Features: Have Cello Will Travel


The others answered that the logistics of busing 3,000 students downtown during the day make the idea unattractive. More importantly, they said that if the Orchestra is to shed its Establishment image it must move’ out into the city. The poorest school in the poorest neighborhood should have a chance to host the Orchestra and should have the highest priority in hearing what a great ensemble sounds like.

The plan to go to the audience won. The Orchestra appealed, first, to the National Foundation on the Arts, which found $15,000 in its tiny bank account to help start the program. The Orchestra management matched it with funds donated by the Philadelphia Foundation and the City.

When you go to the grass roots, you have to have a message. The Orchestra devised a format, picked a repertory and moved out. Only continuing experience will mold a formula which will be right in every situation, though William Smith and Mason Jones, the two conductors who led the out-reach venture, picked up some valuable pointers on this first try.

William Smith, the Orchestra’s assistant conductor, led his group in music by Tchaikovsky, Bartok, Burrell Philips and Beethoven. Some agonizing had gone on before this selection was made. Should the Orchestra play to the students’ taste or play standard repertory? Should music by black composers be included or jazz or music that in some way would acknowledge the vast black segment of the school population?

In the end, the feeling prevailed that any gesturc of this sort would have been viewed as tokenism, that the Orchestra was playing in the schools what it would not play for subscribers. So Smith opened with the Beethoven Fifth Symphony. But what to him was a monument of Western art was greeted with laughter. The kids knew the four-note theme as the television commercial for pills, not as an epochal motif. Time after time, Smith had to stop and remind his listeners that they were hearing Beethoven, not Bufferin. It was a case in which generations were approaching a common event from different experience. Smith had introduced it as an example of "angry music, but music in which the composer turned that anger to triumph." Whether the kids took that away with them remains unresolved in Smith’s mind.

Jones used the same music and found similar responses. "] told them to listen for the pauses in the Beethoven," he said. "When the first pause came after the four notes, they really whooped it up. Well, I didn’t talk much about music, and we didn’t play many slow movements." Jones said he’d like to see the concert schedule expanded and made more flexible.

Elsewhere, other approaches have been tried. Zubin Mehta took the Los Angeles Philharmonic to Watts and combined Beethoven with a mixed
media work by John Nelson that included a jazz combo. George London, artistic administrator of the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington D.C .. has been planning his move to the grass roots as a part of the Center’s means of survival, He wants a black assistant conductor to tack the orchestra out. "The cities have a massive black population and we have to reflect that in our players, our soloists and our music," he believes.

Robert de Pasquale. a violinist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, was one of those who though t the idea of ~ black conductor was worth exploring too. He ‘had talked with the young audiences and found the need for black children to identify with black musicians. The whole racial undercurrent was felt in every aspect of the venture, and led to soul-searching among the players as the buses headed out into the city for each of the concerts — a total of 12 concerts played in six schools.