With a firm belief that music education is integral to bridging cultures, Angie Durrell in 2011 founded INTEMPO, an award-winning Stamford-based music education nonprofit that teaches multicultural and classical music education to children predominantly from immigrant backgrounds.
“It feels surreal. INTEMPO was founded with $1,500 of Angie’s college graduation money,” said Lou Chen, the company’s CEO. “Today, we are a million-dollar organization that touches hundreds of lives every year across lower Fairfield County, with an emphasis on Stamford and Norwalk.
“Our longevity is testament to the brilliance of Angie’s original vision and the strength of our community, which comprises not only our staff and board but also our parents, students, volunteers, and donors.”
Durrell, an Ecuadorian-born violinist, educator and social entrepreneur, was inspired to create INTEMPO after experiencing a need for culturally reinforcing spaces for children from immigrant backgrounds. She was recognized as one of Musical America’s Top Movers and Shakers in the Performing Arts.
She is a sixth-generation musician from the Godoy family – a family of musicians from the Chimborazo region in Ecuador, from her maternal side. Currently, she is the Director of Programs for the Office of the Arts at Harvard.
“I founded the organization to create programs that simply did not exist when I was growing up in Norwalk or spending time in the larger city of Stamford,” Durrell said. “We intentionally chose repertoire and designed programming that other ensembles and institutions were not presenting, filling a real void in the cultural landscape,” said Durrell. “From the beginning, our goal was to welcome audiences who hadn’t felt included because they didn’t see themselves represented on stage or in the music itself, and I’m deeply grateful to the artists, community partners, and supporters who helped make that vision possible.”
Under her leadership, INTEMPO has grown to serve hundreds of children in the Fairfield County area and open the city’s first Community Arts and Cultural Center. INTEMPO won the prestigious 2021 Impact Fairfield County award and the 2022 Accelerator Award from the Lewis Prize for Music; was a National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award finalist, and premiered a new multimedia commission featuring the Grammy-nominated PUBLIQuartet at Carnegie Hall, hosted by the PlayUSA network.
The nonprofit annually serves more than 700 children, ages 4-17, through after-school, in-school, summer, and partnership programs.
“We focus on these young populations because they’re the most at risk of losing out on high-quality music education,” Chen said. “This is primarily for two reasons: music education is expensive, and music education, as most commonly taught in the U.S. with its emphasis on classical music, can be culturally alienating for children from immigrant backgrounds.”
The nonprofit music school complements conventional classical instrument (violin, viola, cello) education with instruments of home cultures, such as the charango (a 10-stringed Andean lute that, on the East Coast, is taught only at INTEMPO).
The nonprofit’s music school is its largest program, serving more than 120 students this year. Professionally trained instructors include a mix of freelance performers and music teachers. “Our tuition is already highly subsidized, and on top of that, many families receive partial or full scholarships,” Chen said. “The full scholarships are due to the generosity of our Scholarship Circle donors.”
In addition, the nonprofit offers an affordable multi-week summer music session and it has several partnership programs that provide free music education, including partnerships with The Norwalk Art Space and the Norwalk Youth Symphony. INTEMPO also provides academic support, family advocacy, and workforce development.
“In 2013, the INTEMPO ensemble (formerly known as Intake Ensemble) received support to travel to Guatemala to study its musical traditions and national instrument, the marimba,” Durrell said. “Given the strong presence of Guatemalan and Central American communities in our region, it’s especially meaningful to return to this repertoire through this year’s concert theme, ‘Song of the Quetzal.’”
This is INTEMPO’s first year with a million-dollar budget, after achieving a surplus last year. “We’ve largely met our goals since our inception. Last year, we lost a historically reliable $10,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, but made up the difference and more thanks to the generosity of our donors. We are agile in our approach to both fundraising and programming,” Chen said, noting the nonprofit is funded primarily by grants and individual donations.
Its event calendar is expanding to at least six major events annually: two Hispanic heritage month concerts, one cultural crossover concert, one fundraiser, and two concerts centered around their new artist-in-residency.
On March 7, INTEMPO will present its annual flagship Cultural Crossover Concert at the Norwalk Concert Hall in partnership with the Norwalk Youth Symphony.
“Every year it brings together over 100 young musicians from INTEMPO and the Norwalk Youth Symphony to perform a specific genre of Latin American music for an audience of over 500,” Chen said.
With such growth over 15 years, Chen hopes to stabilize by focusing on three goals.
“We want to make sure we have the infrastructure in place to do so. We also want to both expand and deepen our programming, and we want to continue being on the cutting edge of music education, as evidenced by our groundbreaking Artist-in-Residency, which we just launched in collaboration with Orchestra Lumos,” he said.
“Our mission is to enable young people, regardless of their life circumstances, to thrive through instruction in multicultural and classical music, the building of life skills, and the fostering of community.”
