Durban Music School

In 1998 the South African Government removed the arts programs from Government Schools, and many music and arts educators were left without employment. Dr Nhlanhla Brian Thusi was made aware of this and he was very concerned that music education was becoming very elitist and only children who were born into wealthy families would be able to receive music education so he formed a committee of 12 music educators with himself as the Chairman and approached Operation Jumpstart to give him a building where he could offer free music education to vulnerable and physically disabled children. He looked all over Durban and eventually decided on a building in Albert Park as it was a seriously violent and depressed area, and he wanted to empower and make a difference in the lives of that community. Operation JumpStart paid for the building and the refurbishment, and The Durban Music School (DMS) opened its doors in 2000 with Dr Thusi as our trumpet educator.

DMS isn’t owned by anyone and stands alone as an entity and in its Constitution, it states that the building can never be sold, and it is here to impact positively on the Albert Park Community and the children and youth of KwaZulu-Natal.

A few years ago, the South African Police Services issued a statement regarding the Albert Park Area situated in Ward 32. The police said that this area was one of the worst areas in South Africa concerning crime. It had more drug addicts, gangs, sex workers, and murders than most other areas in South Africa. There are many street children, foreign nationals who are not registered, vagrants and huge groups of heroin smokers and drug addicts. Every day one can see drug deals in action and watch the many sex-workers plying their trade.

In the mist of this depressed community experiencing economic and social hardship which has high unemployment, poverty, and a low standard of living there is a beacon of hope. A place that impacts positively and empowers the children and youth of Albert Park. A place where the community can come and find a safe place for them to meet and spend quality time. Together with our Councillor Protas Mngonyama and the local Community Police Forum headed up by Siyanda Biyela, we have been working on changing that statement from the SAPS and while the Councillor and Siyanda have worked tirelessly to clean up the park and our precinct, removing many vagrants and making Albert Park a much safer place we have been working to empower the people of this area and the youth of KZN so that they can acquire skills so that they can find employment.

The Durban Music School is a non-profit company having 21 company status and is run by a Board of Directors with a Chairman. It has approximately 550 learners a year that receive excellent music tuition and of those 550, 540 are on a free full music bursary. The school raises funds to give free music education and then gives an orphan or vulnerable child an instrument of their choice which they take home to practice on, they receive a theory lesson, a practical lesson, and an ensemble lesson during the week. They are given money for transport, sheet music, a uniform if they are in an ensemble and their exam fees are paid. We do international classical music exams through Royal and Trinity Schools of Music, London so that the learners can get an international diploma and accreditation which will help them to get entry into a tertiary institution or find employment in the music industry. We hold regular concerts to improve their self-esteem, entertain our community and every learner is assessed by their educator twice annually.

We partner with two local Early Learning centres, called eThekwini Creche, which is also situated in Diakonia Avenue and one in Park Street. We give music education to approximately 40 children from these centres. We hope to really impact on our community by getting as many children as possible from the Albert Park area playing instruments and singing in a choir. We believe that we will be able to do this if we get them interested when they are 3 or 4 years old. We have a holistic way of teaching, and we care for the whole child not just their music tuition. We get to know them, their schools and family and try to help wherever we can.

We give employment to our young black learners who complete their grade 8 or licentiate exams in music here at DMS and encourage them to continue studying for their teacher’s diploma. We could easily employ 50 young music educators if we were given the funds and they would be sent into township schools to teach music education there. Presently we have 26 young people employed to do this and teach here.

For many years now DMS has been sending music artists and educators into primary schools to teach music education. Our project at Bonisinani Primary School in Ntuzuma has been going for 15 years and we have given music education to hundreds of children from that school. We concentrate on violin, recorder and piano classical music at this school. We have identified children that show great promise and once they leave the school for high school, they are offered a full music bursary at DMS. We have a recorder program at another school in Ntazuma which is a neighbour to Bonisinani Primary School called Maziwabantu Primary School and we teach 15 children at that school. We are hoping to grow that program to at least 40 children learning recorder.

We have another outreach program in Inanda at a school called Inanda Day Primary teaching classical violin to 14 children and one at St James Primary school teaching 15 children from grade 5.

One of our biggest outreach programmes is to the Open-Air School which is a school for the physically disabled. We teach over a hundred and thirty children there and they are given music education in the form of group lessons. We have marimba and percussion classes in every grade, and this is a project very dear to my heart as we are giving children with very little choice when it comes to employment the opportunity to acquire skills which help them when looking for employment. There are many blind or partially sighted children that we teach who never knew that there was a viable job opportunity available to them in the music industry. 

