The flute had already been everywhere. It had crossed oceans in a diplomat’s suitcase and was played in the songs of community orchestras from East Africa to Western Europe. Then one day, it came to rest in the hands of a teen from Silver Spring, a young man with passion for the flute and his own journey across continents. This is the kind of story that happens at DCYOP. People, cultures, and stories all brought together through the power of music.
A Life Played in Many Keys
Before becoming one of DCYOP’s 1960 Circle donors, Michael Calingaert spent his career in places most people only read about. A U.S. Foreign Service officer for 33 years, he served postings from Mogadishu during Somalia’s independence, Colombo, Tokyo, Rome, London and more. Wherever the Foreign Service sent him, he went. And wherever he went, the flute went too.
With the conviction that music belongs to no particular country and yet belongs everywhere, Michael did what musicians do when they move to a new place, he found the local orchestras. In city after city, he showed up, introduced himself, and asked if he might play. Community ensembles welcomed him. After retirement, Michael settled in the DC area and turned his energy toward the institutions he cared about. DCYOP became one of them.
Michael understood, from a life spent in the world, why access to music and to a larger community matters enormously for young people who are still figuring out who they are.
When he decided to become a DCYOP donor and donate his flute — a century-old instrument that had been his traveling companion for decades — he didn’t think of it as giving something away. He thought of it as sending it on ahead.
A Legacy Worth Carrying
Murilo dos Santos was born in Brazil. He moved to the United States when he was four and has lived most of his life in the Silver Spring and DC area. He started playing flute in fourth grade, at nine years old, drawn to the instrument partly by its sound and partly by something his family carried: his great-grandfather had been known in their Brazilian hometown both as a good man and as a gifted flutist. Murilo decided the legacy was worth continuing.
He joined the Youth Orchestra, DCYOP’s most advanced orchestra, in early 2023 after hearing about the program from friends and a middle school music teacher. At his audition, his conductor asked almost immediately whether he happened to own a piccolo. He did. “Start practicing the Romeo and Juliet part,” came the reply. The welcome was immediate.
Now a junior at Montgomery Blair High School, Murilo is part of a specialized Communication Arts program and writes for his school’s newspaper. He also serves on the Takoma Park Youth Council and plays soccer. He hopes to have a dual career where he will work in economics or government in Latin America and play the flute professionally. He is, in other words, exactly the kind of student that DCYOP tends to produce: curious, disciplined, responsible, already reaching toward the world.
He also knows a great deal about flutes. Over the years, Murilo has developed a habit of scouting out instruments on the secondary market; studying them, buying them when the price and quality align, reselling them, and using the proceeds to work toward something better. He has owned dozens of flutes through this process and encountered all manner of remarkable instruments along the way: old ones, wooden ones, silver ones with gold inlay, flutes with flowers etched into their lip plates, etc. He currently has his eye on a solid gold flute that he hopes to own some day.
So when he lifted Michael Calingaert’s century-old flute and heard the story of where it had been, he understood immediately what he was holding. “Knowing that the flute has been all over the world, it’s a great honor to play it,” he says. And he had the opportunity to play it for Michael recently at one of our exclusive Behind the Scenes tours for our Whole Note Donor Circle members.
When Two Journeys Meet
There is something quietly remarkable about what happened when Michael’s flute passed to Murilo. Two stories, one spanning decades and continents in service to the country, the other just beginning, carrying its own history of migration, family legacy, and reaching toward a larger world, briefly overlapped through a single instrument.
In a recent paper for a Federal Reserve competition on the economics of music, Murilo and his fellow DCYOP co-authors explored what an orchestra actually builds in a young person: discipline, responsibility, the ability to hold your part while depending on others to hold theirs. He quoted something his conductor Evan Ross Solomon says often: “Music is a tough judge.” You are always reaching toward something you haven’t quite achieved. The music itself is the standard. And that striving, Murilo believes, is the thing he will carry into whatever he does next.
DCYOP, he says, has been part of building all of that. He points to the program’s welcoming character – the way auditions lead not to rejection but to placement, the rotating parts system that ensures every musician gets a chance to sit in the principal chair, the financial support that has helped his family make DCYOP and international touring possible. He has already been on one tour and will travel with the orchestra again this summer to South Africa.
“I always wanted the opportunity to share my story about DCYOP,” he said, “because it’s just an amazing program. It’s done so much for me and for others too.” He continues, “Music is life-changing and being in an environment like DCYOP with the staff, the teachers, the other student members, helps you develop and grow.”
Whether music becomes Murilo’s career or the foundation beneath a different one, he plans to keep playing. He hopes to still be improving when he’s very old. That, too, seems like something worth carrying forward. It’s because of donors like you, and Michael, that this is possible.
For more information about supporting the work of DCYOP, please contact [email protected].
DCYOP is known as one of the few comprehensive orchestral music education programs in the country where a four-and-a-half year old can start the program with no musical experience, be introduced to an instrument for the very first time, and come out of the program thirteen-and-a-half years later as an advanced musician with experience performing major orchestral works in professional venues like the Kennedy Center and touring around the world. But did you know that DCYOP directly offers instrumental training to students in the DC public schools (DCPS) system through Prelude, its after-school program?
