How the Colorado Symphony’s Youth Concerts are Redefining Music Education
When thousands of students stream into Boettcher Concert Hall each season — eyes wide, chatter buzzing, instruments tuning — it’s anything but an ordinary field trip. They’re stepping into a story where they are the heroes, discovering their voices, their creativity, and their place in the arts and local community. The Colorado Symphony’s Youth Concert Series has become one of the state’s most meaningful and innovative education programs, helping young audiences experience world-class symphonic music while also showing them that art can help them connect with their community and one another.
Each season brings a brand-new production with an interdisciplinary theme, crafted to empower students to see themselves in the music. By partnering with local dancers, poets, rappers, visual artists, museums, and cultural organizations, the Colorado Symphony acts as a guide and catalyst, weaving immersive, inclusive performances that mirror the diversity of Colorado’s communities. In these moments, students don’t just hear music, they begin to imagine their own voices as part of a larger creative chorus.
2022/23 Season
Lift Every Voice: A Celebration of Unity and Expression
Originally launched as a virtual program during the pandemic, Lift Every Voice took on new life with a powerful return to the concert hall during the 2021/22 and 2022/23 seasons. Designed as both a performance and a platform, the program featured a spectrum of artists and collaborators including Cleo Parker Robinson Dance, Fiesta Colorado Dance Company, poet Frankie Le’Troy, and visual artist Javier Flores. Students not only heard diverse repertoire but also saw and felt how music and art can celebrate our common human spirit while amplifying individual voices.
“It was inspiring to see students engage so deeply. You could feel that we were giving them permission to tell their own stories.”
Collaborator with Cleo Parker Robinson Dance
Through a comprehensive digital curriculum, complete with lesson plans, professional development tools, and multimedia resources, thousands of students were encouraged to find their own voices by creating visual art, music compositions, dance, poetry, and more. Some schools took the curriculum a step further with students at Skyline High School creating podcasts exploring their own family histories.
The Englewood School District engaged in multiple professional development workshops in partnership with the Colorado Symphony. These efforts culminated in a district-wide celebration, where the community came together to showcase student work at a year-end event, which resulted in recognition from the Colorado Department of Education as a 2021 Promising Partnerships Practices model and having “lasting impact.”
“Though students watched my poetry unfold, I found myself in awe, witnessing their faces shift and bloom, as if awakening to a world they never knew existed.”
Frankie Le’Troy, 2022/23 Collaborator
The Lift Every Voice Youth Concert series offered a cultural moment, fostering empathy, creativity, and identity exploration in classrooms across Colorado. Whether in the hall or virtually, students left not just entertained but emboldened, knowing that art can celebrate their individuality while connecting them to a shared human spirit.
2023/24 Season
Untold Stories of the West: Expanding the Narrative
The 2023/24 program, Untold Stories of the West, reframed the American West through voices often left out of traditional textbooks. The program featured three partners as first-time collaborators: the Black American West Museum and Heritage Center’s Jane Taylor Reenactors Guild, the Japanese Arts Network, and spoken word poet, José “Jozer” Guerrero, each recommended directly by community members on the advisory Community Education Committee.
In this program, symphonic works were paired with original content from each of these collaborators so students could experience the stories and histories firsthand. Students encountered the West not as a single narrative, but as many, told by the people who shaped and continue to shape it.
“We hope that students were able to see themselves in us as we collectively came together through our love of music and our cultural identities.”
Courtney Ozaki-Durgin, 2023/24 Collaborator
“It was very meaningful for us to be able to share our combined love of Japanese culture and the American folk art of hip-hop with students from across the Denver/Metro area through taiko, dance, lyrics and traditional and original songs in collaboration with the magnificent Colorado Symphony musicians,” said Courtney Ozaki-Durgin from the Japanese Arts Network. “We hope that students were able to see themselves in us as we collectively came together through our love of music and our cultural identities.”
For many students, it was their first time encountering these narratives. The concert became a journey of discovery, showing students that their own stories and family histories are vital threads in America’s fabric.
2024/25 Season
Destination Denver: A Musical Tour Through the Mile High City
If Untold Stories looked westward, Destination Denver turned the focus homeward, zooming in on the neighborhoods, cultures, and rhythms that make Colorado’s capital city unique. With partners ArtistiCo Dance Company representing the Arts District on Santa Fe and Cleo Parker Robinson Dance representing historic Five Points, students encountered an energetic mashup of musical styles and art mediums representing iconic Denver neighborhoods.
The original song “Next Stop Denver” by local artists Chinelo “Nelo” Tyler and Wayne Watts took students on the light rail for a tour around the city with their accompanying music video and brought the house down at the end of the live concert with kids singing and fist pumping along.
