Princess Stéphanie Meets with ISL Music Students, OCL Musicians

On Monday 10 February 2025, Princess Stéphanie, Hereditary Grand Duchess of Luxembourg, visited students and musicians at the International School of Luxembourg (ISL).

Since 2021, the ISL and the Chamber Orchestra of Luxembourg (Orchestre de Chambre du Luxembourg - OCL) have been collaborating on a musical education project aimed at introducing students to musical composition and allowing them to create original works for a string quartet, which professional musicians then perform. In 2023, the school and the orchestra strengthened their collaboration with a residency at the ISL, further promoting cultural exchanges between musicians and students.

Upon arrival at the school on Monday morning, Princess Stéphanie was greeted by ISL Director David J. Condon and Upper School Principal Iain Fish, as well as representatives of the OCL. After receiving a bouquet of flowers from one student, the Hereditary Grand Duchess was guided to the music centre room, where there performances of violin and string quartet compositions, as well as the screening of a documentary about the ISL-OCL partnership and an electronic music performance video. The Grade 7 students later had the opportunity to speak with Princess Stéphanie and ask her questions.

Speaking to Chronicle.lu about the origins of the school residency, OCL Director Sylvie Charmoy explained that the orchestra had struggled to find a place to rehearse. Building on their existing partnership (through the string quartet project), the orchestra and the school decided to launch this residency. "For the orchestra it is, of course, a place to rehearse but [that is] not all. It’s very important for us to have a place in society," she shared, adding: "We find a way to give children a link with music". The OCL Director recalled that the residency at the ISL is a pilot project that is unique in Luxembourg. "It’s a time to rehearse, a time to meet children," she said. Looking ahead, the orchestra will "try to build this kind of residency in public schools", possibly in a public secondary school in Luxembourg City as early as May 2025.

Elaborating on the ISL-OCL partnership, Dr Demosthenes Dimitrakoulakos, Academic Leader of the Arts and Music Educator at ISL, told Chronicle.lu: "We've tried to provide authentic learning experiences for our students, and so we provide a programme where students learn how to perform, […] compose and learn about music theory and history. But of course, performing, you get that live feeling; when you're composing, you only get that live feeling if the work is actually performed by human beings. So, we have this wonderful, privileged opportunity to have this partnership with the Chamber Orchestra of Luxembourg, where they perform all of the works that the students compose".

Commenting on the residency, he shared that the OCL musicians "come as an entire orchestra and practise and give concerts. Students have the opportunity to go to those open rehearsals, have masterclasses with the members, meet the conductor, meet the soloist, and so it's a very interactive programme". For the Grade 7 string quartet project, he noted that the OCL string players visit the students three times: "The first time they come and introduce the students to the instruments, show them how they work, what they can do, how the students can compose for them. Then the students write a composition. They start working on it for about a month and then the members of the orchestra come back and give […] constructive feedback for [the students] to improve. And then they come back a third time and give a world premiere. So, it's really about bringing students' works to life for the first time".

Also speaking about the string quartet project, Kelsey Hopper, Middle School Music Teacher, explained: "We have the seventh graders decide on what characters they want to assign to each of the instruments. They might choose to create an adventure piece where the characters are on a journey and the violinist is the captain of a ship and the other musicians are the sailors on the ship, and they have to work together to make their way through the storm. They decide all of that before, so we help them work through sort of a storyline, and then they assign musical techniques to those characters to inform the storyline".

"So, they might choose to make the captain and a sailor in conflict, and they might do a call in response melody between the two of them to illustrate the character development, or they might do they might do an ostinato to indicate that the mood is a hostile mood and have like a very rigid staccato type of underlying ostinato for maybe the cello or something like that," she continued: "That's how we inform them for how to create these pieces, and then […] we take them through Flat.io, which is a software for notation and composing for the kids, and we teach them what all of the [musical] symbols mean and the buttons to use and how to use the software, and then they are allowed to go and use their creativity and imagination to create the rest with".