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At Sistema Toronto we want our classes to be an inviting, welcoming space for our students to learn, play, and grow together. Our work and programming are equity-driven, and we are committed to promoting diversity and inclusion. In our internal repertoire selections, we work hard to include diverse genres, traditions, and styles of music, and each year we engage in partnerships with exceptional musicians who share their musical and cultural knowledge with our students. The education our students receive is culturally responsive; we want our students to feel like the centre of the action, not like passive inheritors of a tradition that belongs to dead, white Europeans. Repertoire, staff, and visiting artists can help, but above all we want our students to feel like the focus; to know that their own agency and musical creativity are the most important parts of the program.

This year, students at Sistema Toronto - Yorkwoods had the opportunity to add an exciting element to their musical toolboxes by learning about hip-hop music from Aaron Manswell, a Toronto-based artist, composer, educator, and scholar with a musical style heavily influenced by hip-hop, classical, gospel, and R&B music genres. Manswell holds music composition degrees from Oakwood University and the University of Memphis, and he is currently completing his Doctor of Musical Arts in Composition at the University of Toronto, where he is also currently the composer-in-residence for the MacMillan Singers. Beyond this, his career has seen him produce and perform live with award-winning Canadian artists such as DVSN and Savannah Ré; write original scores for films premieres at the Toronto and Montreal Black Film Festivals; and compose award-winning music that has been performed by ensembles across North America.

For our students, Hip-hop music was an exciting addition to the repertoire they had learned throughout the year, and Manswell is a particularly good match for our program. In his own compositional practice, Manswell blends classical, electronic, and hip-hop elements in a style he calls “offspring” compositions. Over eight weeks throughout May and June, students at Sistema Toronto - Yorkwoods worked with Manswell in a series of workshops that taught them about the history of hip-hop music and the genre’s major names, before moving on to practical lessons in beat creation, vocal writing, and freestyle rapping. The workshops culminated in the creation of the students’ own original songs, that they wrote, rehearsed, recorded, and performed under Manswell’s guidance.

The first of their songs, entitled Skibidi, is a process piece that the students created collaboratively. The students collaborated with Manswell on the backing music and recorded this music on their string instruments, and chose a theme for the song’s two vocalists to freestyle rap about on the track. ‘Skibidi,’ as our patient Gen-Z summer interns kindly explained to us, is a colloquial term referring to a viral online video involving an AI head protruding from a toilet and singing. Skibidi is infused with in-jokes and internet memes, a sort of 2024 musical yearbook that exemplifies hip-hop’s use of slang and humour. 
 

The second piece the students created, entitled Earth, is more serious in tone, focusing on the environmental crisis and the simple ways in which we can respond to it as individuals. Having familiarized themselves with the collaborative process in the creation of Skibidi, the students were able to focus on the lyrics and craft a more serious message in the tradition of socially conscious hip-hop, resulting in a truly catchy track: you’ll be reminding yourself to “put it in the trash, it’s not that hard” long after the music ends.
 

To cap off their weeks of work, the students participated in a panel discussion at the York Woods Library on May 31st. Here, they presented their learning to members of the public, discussing the history of hip-hop music, showcasing hip-hop pioneers and their influence on the genre, describing the process of writing their own music, and answering questions from the audience. They also had the chance to share their work, ending the discussion by playing recordings of their songs.
 

When the Sistema year ended in June, students also had the chance to share the recording of Earth with their parents and community at the end of year concert. The song was received with enthusiastic applause.

Learning about the history, culture, and impact of hip-hop music gave our students the chance to engage with artists and styles that were new to many of them, and that offered new avenues for authentic and free expression. The openness of freestyle rapping empowered them to engage with popular culture on their own terms using a contemporary and familiar musical language to express themselves in their own words. The results of Aaron Manswell’s time with students from Sistema Toronto - Yorkwoods are two artistically excellent pieces of music that show the students’ capacity for creativity alongside an understanding of advanced musical skills like beat creation, composition, performance, and freestyle rapping. Through this immersive experience, the students not only honed their technical abilities but also gained a profound appreciation for hip-hop as a transformative cultural force, highlighting the potential for music education to foster both artistic excellence and personal growth.