Children’s Memorial Hospital
pinpoints where participants are located. A couple of months into the initiative, most were still grouped around Chicago, but it’s easy to visualize how the tentacles could spread outward. It has to grow organically, says McGill. “Oftentimes people try to force things to happen.” For true impact on the citizen level, he says, there has to be a sea change in thinking about music participation. “Thoughts create action and creative ideas and teamwork with all the different organizations out there.” The Citizen Musician Initiative is unusual in that it originates with the CSO, building on Muti’s vision to further deepen the orchestra’s connecYo-Yo Ma performs for a young patient at tions to the city and comChildren’s Memorial Hospital as part of the munity partners, yet is not Citizen Musicians Initiative in Chicago. a program of the orchestra. The website is distinct from the orchestra’s, although it is accescitizen musician was, and I was a kid from sible through the main CSO site; content the South Side, not necessarily thought of is generated by users, much like any other as a part of the music community in certain social network. The CSO anticipates that it circles,” McGill recalls. “But this is the comwill facilitate Citizen Musician activities and munity that accepted me and pushed me that its musicians will initiate some, but it forward.” does not plan to present them as orchestra Still, a concept can be difficult to pin events per se. “It’s easy to say we do educadown; random acts of kindness or culture tion and community programs. People uncan be hard to capture. The Citizen Muderstand that,” says Rutter. “But what we’re sician Initiative’s most visible commodity trying to say is, let’s honor and celebrate may be a website set up to act something what musicians, individually and collectively, like a social network, inviting participants give back to our community. It’s a different to post information about themselves, discussion around the same value.” their connections to music, and stories of Indeed, the Citizen Musician Initiative citizen musician encounters. “Tell us the is a very different idea for orchestras—an story, because there are so many wonderopen-ended concept that is inherently limful stories,” says CSO President Deborah itless, and potentially global in nature. And Rutter. Some, like events involving Yoit’s a very different approach for any orgaYo-Ma, attract media attention. But many nization that is used to setting goals and small and equally affecting daily moments markers for success. “We’ve all seen so many never do, like one CSO staffer’s on-theprograms, I call them the measurable: Here spot decision to pull an orchestra CD out are their test scores, they’ve done this or of her car player and give it to a neighbor achieved that,” says Yo-Yo Ma. “The basic who happened to remark on how beautiful point of music is that it addresses our inner the music sounded. lives. We can’t measure our inner lives.” That, A map on the Citizen Musician website
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he says, is where passion, commitment, and caring lie, and where we find meaning in our pursuits. Ma adds that the Citizen Musician Initiative is not a single idea that can be applied across the board, but that it should take shape with the needs and interests of specific communities. And activities don’t have to be large-scale. What if I stop to pick up a piece of garbage on the street? Ma wonders. What might that one gesture start? OrchKids
The bell rings at 3:30 p.m., signaling the end of another school day at Lockerman Bundy Elementary, a public school in West Baltimore. But instead of bursting out the front door, a swarm of about 120 students descends on the cafeteria. There, a nutritious meal fuels them for the next phase of their afternoon: music study, homework assistance, and mentoring under the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s OrchKids program. OrchKids has been operating in this corner of Baltimore for three years, expanding recently to a second location at the New Song Academy, a charter school. The school buildings themselves are bright patches in an area of overwhelming blight: the rare well-kept facilities on blocks lined with boarded-up homes and abandoned community centers, broken sidewalks, and crumbling businesses. To walk down the sparsely populated streets is to get a vivid sense of how unsafe it can be for kids to hang out after school with no real place to go. So when OrchKids staffers noticed a young boy walking past Lockerman Bundy, carrying his trumpet, they invited him in. He wasn’t a student at the school, but they introduced him to the OrchKids program and invited him to join. Two days later, he was one of the kids in the cafeteria, trumpet case in hand. Participation in OrchKids is free, and around 220 students from kindergarten up can now spend sixteen hours a week learning the fundamentals of music, singing in chorus, and taking part in group and ensemble lessons. The youngest play in the Bucket Band, which uses buckets—the kind that come from a hardware store—to learn about drumming, and have the opportunity to explore various instruments before choosing one of their own when they reach second grade. Instruments are donated. While based on principles of El Sistema, symphony
summer 2011