Music Education is Everything to Her: Now She’s Sharing It With Others
DMA Violin Performance student Aija Reke (CFA’15,’26) traveled to Tanzania to teach students in joint music/conservation education program
Aija Reke with some of her violin students in Moshi, Tanzania. Photos courtesy of Reke
Music Education is Everything to Her: Now She’s Sharing It With Others
DMA Violin Performance student Aija Reke (CFA’15,’26) traveled to Tanzania to teach students in joint music/conservation education program
This article was originally published in BU Today on August 27, 2025. By Abigail Pritchard (COM’26)
EXCERPT
When Aija Reke was young, education enabled her to escape poverty. Now a violin teacher, she wants to give the same gift to others. Reke (CFA’15,’26) grew up in Latvia, in a house with no heat or running water, and her education in music has helped her create a new life for herself, she says. Now pursuing a DMA in violin performance at Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Music, she says she’s always dreamed of passing on the gift of education.
Thanks to a scholarship from the Boston University Women’s Guild, Reke realized her dream this summer. She traveled to Moshi, Tanzania, near Mount Kilimanjaro, where she volunteered for three weeks, teaching beginner and advanced violin at a local school. Her students ranged from complete beginners to relatively experienced violin players.
“My dream came true,” she says. “It was a bridge of education between different continents.”
Reke has taught violin since earning a master’s degree at CFA in 2015. She says she’s always wanted to teach in an area dealing with severe economic hardship because she knows firsthand the difference it can make in a young person’s life.
In Tanzania, she worked with the Daraja Music Initiative, an interdisciplinary program that combines music education and conservation education.
Through teaching violin, she sought to build critical thinking skills and confidence among her students and give them a foundation in violin performance so they could continue to learn. The program, now in its 15th year, includes a number of older students who are working to become teachers themselves.
“It was an incredible experience to teach local students,” Reke says. “They are very eager to learn and they progress very fast.”
Her summer wasn’t all about music. The program bridges music and conservation, so in addition to teaching beginner and advanced violin classes, she also led conservation classes and planted and pruned mpingo trees, also known as African blackwood, the national tree of Tanzania. African blackwoods are used to make clarinets, oboe and violin fingerboards, pegs, and chin rests, but they’ve been overharvested in the country. Students in the Daraja Music program are taught about the trees’ environmental and economic importance.
I think in this world, we just need to create a lot of beauty and positivity, and we can do that through teaching music, through planting trees, creating a positive environment. We all need hope for a better future and for our world and planet.