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For five years, Florida’s Ocala Symphony has partnered with the Appleton Museum for its “SoundArt” series.
Members of the Los Angeles-based wild Up ensemble perform at the Grand Central Art Center at California State University/Fullerton, conducted by Christopher Rountree, wild Up’s founder and creative director, February 2014.
Omaha Symphony Music Director Thomas Wilkins leads a concert at the Joslyn Art Museum’s Witherspoon Concert Hall, with Principal Cellist Paul Ledwon (pictured in foreground) as soloist in Schumann’s Cello Concerto in A minor, one of the works on the program.
by Madeline Rogers
Orchestras are bringing live art to museums— where the art is usually on the walls.
Off the Wall
Orchestras have been described—sometimes admiringly, sometimes disparagingly—as “museums”: conservators of great masterworks and of a tradition that dates back centuries. It’s a rubric symphony orchestras increasingly chafe at as they seek new audiences, new repertoire, new concert formats, and unconventional performance venues to attract more diverse audiences. So where do creative administrators and music directors go in search of innovative ways to reach more deeply into their communities? In, of all places ... museums. Museums and orchestras make attractive bedfellows for many reasons, chief
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among them the shared challenge of luring younger visitors and concertgoers. In a March 2014 New York Times article about museums, David Gelles wrote, “It is far from clear whether the children of baby boomers are prepared to replicate the efforts of their parents,” noting that the younger generation has a wealth of leisuretime options competing for their time and dollars, options that were undreamt of by their elders. These days museum-orchestra collaborations are blossoming in cities big and small, all around the country. In a collaboration with the Montreal Museum of Fine
Arts, musicians of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (OSM) perform a chamber series at Bourgie Hall, a 444-seat venue in an 1894 church, which the museum acquired and converted to a concert hall. Connecticut’s Hartford Symphony presents a chamber series at the Wads worth Atheneum Museum of Art. New York’s peripatetic Orchestra of St. Luke’s presents concert series at two museums— the Brooklyn Museum and the Morgan Library & Museum—as well as at Carnegie Hall and Caramoor, a summer festival in Westchester County. Museums can offer an alternative experience for orchestras symphony
SUMMER 2014