Looking back on 2025

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2025 was a year full of ups and downs. Hard times for our region and city, as political tensions were high, and many crucial services stopped due to cuts in international aid. But mostly good times inside our school, where young musicians from both side of the divide connected, created, and invested in themselves and their future.

Our students travelled to Berlin and Skopje, together with Musicians Without Borders, Roma Rock School, Fontys Rockacademie, and Clash!. Our teachers and student-trainees received training and master classes at the Rockacademie in the Netherlands. And next year, we hope to attend Balkan Trafik! Festival in Brussels once more, to successfully end our Music Connects project, and start the next school year on a high note. 
 

Here’s what our project Music Connects achieved in 2025: 

  • 141 young musicians (98 from North and South Mitrovica, 43 from Skopje) participated in 3,009 music lessons, mixed band rehearsals and workshops.
  • 19 teachers and trainees from Mitrovica Rock School and Roma Rock School received teacher training from the Dutch Fontys Rockacademie.
  • 12 ethnically mixed bands with 58 members rehearsed, recorded, and performed their original songs.
  • Two supergroups with 8 members from Mitrovica Rock School and Roma Rock School performed their original songs in Berlin. 
  • We delivered two training weeks in Mitrovica, one training in Skopje, a summer school in Skopje, an exchange in Berlin, and teacher training in the Netherlands. 
  • We organized 8 concerts, 40 training sessions, and spent 29 days in the studio. 
  • We reached an audience of approximately 4.4m with 15 press reports in four languages.

Music as a Response to Division

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A blog by Filip Milovanović, professional session musician and drum teacher at Mitrovica Rock School. This blog was written as a contribution to the project “Cultural Canvas of Northern Kosovo,” and originally posted on the website of NGO ACDC.

Back in 2008, I heard that the Mitrovica Rock School was opening. Older musician friends from the city invited me to attend drum classes, and that’s how my life journey truly began.

Now, 16 years later, I teach at that very same school and work what is possibly the best job in the world.

I’m somewhat glad that music and the rock school taught me that differences in faith, religion, or skin color don’t really matter—because at the end of the day, we’re all here for the same reason: to create music.

Music has this unique power to overcome barriers that politics and history often place, simply because, on stage, you see musicians—not Serbs, Bosniaks, Albanians, and so on.

I had the chance to play and work with people from many different cultures, and now I realize how important that is in shaping a musician/human being, especially someone born in a “strange” place like this, where unfortunately there’s still a lot of hatred and perspectives that perhaps shouldn’t exist.

That’s why I believe we have to find ways to make the world a better place. I believe music does that every day. But if we, as people, don’t want to make that change, then I believe we face a serious problem.

Culture and music need no translation. Emotion is understood without words. That’s exactly why I believe the diversity we have should be seen as our greatest wealth—because by combining all these differences and cultures, we can create something truly valuable.

At the end of the day, multiethnic cooperation is not just an artistic act—it’s a social stance that shows something different is possible and achievable, if you truly want it.

Our year in 2021

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As the end of the year approaches, we like to look back and reflect on our impact during the year. And, despite the challenges that the pandemic poses for the entire cultural scene, 2021 was a highly active year for our school.

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Looking back on 2020

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2020 challenged the world in ways that no one expected. And the pandemic took away some of our most powerful ways of coping: the ability to share music, and to come together.

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Rethinking music and reconciliation during a global pandemic

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We had a good thing going. Not to toot our own horn, but only two months ago an embassy representative approached us saying she had heard we were “the best project in Kosovo.”

Mitrovica Rock School worked: the project had shown that music can create new paths to mutual understanding, even in a highly complex post-conflict environment like Mitrovica. Students of the school, young people from the divided town’s Albanian and Serb communities, found a place where politics could be shut out and where ethnic identity was secondary. What matters at the Rock School is what you can do, what you like and what you’re like.

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Friends behind the camera: Interview with Music Connects filmmaker Stuart Jolley-Socea

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Stuart is a filmmaker and video producer from England, an interviewer, and a massive music fan. One of the founders of Hatched-MV, a music video and documentary production duo, Stuart has supported the Mitrovica Rock School by producing the video for Proximity Mine’s Set Me Free, and is now working on the feature documentary Music Connects: The Real School of Rock.

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