Film Composer Ted Trobaugh Speaks with the Yleana Leadership Foundation
New York, NY — The Yleana Leadership Foundation, an educational nonprofit based in New York City, hosts annual summer SAT camps for underprivileged high school students. Over the summer, the foundation hosted a series of Imagination Lectures for students and staff featuring prominent community leaders.
On July 29, 2020, Ted Trobaugh spoke as the second Imagination Lecture speaker of the summer. Working as a composer for various films, Trobaugh taught our students the power of music on screen. After showing clips from "Rocky", "Casino Royale", and "Us", he walked students through his own thought process while creating music for a scene from "The Knot." First he dealt with the clip without any sound at all, and slowly progressed until he created the final sequence. Ted Trobaugh showed our students how important creativity, collaboration, and attention to detail are for success.
Afterwards, student Amy Jimenez reflected on learning something completely unfamiliar to her. She said, “It was really interesting to learn about a profession that I otherwise would never know anything about. Ted was very funny and he was very good at explaining what he did and how it helps enhance a film.”
Yleana staff member Allison Pyo realized the potential of film scoring. She said, “He showed us various film clips, helped us dissect the music in it, and explained how it connected to the themes in the scene. My biggest takeaway was that the music in film can be so much more detailed and complex than it seems on the surface.”
The Yleana Leadership Foundation sees the US’s racial wealth gap (economic/wealth accumulation) as a consequence of the opportunity gap (education). Our mission is to decrease the opportunity gap in order to decrease the racial wealth gap - by making sure students have access to the best resources possible as they enter college, we will change their economic position and ability to accumulate wealth as adults.
Our population is 95% BIPOC, primarily Black and Latinx, with an average family income of $32,829. We partner with high schools and CBOs in Baltimore, Boston/North Shore MA, NYC, and Philadelphia. We are emphatically a non-creaming organization, meaning our actions are directed at slow, incremental change in the thick middle of the curve.