Over the past 5 years, the need of DISD students for more personal attention has been obvious to these professionals. The goals of these lessons are manyfold: to provide such students with the tools to pursue their musical interests, to help the Dallas ISD orchestra teachers build their programs, to expose the child to possibilities otherwise unexpected, and in the long term to encourage the student's family to participate in their child's development in music and beyond.

Our most promising long-term audience is found through education, namely with DISD students. Students, some 90% Latinx, are our most important and promising audience because they are our future, as well as recipients of the artistic and cultural nourishment they find nowhere else. We offer for no cost the annual Summer Strings Camp that engages young music students and employs local music teachers. We offer free string instrument lessons in class and via Zoom during Covid. We offer students free attendance at our annual Spanish language production in the Arts District’s Moody Hall. This first exposure to theater for many provokes wide-eyed and spell-bound reactions where a stage production featuring their language is being spoken and sung by young people who look like them. Those productions, historically on themes of mythology, are scheduled when 4th & 5th graders are studying mythology, linking their Hispanic cultural history to the classroom through the arts. 

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The Orchestra of New Spain (ONS) is a period-instrument baroque orchestra and chorus specializing in the music of Spain and its sphere of New World influence. Fully professional, it is based in Dallas where it was created in 1989 to celebrate the place of the Catedral Santuario de Guadalupe in the aborning Arts District. The Orchestra's repertory comes from the rediscoveries of its founder and Artistic Director of manuscripts in the court of 18th-century Spain, from Spanish and New World cathedrals and monasteries, and from the popular theaters of Madrid. This previously unknown repertory is the Spanish equivalent of better-known European baroque traditions. The Orchestra's most recent initiatives are concerts reviving music and poetry of the Medieval Spanish Convivencia, when Christians and Jews lived peaceably under the Islamic Caliphate until 1492, and more recently performing the music of Black composers with award-garnering programs "Celebrating Juneteenth."

Our Needs

We would like to ask our donors to consider any contribution that will lead us to the amount of $7,500 to the combined programs that include a Summer Strings Camp, In-School individual and small group string lessons, and student attendance at our annual staged production at the Moody Performance Hall. $50 will provide one hour of private or small group tutoring for DISD students.