Ron Davis Alvarez
Founder
Dream Orchestra
About Ron Davis Alvarez
Ron Davis Alvarez is a musician, teacher and founder of the Dream Orchestra. He specialises in training teachers to lead youth orchestras and has lectured at conferences and masterclasses around the world. In 2016 in Gothenburg, Sweden, Ron Davis Alvarez founded the Dream Orchestra with children and teenage refugees who had no musical training from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Kurdistan, Albania, Angola, Eritrea and Somalia. With over 50 current members, the Dream Orchestra is now a role model of education for many music programs worldwide and was awarded the 2021 Ockenden International Prize.
In addition to his work with the Dream Orchestra, Alvarez was the Artistic Director of the El Sistema Sweden Foundation. He also has experience working in remote communities after having founded an orchestra near the Arctic Circle at the Uummannaq Children’s House in Greenland. Alvarez has received numerous awards including the Royal Swedish Academy of Music’s Pedagogy Prize, the Frihetsonen Award, and was one of 50 teachers selected for the Varkey Foundation’s Global Teacher Prize.
Events with Ron Davis Alvarez
Music Education – Transforming Children’s Lives
Across the planet, social initiatives rooted in the teaching of music have shown the powerful impact that this form of creative expression, collective engagement and personal development can have on...
Music Education – Preserving Culture, Preventing Erasure
Music is a connecting thread that runs through cultures, extending from the very origins of identity to today’s contemporary expressions. The central role of music makes it an essential part...
El Sistema at 50 – The Movement that Started it All
In 1975, Venezuelan economist and musician Dr. José Antonio Abreu had the idea of expanding the reach of music education to make it available more widely to the young people...
Roundtable: Building Bridges to a Better Future
When young people grow up facing adversity, whether through economic deprivation, violence, displacement, or multigenerational trauma, feelings of hopelessness, disengagement, and hostility can become internalized responses to their outward circumstances....