Grand Canyon Music Festival

Native American Composer Apprentice Project

Reaching Out and Across

The love of music is everywhere, and nowhere else it that truth better displayed than it is each year through the Native American Composer Apprentice Project of the Grand Canyon Music Festival. Talented professional musicians become visiting music professors at many native high schools in the Southwest US, bringing both their technical expertise and their unique cultural gifts to young native musicians who are eager to try out new ways to express their own incredible inspiration. The results are always predictably wonderful!

2019 NACAP Compositions

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2018 NACAP Compositions

2012 NACAP Compositions

2008 NACAP Compositions

About NACAP

Since 1984, the Grand Canyon Music Festival has been dedicated to bringing the world’s finest musicians to Grand Canyon National Park in celebration of the power and beauty of this magnificent World Heritage site. Since 1985, the Festival has extended this gift of music to the students of northern Arizona’s under-served and rural communities, primarily at schools on the Navajo and Hopi Reservations. In 2001, the Festival initiated its Native American Composers Apprentice Project (NACAP) to extend its outreach to training talented Native American students in the art of composition. NACAP develops musical literacy and enhances critical thinking and decision making skills through the study of music composition. It introduces students to European “classical” music techniques, develops their understanding of their own musical heritages and how to use that knowledge to develop their own compositional voices.