Despair over rising international tension is not part of the vocabulary of concert guitarists Emre Sabuncuoglu and Thomas Foster, instructors at Los Angeles Guitar Academy. This month, they have revamped their online guitar lessons website to foster hope through their shared belief that music has the power to change tension into harmony.
To change international tension into harmony, they brainstormed ways to bring more cultures together through the power of music. Foster and Sabuncuoglu decided to translate the fledgling site’s main page and sidebar links into five different languages. Two of the languages, English and Turkish, have introductory videos in each language. They hope to add the others: French, Spanish and German, later this year. “Music serves as a unifying force,” says Sabuncuoglu, “bringing together students from vastly different social circles and economic circumstances. As a teacher, I have discovered that such differences fade as the students become one with the music.”
Two more diverse backgrounds could hardly be found than those of Emre Sabuncuoglu and Thomas Foster. Born in Ankara, Turkey, Sabuncuoglu spent his youth immersed in the capital city’s kaleidoscopic mix of cultures. Foster, on the other hand, spent his university and graduate school years in North Carolina’s Piedmont, an area which still struggles with racial issues. Yet both men, driven by a passion to learn about how others experience life through music, made translating their home page into as many languages as possible a top priority for the online school.
This January, it became a reality. “We were thrilled that the launch was in January, “ says Sabuncuoglu, “since the U.S. honors Martin Luther King, whose life’s work was mending cultural rifts.” Seeing their home page (http://www.onlineguitaracademy.net) posted in five different languages gives LAGA Online’s teachers hope, even amid the global tension in today's world. “When I heard our introductory video for the very first time in my own native language,” Sabuncuoglu adds, “I felt that we had made one significant step down the road of cultural understanding.”
