Our Mission

The New London Community Orchestra is an organization with a dual mission: We seek to provide a supportive environment for community musicians of all levels to play and perform orchestral music, and we also seek to create the next generation of music lovers by providing free string instrument lessons to local students.

In order to achieve this mission, our orchestra is made up of volunteer musicians who pay annual dues to cover the operating expenses of the group. At the same time, proceeds from the concerts we perform each season go to support Music City Strings, our free music education program. We also provide free concerts for nursing homes and retirement communities.

Music City Strings employs experienced string teachers and provides free violin, viola, and cello lessons. Funding for the program comes from donations collected at NLCO concerts, contributions received from individuals and businesses in the community, and grants from a variety of charitable organizations and foundations.

Learn more about Music City Strings here.

We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

Kevin Bishop, Music Director and Conductor

Kevin Bishop

Kevin Bishop’s life work serves the ideal of “music as social action”: the belief that long-term music education can aid community building, personal elevation, and reconstruction. His varied career as a violist, violinist, conductor, composer, educator, researcher, and arts administrator has taken him around the world to study, witness, engage with, and lead social music projects. He is a founding member and Executive Director of Cuatro Puntos, an organization that uplifts underrepresented, silenced, or persecuted musical voices and genres. His work with Cuatro Puntos has taken him around the world, from Bolivia to Afghanistan to Switzerland and beyond. While serving as Director of Orchestral Studies at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, Kevin led the country’s only two orchestras in numerous concerts for presidents and ambassadors. He prepared and led the country’s first female conductors with the Afghan Women’s Orchestra "Zohra" in concerts across Europe, including the closing ceremony of the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.

As part of his directorship of Cuatro Puntos, Kevin is currently music director and cofounder of the Music Moves Hartford Street Choir, a program in shelters and soup kitchens that serves adults in Hartford who face homelessness and displacement. He was previously cofounder and orchestra director of Müzikhane Social Music School, teaching local and refugee children while living near the Syrian border in Southeastern Turkey. Kevin composes and records music inspired by the traditions and people he encounters, and he has both compositions and performances published on albums via the Arkadash, Toccata Classics and Métier, and Naxos labels. Kevin has conducted on some of the biggest stages in Europe, performed viola recitals at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, won international competitions, performed chamber music on four continents, lectured at universities across the United States and Europe, and presented at conferences on "music as social action" around the world.

Kevin is also founder of the Connecticut Elementary Honor Orchestra, which he first organized with a group of 100 elementary students from around the state while he was teaching at UConn. Two years later the ensemble became part of CMEA, and is now the All-State orchestra for elementary level. Kevin likes to keep things light, and has performed and recorded over 500 of his own arrangements of popular music with the ensemble Golden Scroll Soloists, a funky and modern string quartet that he has been a part of since 2005. Kevin has degrees from the University of California (BM), University of Hartford (MM) and Institute for Cultural Diplomacy. In all of his work Kevin aims to have fun and cultivate lasting friendships while exploring music's potential as one of many relevant, viable, and complementary methods for creating a more just and inclusive society.

Board of Directors