Orchestre des jeunes d'Algérie (OJA)

In 2018, composer and conductor Salim Dada founded the Orchestre des Jeunes d'Algérie (OJA) — Algeria's first independent national youth training orchestra — with a single, ambitious conviction: that advanced orchestral training, professional mentorship and public performance should be accessible to young Algerian musicians from every region, background and level of training. Born from a gap in the national music education landscape, the OJA was designed not as a static ensemble but as a living, evolving platform — a hybrid model combining intensive residential training sessions, sectional coaching with professional tutors, full orchestral rehearsals, cultural activities, and public concerts in diverse settings. Each annual session, lasting ten days, brings together musicians aged 14 to 32, selected through national auditions ensuring geographic, gender and curricula diversity across Algeria. The orchestra's repertoire reflects its founder's plural artistic identity: from Baroque and Classical works to Romantic symphonic repertoire, jazz, film music, and original compositions by Salim Dada and emerging Algerian composers. The OJA has always been as much a cultural project as a musical one — a space where young people from all the country discover that music is a language of cohesion, dialogue and national pride. As an independent orchestra, the OJA's operation was based on partnerships with several public cultural institutions: the National Office of Authors' Rights and Neighboring Rights (ONDA), the National Office of Communication and Information (ONCI), the Algiers Opera House, the Algerian National Theatre (TNA), the National Higher Institute of Music (INSM), the Regional Institute of Musical Training of Algiers (IRFM), as well as private and civil sponsors. In five sessions held between 2018 and 2023, the OJA trained over 300 young musicians, gave 20 concerts across Algeria and internationally, and culminated in a historic participation in the 1st Festival of Youth Orchestras of the World directed by Yuri Bashmet in Moscow in August 2023. Along the way, it performed at the Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the 19th Mediterranean Games in Oran (2022), collaborated with the Icosium Polyphonic Choir in 2021, and brought orchestral music to concert halls, open-air theatres, public squares, hospitals and libraries. In 2020, the OJA was cited by UNESCO as one of the finest examples of Public-Civil Society partnership in Algeria's Quadrennial Periodic Report on the 2005 Convention for the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions — a recognition that placed this grassroots initiative among Algeria's most significant cultural contributions to the international stage.