Steve Metcalf
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that perform in a large hall, or serve as a primary performance venue for orchestras without a dedicated concert hall. Orchestra-museum affiliations provide a way for orchestras to reach new audiences, including millennials and others, such as underserved populations intimidated by the formality of the concert-hall setting, and adventure-seekers who may turn their noses up at what they consider staid orchestral programming, but who will jump at the chance to hear new music. That may partly explain why the New York Philharmonic chose to launch its new-music series CONTACT! in 2009, in venues outamericanorchestras.org
The Colorado Symphony has collaborated with several Denver-area museums, including the Clyfford Still Museum, pictured above.
side of Avery Fisher Hall, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This year, CONTACT! is bringing one of its programs to the Museum of Modern Art. Some museums, like the Cleveland Museum of Art, have dedicated performance halls; the Cleveland Orchestra has already collaborated on programs there, with plans for more. More typically, museum spaces are the setting for chamber music concerts, for which many are ideally suited, given a creative approach to seating arrangements. When it comes to finding new audiences, orchestras are discovering that museumgoers complement, but don’t neces-
sarily overlap with, the symphony crowd. “A lot of the folks who are buying tickets for our museum concerts are new customers who are not in our existing database,” says Matthew Wardell, music director and conductor of Florida’s Ocala Symphony Orchestra, a per-service professional orchestra with a half-million-dollar budget located smack-dab in the middle of the state. The orchestra offers a regular series at Ocala’s Appleton Museum of Art. “The best part is that when people go to the Appleton and have fun, they also end up coming to our regular concerts.” Anthony Pierce, the Colorado Sym-
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