Confession: Despite being a music fan who is friends with musicians and married to a bass player, I had never played guitar, bass, or drums before.
Ladies Rock Camp, an arm of the non-profit organization Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls, was ready to intervene and expose me to my inner rockstar. At a recent Urban Girl Squad event, I sat down at a drum kit set up in the front window of the Eileen Fisher store in Soho and received my first music lesson since middle school. I tend to have a hard time clapping on the beat, so I was surprised how easy it was to learn to play a simple beat. Next I moved on to learn how to play a few chords on the guitar in a small group session. Bass guitar was the final station.
The event highlight came when all the attendees co-wrote lyrics to a non-sensical song about champagne bubbles, and then volunteers from the group got up to play impromptu drum beats, guitar riffs, bass lines, and to sing. It was pretty amazing to watch what our non-musician group could create in a few minutes.
While it was fun - and even empowering - for our group to rock out, the Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls serves a more important mission. They were founded to build girls' self-esteem through music creation and performance. From their website:
"We want to eradicate all the limiting myths about music and gender that make girls afraid to speak up, sing out, and make noise... We seek to demonstrate--through lessons, mentorship, positive examples, and the shared experiences of the staff and volunteers--that every genre of music from the heaviest to the most delicate, and every technical job and creative endeavor in the music industry, is available to any girl or woman who wants to explore it."
Each summer, this organization runs a summer camp for girls where female instructors provide in-depth lessons on how to play instruments and write music. Ladies Rock Camp, a weekend intensive for grown-up girls, helps to subsidize tuition for the girls' camp.
Many thanks to Eileen Fisher for opening her doors to Urban Girl Squad and Ladies Rock Camp, and offering a discount for shoppers that evening. And of course, UGS also thanks Ladies Rock Camp for their instruction and the important work that they do.
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