Engaging the Community

Artistic Work in Schools and Communities: the Orchestra’s Role

Education and Community Engagement departments in American orchestras have grown dramatically over the last few decades, largely in response to two major trends: dwindling ticket sales and cuts to education funding in the public schools. Orchestras, which had been among the most exclusive organizations in most cities and towns, have earnestly attempted to make the case for the importance of their role in their communities, hoping that if they are seen as central to the cultural life of the city, and if members of the general population have some experiences with orchestral music when they are young, more people will want to go to concerts (and buy tickets) on a regular basis in the future. In addition to the audience development aspect, following this line of thought, if an orchestra is seen as central to its community, it is more likely to secure funding for its continued operation. This helps us make the case to donors.

It is true that in most cases smaller orchestras embraced community and education work first, but now most orchestras in this country, including the big ones, do a range of these kinds of activities and include them as part of their core mission. This work is extremely interesting and important both for orchestras as organizations and for the musicians who play in them. That being said, we should be clear about what it is that we are trying to accomplish, and how the various programs we run address our goals and the needs in our communities. What can and should be the orchestra’s role in its community?

In Philadelphia we have a range of education programs that fall into three major categories. First, we have programs that connect with children and grandchildren of our core audience and invite new families into the fold. Second, we have programs that are designed to support music educators and music students in the region. Third, we run programs that fulfill our responsibilities as a major cultural citizen in the city of Philadelphia. Several of these programs go into great depth, and make significant contributions to the cultural life of the community.

I am articulating these three categories in part to be clear about what we do not claim to do. We can not ultimately fill the gap created by severely cut funding for music programs in schools. We don’t have the resources or the capacity to do that, and it isn’t our role. So what can we do? We can provide programs and resources to support and inspire students and educators. We can function as a convening force, inviting educators and colleagues from other cultural institutions to join conversations about city-wide challenges. We can advocate, along with educators, parents, and our cultural colleagues, for better funding for arts education. We do run in-depth programs in schools which fall into the third category of activities, like our School Partnership Program. This program does provide significant and varied resources to the partner schools, but it still is not designed to take the place of having strong music educators in the school on a daily basis. We run these programs because they do give back to the community in substantial ways, something that we consider to be part of our responsibility as a cultural citizen, and we also learn an enormous amount through these in-depth relationships that we can fold back into our other activities.

Taking into consideration this range of programs and our advocacy efforts, the education and community activities will drive ticket sales for the orchestra, but that will not happen because a student had two positive experiences in the concert hall in third and eighth grade. It will happen because the breadth and depth of our programs make the case for the cultural relevancy of orchestras in today’s society.

I dislike the word “outreach.” It comes from a time when orchestras thought of themselves (positively or negatively) as somehow separate from a large part of their communities, either exclusive or excluded. It implies an “us versus them” dynamic. Instead I like to describe what we do as artistic work in schools and communities. Describing the work in this way goes to the heart of what I find to be most valuable and interesting about it, both for orchestras as organizations and for the musicians who participate in it.

Many musicians say that working in schools and with community members feeds them artistically, that it helps them rediscover why they love what they do so much, that it challenges them to think about what turns them on about music and to then invent a way to share that passion with others. It can also be extremely moving and exciting for musicians to experience an audience’s personal reactions to live music in a smaller, more intimate classroom or other informal setting. As we know, those personal reactions or impressions don’t often translate from the audience to the stage in today’s concert halls. To get back to this notion of artistic work, though, I think that some of the most interesting work occurs when musicians and community members undertake joint artistic projects. This can happen on a small scale, with a classroom composition project in which a musician participates, or in a large flashy way, as in the case of some of the Berlin Philharmonic’s education projects.

I would like to challenge all of us to think about what might be possible in this area during our panel conversation, to brainstorm ideas and share successful projects. What kinds of things might we do artistically with our communities that might genuinely begin to shift the way in which we are perceived, making the orchestra into a place where people go not just to appreciate the great artistry on stage, but where they also periodically have opportunities to discover and experiment with their own musical capacities and skills? I’m happy to share some of our thinking in Philadelphia, and look forward to hearing from others throughout the conversation.