Contribution to Regional Community Development

The Yamaha Group aims to make contributions to communities and their invigoration by planning and holding music events in various regions.

Yamaha Music Japan Co., Ltd., is advancing the Oto-Machi Project for Creating Musical Towns. The Oto-Machi Project aims to revitalize communities and create shared value for companies and society by harnessing “the power of music to connect people.” To address the issues faced by municipalities, communities, and companies, the Yamaha Group proposes and supports citizen participatory projects, events, and programs that use music as a tool for community development. The Group aims to help create the independent communities that form sustainable community foundations. Through the Oto-Machi Project, we promote new forms of social contribution activities by offering focused support for the early stages of community development and building schemes for places and times that allow for ongoing activities open to free participation by community members.
The Yamaha Group has been engaged in a facilitator development program through group drumming together with a Kashiwa City social welfare association with the aim of fostering community leaders over the four years since fiscal 2017. These activities have given rise to Drum Circle Beat of Kashiwa (DCBK), a group comprised of individuals who have completed the facilitator development program. DCBK’s activities are being advanced in an increasingly wide range of locations throughout the community. In addition, Yamaha Music Japan concluded a three-year partnership agreement with Fukui Prefecture in February 2021. Through this agreement, we will contribute to community development in Fukui Prefecture with music. We are currently engaged in wide-ranging initiatives together with local and prefectural government agencies and other organizations to create opportunities for musicians to perform in urban centers and other locations and along with opportunities to view performances in one’s community. These are just some of the activities we are implementing to promote the spread of music within Fukui Prefecture.

The Yamaha Symphonic Band, which was established in 1961, is an amateur band comprised of Yamaha Group employees. The band’s activities include holding regular musical performances and pop concerts, supporting the Yamaha Baseball Club, and performing regularly and appearing in contests in Japan and overseas. The band also actively participates in events rooted in local communities while helping Hamamatsu City realize its vision for becoming a “city of music.” Examples of these events include a concert commemorating the opening of Hamamatsu City’s newly built community musical hall.

The Yamaha Group contributes to the healthy development of youths and the development of music education and culture through activities that include bringing music and musical instruments to local communities in addition to activities to popularize music.

In many countries in Central and South America, crime and poverty as well as social inequality are serious social problems. In order to enable the children in such environments to grow up in a healthy manner, rather than leaning toward crime, delinquency, or violence, music education activities are provided free of charge as a country policy. These activities have led to the formation of regional youth orchestras and band groups. Endorsing such activities, the Yamaha Group has long offered support for activities that draw participation by large numbers of children.

The AMIGO Project was launched in 2014 and entails holding maintenance seminars to spread knowledge regarding instrument maintenance and to help children learn how to maintain instruments on their own. In addition, we hold technician seminars to foster technicians that can repair instruments and offer other forms of support to aid in the development of an environment in which children can more easily continue to play music. This project is currently active in eight Latin American countries: Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil.

Yamaha Musical do Brasil Ltda. (YMDB) began its Sopro Novo (New Breath) activities in 2005 and has since been holding recorder music popularization seminars for music teachers throughout Brazil.
These seminars entail music instruction lessons that comprehensively provide instruments, textbooks, and teaching methods. Starting with how to read music and ending, ultimately, with ensemble performances, seminar members learn music performance techniques so that they can begin giving music instruction to beginners after completing the lessons. In Brazilian schools, there is no regular music education in the compulsory curriculum. For this reason, the cultivation of music instructors plays an important role in granting children their first opportunity to learn music. To date, Sopro Novo seminars have been held over 1,600 times in 189 cities and have trained approximately 4,700 instructors. The number of children taught by those instructors has reached more than 550,000.
In 2017, we established the non-profit organization Fundação Sopro Novo Yamaha. At this time, we began to lobby the government to adopt direct music education and embarked on activities to provide music teacher training and music education instruction in public schools. Furthermore, the state of São Paulo provided support for costs of the activities in the form of tax exemptions in 2018, acknowledging the contributions from past Sopro Novo activities. In 2019, recorder seminars were held, drawing 103 participants from 10 groups, and recorder classes based on the Sopro Novo method were conducted in 54 public schools.
In fiscal 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic impeded our ability to conduct the face-to-face recorder seminars that had been held previously. In response to this situation, YMDB prepared online recorder lesson materials and began conducting online lessons in October 2020. As of March 31, 2021, more than 100 individuals, primarily consisting of public school teachers, had participated in these online lessons. In fiscal 2022, we expanded the scope of our online recorder lessons amid the prolonged pandemic. We are also offering a broader range of courses, including the prior soprano recorder courses as well as new alto and tenor recorder course. As of March 31, 2022, a total of 315 individuals had participated in these courses, including 113 public school teachers. Looking ahead, YMDB will gradually resume offline activities, while monitoring trends related to the pandemic, and move forward with the development of frameworks for promoting the widespread adoption of the Sopro Novo method in school education.