We hold sixteen workshops annually whereby we partner with the Department of Education, and we invite 80 educators from all over KZN to come and learn how to teach music. These are all educators in government schools who are supposed to be teaching music as a subject but don’t know how to. We look at the terms work and help them plan their lessons and teach them exactly what they must do, so as to complete the syllabus. At the next workshop we go through the terms work which they have completed and check if there were any problems before moving on to the next term. The Department of Education also holds dance workshops at the school to help teach their educators basic dance education.

We have ensembles at Durban Music School which provide training which helps musicians learn to work in a group and read the conductor and improves sight reading. This training is vitally important, and no learner will be able find employment in a band or orchestra or ensemble without it, as a conductor does not have time to teach new members how to read them. No matter how good a player a musician is, if they have only had one on one training with an educator, they will not get the job. Our ensembles are the DMS Jazz Band, a Concert wind band, ensembles at the Open-Air School, a brass ensemble, three community choirs and the KZN Youth Wind Band. All these ensembles practice regularly and perform at functions and do educational concerts at schools. We use these ensembles to perform many educational concerts annually and educate the future audience. Many of our learners go on to find employment in the Defence force and Polica Bands and they need this training to be able to audition for a place in a defence force or police band. We have many alumni who are in these bands around the country and one of our trumpet players is in our Presidents band based in Pretoria.

We have a program for Living Legends and many of the greats use the school to rehearse and include members of the school in their ensembles. If we didn’t open our doors to these legends, they wouldn’t have a place to rehearse and pass their knowledge on to the younger generations. We include them in our concerts, and they are very much part of the school’s life. Some of the legends who practice and are involved in our school’s life are Jerry Kunene, Mthobisi Mthalane, Vusi Mkhize, KB Maphumulo, and Bheki Luthuli.

We partner with Mbuso Khoza, and he often comes to the school to rehearse for shows and he uses our recording studio to do recordings. We work with the Mbuso Khoza institute when they run programs and need space. We do the same for other community arts centres and often have learners from other centres using our space for rehearsal. We have choirs from Ladysmith and Newcastle who come and use the school for rehearsals when they come to Durban for competitions.

Our Jazz Band is one of the schools’ best ensembles and in November of 2015 they were invited to go and perform in Dundee, Scotland at a Jazz festival there for the SA/ UK Seasons. They were a huge hit and did a big masterclass with 30 young people from music schools in Dundee culminating in a concert where all the children played Zulu pieces to the delight of the audience. While in Dundee the organizers of the Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival spotted them and invited them to that festival in 2017. They performed 4 concerts, one to over 30 000 people. They were the highlight of the parade through the city and had people joining them to dance. This band was also invited to Stellenbosch in 2016 to take part in the University of Stellenbosch’s ensemble competition where they did well, as well as winning at a National Competition in Empangeni in October in 2017.

We hold many concerts during the year, and some are big gala concerts to celebrate certain events to which we invite the community of Albert Park. For example, we hosted a big International Mother Tongue Festival for Cgina Mhlophe and our senior ensemble, the KZN Youth Wind Band, entertained our guests. We also partner with the Claremont Community Choir, and we have performed an opera which told the story of Queen Nandi, King Shaka Zulu’s mother. To celebrate Africa Day this year we held a function for women which showcased the work our local women do, and we were very honoured to have Dr Nkosazama Dlamini-Zuma with us as our guest. We also held a large memorial service to honour the late Former Deputy President of South Africa David Mabuza; may his soul rest in peace.

When we have guests from overseas, we always have a concert and perform with the guest ensembles. A few years ago, we had a group coming from New York, another large youth orchestra from Germany and a group of young musicians from Norway.

One of our important programmes is our cultural exchange programme and we have partnered with many countries and schools over the years especially Mauritius, Germany and the UK.

We have space at DMS to create a library and media centre, and I am working to raise funds for this as I think it would be beneficial to our community, and we could host storytelling and encourage young people to become more interested in their mother tongue and reading. We need computers for our bursary learners to have access to as they are falling behind other young people by not being computer literate. Lessons in computer literacy would form part of their free music education and we feel that with the rise of AI we need to teach our youth how to do this or else they will most definitely be left behind. This library would also be open to the youth of Albert Park and help would be given to encourage them to become computer literate.

We have a state-of-the-art recording studio which we use to teach our learners a basic course in sound engineering which opens another job opportunity for them and we especially want to teach blind people to learn to do this as it is a good opportunity for them. We teach our learners how to record and what to expect when they go into a recording studio. They can record their performances and then play the CD back and identify where their mistakes are. We feel that this impacts on their performance and helps them greatly. We are developing a sound engineering course which is taught in Zulu and we hope to print it so that each learner has their own user-friendly manual to refer to when they work in a studio.

