What Professional Organizations Can Learn from Community Orchestras

Under creative musical leadership, the trust and relationships that bind the orchestra and its audience also provide a groundwork for programming contemporary and experimental pieces. Sure, BARS performs Dvorak and Beethoven, but we also regularly play works by living composers, like Jennifer Higdon and David Conte, and take creative risks with older pieces, like a performance of Britten’s serenade for tenor, horn, and strings juxtaposed with readings from love letters exchanged by the composer and his partner Peter Pears. My youth and college orchestras were led with the same sense of adventure, and both players and audience members enjoyed a richer musical experience as a result.

The musical heights reached by professional symphonies inspire community orchestras. We constantly strive to improve our technique and musicality, and in striving we grow. But community orchestras have some real strengths that could inspire professional groups. Building deep relationships among performers and audience members takes both hard work and a sense of joy – diligent practice, rehearsing, and open-hearted listening, of course, but also a sincere commitment to integrating music and musicians into the larger community. Community groups throw post-concert parties with their audiences, spend afternoons performing and volunteering at street fairs, mentor in local high schools, and put on informal chamber music nights. Professional symphonies may not need to replicate all of these activities, but it is essential to the future of classical performance in America that they take the process of building community as seriously as they do perfecting their performances.

— Sam Tepperman-Gelfant

An Oakland native, Sam Tepperman-Gelfant has been playing cello since age 8. In addition to the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony, he has performed with the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, the California Shakespeare Festival, the Broadway Bach Ensemble, and other community groups. He is also an avid chamber musician. By day he is a civil rights attorney in San Francisco focused on poverty and racial justice issues.

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