“This was Denver the way kids live it — vibrant, diverse, full of movement and possibility,”
Wayne Watts, 2024/25 Collaborator
The concert showed classical music not as an elite art form, but as a part of a larger ecosystem moving alongside the city’s dancers, poets, and beatmakers. It pointed students toward the art around them and the spaces where they can make it themselves, turning the concert hall into a doorway to their own creative communities. The message was simple: great art is already here and there’s a place for every student to take part.
2025/26 Season
Colorful Colorado: A Sesquicentennial Soundtrack
In 2025/26, our Youth Concerts are among the most ambitious yet. Commemorating Colorado’s 150th and the nation’s 250th, Colorful Colorado takes these milestones and gives them a distinctly Colorado Symphony twist. Instead of a history lesson, it’s a live, communal experience that brings the state’s people, places, and stories to life through new collaborations and original creations.
Grounded in Colorado voices, the program features History Colorado’s Shaun Boyd as narrative host, who introduces the two state songs — “Where the Columbines Grow” and “Rocky Mountain High”— as a musical throughline. Students experience many genres, including original works by Bluegrass artist Martin Gilmore and his band “The Dry and Dusty West”, and a commissioned piece by rapper and the reigning Miss Black Colorado, Osha Renee, titled “ANTHEM,” inspired by the two state songs.
“I am beyond grateful, blessed, and honored to be part of this production, this movement, this life changing experience. I can’t wait for the children to see it!”
Osha Renee, 2025/26 Collaborator
“Being a Denver native, when you think of Colorado, you think about the Colorado Symphony and the music they produce on stage is beautiful,” said Renee. “So, being a part of this, I’m excited, and us intertwining hip-hop with it, it’s a movement. I am beyond grateful, blessed, and honored to be part of this production, this movement, this life changing experience. I can’t wait for the children to see it!”
“If a child’s first symphony memory and adult’s reaction is ‘Woah, I didn’t know a symphony could do that,’ we’ve done our job.”
Breanna McCaughey, Director of Community Education
These concerts are accompanied by an interactive curriculum created in partnership with Lindsay Genadek, Colorado Symphony Community Education Manager, and metro-Denver educators, providing a 53-page packet of lesson plans and resources that align to Colorado state standards and spark reflection and creativity. Colorful Colorado continues the thread of our recent Youth Concerts: a love letter to the vibrant arts community right here at home.
Breanna McCaughey, Director of Community Education for the Colorado Symphony said, “I’m most excited when the audience realizes: wait, there’s a rapper performing about where I live with a full orchestra? Every year, the artists and organizations I meet blow me away and the best part is introducing them onstage and watching people be delighted and surprised. If a child’s first symphony memory and adult’s reaction is ‘Woah, I didn’t know a symphony could do that,’ we’ve done our job.”
More Than Music
Across four seasons, one truth has emerged: the audiences are the heart of these concerts.
Their voices, stories, and imaginations are the ones lifted, celebrated, and set free. The Symphony’s role is catalytic: convening partners, commissioning new work, and making the hall a place where students and adults recognize their own communities.
“I learned that some people are just different in ways that I didn’t already know. I also learned I might have the courage to go on stage some day.”
Student Participant
“As soon as they [the collaborators] came onstage, there was a look of almost disbelief on the kids’ faces, like, ‘Am I at an orchestra concert?’…It’s exhilarating to be on stage and having people hear what we’re doing in the moment, in real time,” said Mary Cowell, Fixed 3rd Chair Viola.
Access is central to the mission. Tickets are just $7.50 per student, with tiered pricing — including 50% discounts and free admission — ensuring cost is never a barrier. Each year, more than $85,000 in financial aid and bus scholarships help schools reach Boettcher Concert Hall, while a free livestream brings the concert to classrooms statewide.
“They all connected with some part of the performance, perhaps even in ways that will inspire a lifetime of performance and music appreciation, if not desire to do it themselves.”
Alsup Elementary School Teacher
“I have so much gratitude that we were able to attend for free,” said a teacher from Alsup Elementary School. “My students would not have been able to experience something like this if their families or our school had to foot the bill, and from what they said, they all connected with some part of the performance, perhaps even in ways that will inspire a lifetime of performance and music appreciation, if not desire to do it themselves. For that, I cannot express enough gratitude.”
Whether you are a parent, a teacher, or a patron who simply loves bold music-making, help us keep lifting Colorado voices on this stage and across our state. With your support, these concerts will continue inspiring audiences to be creative leaders, thinkers, and storytellers for generations to come.
Community + Education
Discover more information about our inspiring array of educational programs including a bilingual curriculum, education resources, and Youth Concert collaborations with local artists and organizations.