One of the main focuses of the DMS is to impact positively on our community and be involved with the children of Albert Park. We want to be seen as a community centre and not as a music school only, which isn’t accessible to all the children. I realized that not all children are interested in music, so we have run classes in chess and boxing. At the moment we are offering karate lessons to the youth of the area. These different lessons have proved to be a huge success with children coming 4 days a week to be trained. We have girls and boys, and the focus of the lessons is to empower them to say no to drugs and sex work and encourage them to go to school and work hard. It focuses on making them aware of good nutrition and how smoking can damage their bodies. We want them to take care of their bodies and be proud to say no to sex, drugs, alcohol and smoking. We want to park a mobile clinic in our downstairs parking lot and provide basic health care to children in our community.

We partner with Afro Soul, and they run an academy at the school called Ikabowa Academy. This is an annual program which teaches young people who have completed matric and aren’t sure which discipline they want to follow in the arts. It is a year bridging course, and we teach them music, performance, dance, public speaking, sound engineering and business. This is a CATSEETA course and at the end of the year they are examined and receive a diploma. We have had a great deal of success with this course and many youths have gone on to find employment in the performance space and entry into university. One of our learners auditioned and was given a place in the show The Lion King which is on Broadway in New York, USA.

We hold rehearsals for the maidens who will be going to the Reed Dance held by the King of the Zulus, King Misuzulu Sinqobile kaZwelithini. We have approximately 80 young girls who come to the school in the afternoon and spend the whole night at the school being coached.

Our senior ensemble is The KwaZulu-Natal Youth Wind Band. This is a wind orchestra made up of young musicians from around KZN between the ages of 13 and 26. There are 52 members, and the band has a development program which helps vulnerable youth audition and win places in this prestigious ensemble. More than half of the band is made up of members in this program. In October 2019 they competed in a National competition in Empangeni and won the prize as the best orchestra in the Open Category.

In 2017 I entered the KZN Youth Wind Band into one of the best and most prestigious wind band competitions in the world which takes place at Carnegie Hall in New York City, USA. There were 36 bands that entered from around the world and the judges chose 5 to compete in the actual festival. Then the judges held another competition between the chosen 5 and decided which bands audition they liked the most and that band then won the opportunity to work with a famous American composer, Andrew Smith. He composed a piece for the winning band and the piece then debuted on the day of the competition. The KZN Youth Wind Band won this competition and were chosen to work with the American composer. We were awarded a Gold Medal which is the highest award that one can get in international competitions and the composer of the original piece said that he had never expected us to be able to play his piece so beautifully and exactly as he wanted it to be. He couldn’t believe that we weren’t a professional wind orchestra as we were better than many professional orchestras that he had worked with.

One of the judges made this comment, " Wow, great conducting by the way! You have a marvellous conductor. Marvelous ensemble. You guys are tremendous!  You need to be traveling all over the world. This group needs to be an ambassador for South Africa.

Go do it, get yourselves booked all over the world. It is a real honour to have you here in the United States and also in one of our great concert halls, Carnegie Hall. it is a real feather in your cap, congratulations!"

This really was a feather in the cap of the Durban Music School and the KZN Youth Wind Band.

To be in an area like Albert Park and to produce an ensemble that has performed on one of the greatest stages of the world and won Gold!

There is so much more to tell you about the Durban Music School, and I am so passionate about it and the people who work here that I could write another ten pages so I will cut this document short and tell you about a dilemma the school is facing now. The past year was exceptionally difficult to get funding as our country is facing real hardships and there is no extra money to give to non-profits. We need R 4 000 000.00 to cover our annual budget, and we are needing to refurbish our building which was built in 1835 as well as secure it.

Durban Music School proves that an institution which has its community at heart and has a vision to change lives, can do whatever it sets out to do and can change children and young people’s lives through dedication, commitment and a huge love of every person who is part of the Albert Park community.

My deepest wish is that more people could understand the vision we have for our community, the dedication and passion we have to teach children and young people music so that they can find employment in the music industry and how driven we are to make a difference to children who don’t have very much in their lives and futures that look bleak. If we don’t give children, the opportunity to acquire skills that they can use to find employment we continue the cycle of poverty. We break that cycle through our programs.

As a non-profit we cannot generate income or become self-sustaining, so we rely completely on donations, grants and sponsorships and we need assistance to raise the funds required to keep on delivering the excellence we continue to deliver annually.