What an experience and what a luxury it was for the Goducate violinists from Laguna to be trained at the Wolfgang Violin Studio in Singapore. Until they were featured in the Channel News Asia programme Once Upon a Village and then selected for a short period of intensive training in Singapore, never did the 5 selected musicians, coming as they did from poor village and small-town communities, dream they would ever be taught daily by trained teachers, and then allowed to practise for 4 hours at a time every day in air-conditioned comfort. There were so many techniques to learn and try to master, and so much musical knowledge to absorb, in the short time they were here.
The training programme for them included attendance at concerts and observing a master class in action. On top of that there was a visit to the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, to tour the facilities there as well as to learn what requirements were needed for admission to the academy. Will they ever satisfy those requirements? Who knows, but the visit gave them something extra to hope for.
And hope is something that Goducate wants to bring to deprived communities. Even if the 5 violinists do not make it to the academy, the chance they have had to come to Singapore for some training is enough to give the 200-plus other students in the Goducate music project hope that they too might get a similar opportunity at some stage.
