Playing for Change (PFC)

This project uses various information and communication technologies (ICTs) to bring together musicians - and listeners - across divides. PFC built a mobile recording studio and is travelling all over the world (click here for an online map). Throughout the process, organisers have worked create an environment for the musicians in which they could create freely and that placed no barriers between them and those who would eventually experience their music.

The resulting documentary film "Playing For Change: Peace Through Music" brings together musicians from around the world - from blues singers in a waterlogged New Orleans (Louisiana, US), to chamber groups in Moscow (Russia) and a South African choir - to "touch something common in each of us" by celebrating songs familiar and new. Using mobile technology, directors Mark Johnson and Jonathan Walls, along with the PFC team, filmed and recorded more than 100 musicians, largely outdoors in parks, plazas and promenades, in doorways, on cobblestone streets, and amid hilly pueblos. Each captured performance creates a new mix in which essentially the artists are all performing together, albeit hundreds or thousands of miles apart. "Playing For Change: Peace Through Music" is the story of this international musical collaboration and its "power of redemption."

Over the course of this project, PFC decided it was not enough for the crew just to record and share this music with the world; they wanted to create a way to give back to the musicians and their communities. And so in 2007 they created the PFC Foundation, a separate nonprofit corporation; in early 2008, they established Timeless Media, a for-profit entity that funds and extends the work of PFC. Later that year, Timeless Media entered into a joint venture with the Concord Music Group with the goal of bringing PFC's music, videos, and message to the widest possible audience. Through these collaborations, musicians from all over the world are brought together to perform benefit concerts that build music and art schools in communities that are in need of inspiration and hope. In short, PFC is engaged in an effort to build hundreds of schools around the world and to install them all with recording equipment and cameras so that people can log on to the internet and watch recitals and concerts in the schools that PFC is building.

PFC is designed to be a "movement" in which participants can affirm the unifying power of music. People are hosting screenings, musicians are holding benefit concerts of every size, fans are spreading the message of PFC through YouTube videos, social networking technology, etc. "Together, we will connect the world through music!" Click here to learn how to take part.

Conflict.

A DVD version is available for purchase on the PFC website.