In a world that is fast-paced and often full of division and stress, music is one thing that can bring people together. Whether it’s at a performance or concert, sitting back listening to music or playing or singing, music can have a significant impact on us.

With that in mind, Empowered Music Education is a new studio that has opened in Camp Hill that the founder Dani Fiori, says is welcoming to all students for a variety of reasons,"Empowered Music is different from your traditional standard classical music education because we offer some things that you wouldn't normally find in those almost laboratory type classroom environments where you just read the notes on the page and and go home. Or maybe you have a recital and and that's it. What we do is we offer performance opportunities that are very different. We like to put students in front of a live audience with real professional musicians and give them those opportunities. And then also inside the classroom, we're doing a lot more than, like I said, just reading the page. We're getting into it's confidence building. We're getting into practical skills that aren't usually taught in classrooms, like how to use your equipment, how to adjust your mic stand, how things are supposed to feel when we hear them, or how we express what we feel when we hear them."

Fiori said they have students who are beginners to advanced music students but he really appreciates the new music students,"I love starting from the ground up with a student because what I like to do is to make sure that above all it's fun. Make no mistake, learning an instrument is hard. It's difficult. It takes work, it takes patience. And those are barriers that can stop someone, especially if it's not fun, that can stop someone from continuing their music education because they're like, This is too hard. It's not even fun. Why am I doing this? So from the ground up, we can create an atmosphere that is accessible and welcoming and allows you to not only make mistakes, but celebrate your mistakes, celebrate your differences, and make it feel like, Wow, you know, I might not feel like I did great today, but this is fun, so I'm going to keep trying. So that's why I think I really love working with beginners the most, because I want to give them a foundation that makes music education safe."

Fiori said music is more than music to him,"There's so many challenges day-to-day whether we're going to school, whether we're going to work. We're getting bogged down by a lot of things in life, and music can be a refuge from all of that. Music can take us places. It can take us anywhere you might know from. If you put on a song that you grew up listening to and it connects you to your childhood, right? We're really going back in our feelings. And so, we can we can use music as a tool, not just as a thing that's outside of us. We can get it inside and use it to maybe we're using rhythm to manipulate our our state of mind to help us with clarity or with sleep. This is this is really something that can go deep physiologically within us."

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