Something a little different. This is an article I wrote for Nepali Times about a musical family from Germany that visited Kathmandu to support music education in Nepal:
The original dream of Gerwig & González was to bring a grand piano from Germany, and fly it around Nepal from one school performance to another using a military helicopter. That idea was not very practical, so they settled on an electronic keyboard to leave behind in Nepal after their visit.
For the classical musicians from Germany and their two children, the experience does not sound at all like a failure — they were already making new plans for inspiring the growth of music in Nepal before flying home after a busy 15 days with the Kathmandu Jazz Conservatory (KJC) last month.
Tuning in teachers
Sitting on a couch during a rare break in their schedule, Efraín González describes visiting a school outside the Valley where one of the teachers sat at the keyboard and played the Nepal national anthem with one hand. That sparked the idea to train at least one teacher in every school in Nepal to be able to perform the anthem daily on a simple keyboard.
“Why not? Why shouldn’t we dream big?” González asks with the passion that obviously drove this latest musical mission to Nepal.
