Finding a Voice: Fostering Indigenous Composers

Over the past 20 years, the Grand Canyon Music Festival’s outreach efforts have grown into the fully-fledged Native American Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP) providing levels of access to music education that are scarce in rural areas.

In the fall of 2023, the team at Central Sound at Arizona PBS followed NACAP’s resident quartet throughout the Navajo Nation to schools involved in the project, capturing the process as well as interviewing students, performers and composers.

The goal of NACAP is to provide opportunities for young Native American students to find their musical voices, and in this program, we highlight the two current NACAP composers, one of whom won the Pulitzer Prize in Music and the other is an alumnus of the project.