Empowering the Next Generation Through Music with Raúl Gómez-Rojas

This week on the Time to Practice podcast, we’re speaking with Raúl Gómez-Rojas, musical director of the Metropolitan Youth Symphony (MYS), about the transformative power of music education in the lives of young people. 

This is a special episode highlighting a non-profit organization making a difference in its local community, and this conversation has something for everyone as we talk about many benefits of music in the lives of the next generation.

To Listen to the full episode you can find the Time to Practice Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. You can also listen directly from the link below: 

Highlights of our conversation with Raúl Gómez-Rojas include:

Metropolitan Youth Symphony is celebrating 50 years in the Portland community in 2025. Their final concert this season, on June 17th, features MYS alumni and performing artist esperanza spalding You can read more about her HERE.

Raúl Gómez-Rojas: On what events like this mean to students who are a part of MYS:

” For many of them (students participating in MYS), these are transformational experiences, certainly inspiring experiences. The majority of our students, after they play with MYS – for however many years . . . many of them since they were in first grade or younger, most of them go on to do other things professionally besides or instead of music. But we do see an increasing percentage of students who actually go into music in one way or another, whether it’s music performance or music education or composition. We have a few conductors now who have come out of NYS and these opportunities to collaborate with world class artists like esperanza are often catalysts for that decision to go into music because it’s something they love and it’s something they are already excellent at, and something that, while it is a challenging career path, and we talk about that too, it can be very fulfilling.”

On the Beginning Strings Program at MYS:

“Our Beginning Strings program has become increasingly important for us, and it does precede me. It started before I joined MYS, and it started as a weekly group class at our rehearsal site for kids to get started, kids with no previous experience in music.

It was meant to be a place where they could gain the first year or two of experience needed to join our entry-level string orchestra. And in the last nine years, that program has grown in several ways.

One of them is that we started to branch out and create partnerships with schools, organizations in the Portland metro area to create new beginning strings programs in those locations. Eventually, also, we went out to Hillsboro, thanks to our friend Dan Bosshardt, who at the time was the music teacher at Lincoln Street Elementary. But then we also have grown this program by expanding what we do with the students.

So it went from being just a weekly group class to what it is now, which is students do meet weekly for a group class, but each individual student gets a private lesson each week as part of the program.

And then (because part of the goal of this is to give those kids this initial exposure to strings playing so they can make it into our youngest group) We realize once these kids make it into that group, we need to still be there for them beyond just playing in the ensemble. So it’s been a few years now that every single graduate of our Beginning Strings program that enters our ensembles, they keep getting weekly private lessons for free for as long as they’re students at MYS.

So the concept is yes, to get these kids started. Primarily, these are kids who have no music access in their schools or very limited access to music education, or the families might not be in a financial situation such that they can pay for private lessons, which are pretty expensive.

We provide instruments as well to all these kids. And we’ve also expanded, by the way, from violin to also viola and cello, and we’re really proud of these kids, and our teachers are just fantastic. They’re really magicians. I know you work with young students as well, and I have great admiration and respect for people who so passionately and so skillfully work with beginners.

It really kind of blows my mind as a fellow music educator, but now also as a parent of a 6-year-old who has been just got started a few months ago.

So it’s been really cool to see the growth of those students and the dedication of our teachers.”

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I love the work that MYS is doing my own community. To support their work you can donate HERE

There are other ways to get involved: volunteer, attend a concert, sign your child up to participate etc.

Whether you support MYS or another organization in your community, I hope you join me in doing what we can to support that transformative power of music in the lives of young people.

To listen to the full conversation, click on the podcast player above, or you can read the transcript below.

Transcript