In my first post, Out of the Shadows, I mentioned that the musicians of the Pittsburgh Symphony out of all the major orchestras I keep track of, truly demonstrate and care about the audience connection. Here are two instances of how they turned seemingly hopeless challenges into opportunities. Plus, the first in the series of “On the Go”, what people in the business are listening to right now…..
It’s an all too common cry:
Busing for students is too expensive so we cannot send many of them to concerts this year!
NEWSFLASH! This has always been and will always be the case!
School districts seemingly never have enough money for basic needs let for alone numerous field trips and extra curricular programs, so knowing this should never be an excuse to not go all out to work through the problem. When I was music director of the San Angelo Symphony in Texas I will never forget the call I received with some very bad news. The day before our YPC performances in 2001, the buses that were going to be used to bring the students to us, would instead be used for a track meet! I got on the horn to all of the media outlets (it helped that a radio station owner was on our board) and the schools to rally the teachers and the parents. It was all over the news, calls came in to the stations protesting the decision and it was with great pride that we had to start the concert late the next morning because there were lines of cars and church buses (and even some school buses) causing the only traffic jam the city had ever seen because so many vehicles were involved with getting the students to the civic auditorium! It was an incredibly moving sight to behold and an unforgettable concert. Many of the parents who brought their children stayed for the concert also. The musicians in the Pittsburgh Symphony in 2002 however went one step further:
This is from an article by Andrew Druckenbrod, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Classical Music Critic:
Frustrated by a 10-year absence of Pittsburgh Public School students from concerts due to a reduced travel budget, PSO players opened up their own wallets and “put our money where our beliefs are,” said PSO member Paul Silver. The musicians came up with the $5,000 necessary to hire 50 buses, allowing 2,000 second-grade public school students to hear a concert today.
It is truly inspirational that the musicians would do this. Here is the whole article.
More recently, they tackled another challenge: How do we engage people with new music?
The answer is in the question and that is, by engaging people! Greg Sandow, reported on his blog how before presenting a work by Jennifer Higdon in March of this year, musicians went out into the lobby to demonstrate to individual patrons and groups of patrons the important passages they were about to play in the work. This personal connection could only have turned apathy into anticipation and excitement and the audience reaction probably had as much to do with them wanting to like the work because they felt personally involved in the performance and more importantly, with the performers!. Again truly inspiring. Here is Greg’s post. I would very much like to hear other ways performers have connected with the audience and the response. The Pittsburgh Steelers may be 8-3, but it seems that the Pittsburgh Symphony are the ones who have really “got game!”
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“On The Go” with Lawrence Loh
This is the first in a regular series of play-lists that colleagues and friends in the business are listening to. Where possible they are linked to a store (Amazon mostly) where you can look up more information about the works/albums/songs etc.. and listen to samples. To kick it off and appropriately for this post, here is the current “On the Go” list from Lawrence Loh, the incredibly talented resident conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and Music Director of the North Eastern Pennsylvania Philharmonic