© 2024 Public Radio Tulsa
800 South Tucker Drive
Tulsa, OK 74104
(918) 631-2577

A listener-supported service of The University of Tulsa
classical 88.7 | public radio 89.5
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

The Harmony Project: It's Thriving in Los Angeles, and It'll Soon Begin a Satellite Effort in Tulsa

Aired on Wednesday, May 28th.

On this edition of our show, we speak with Myka Miller, who is a musician, teacher, and self-described (per one online bio) "agent for social change through music." Miller is also the executive director of the Los Angeles-based Harmony Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to music education for young people in low-income communities. Since taking the helm of this nonprofit in 2007, Miller has seen its number of enrolled students expand from 250 to 2,000 in and around Greater Los Angeles. The Harmony Project has been recognized as one of the most effective arts-based youth interventions in the nation --- and it's rooted, at least in part, in the popular and highly successful El Sistema music-education program of Venezuela, which arranges for the teaching of music to 500,000 of that country's most vulnerable children. Miller is visiting our community to plan with members of the Tulsa Symphony Orchestra and other local experts about soon creating a satellite program of the Harmony Project at Tulsa's Kendall-Whittier Elementary School. An exciting development for our city, to be sure --- and yet another example of how well-planned and well-delivered arts education can immediately and incredibly enrich young students' lives.

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
Related Content