Get inspired by these curated examples of orchestras engaging in participatory initiatives with communities.
I originally created this page to accompany the chapter “Towards Participatory and Collaborative Orchestras” in the book Sound Systems. Check out the related Sound Systems project.
Contents
Projects With Communities
- Notes for Peace
- Collaboration with Community Engagement | Chicago Symphony Orchestra
- Involves parents of victims of gun violence collaborating with teaching artists to create songs
- Juvenile Prison Partnerships | Chicago Symphony Orchestra
- Collaboration with CSO
- Involves youth creating music in collaboration with CSO musicians
- Boston Symphony Collaboration with Moe Pope and STL-GLD
- “In 2018, during its three-year residency in Jamaica Plain, the BSO’s Education and Community Engagement team began to explore possible collaborative ideas with hip-hop artist Moe Pope and the band STL GLD. These discussions led to what was to be the BSO’s first community-curated performance in Symphony Hall in May 2020, under Pope’s artistic direction. The concert, entitled “Us: A Celebration of Community” featured performances by STL GLD, hip-hop and spoken word artists and members of the BSO, a premiere of three commissioned works written as musical reflections of Jamaica Plain, and pre-concert presentations by DJs, beat-makers, dancers and student musicians.”
- Love stories
- Share Sound | Orchestras Live
- Darlo Creates
- Breathe
- Create Space | Orchestras Live
- Floods of Fire
- Adelaide Festival: Floods of Fire | Newsroom | University of Adelaide
- Floods of Fire – Adelaide Symphony Orchestra
- Floods of Fire Unveiled: A Community Celebration Through Performance – Adelaide Symphony Orchestra
- Community, Climate, Composition, Collaboration – Symphony
- “It’s hard to explain exactly what Floods of Fire is, in part because the end result is less important than the journey to get there. Throughout 2020, the ASO invited a wide range of South Australian arts organizations, community groups, and professional and amateur musicians to a series of workshops. The aim was to have the entire state of South Australia represented: First Nations peoples, members of the state’s diverse migrant communities, artists with disabilities, schoolchildren, and many more. But instead of gathering them specifically to write music, the workshop participants told stories of fires and floods—not just stories of surviving disasters, but tales from various cultures explaining the significance of these natural phenomena.”
- “Also at these workshops were composers and musicians from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplines—composers with training in Western classical music, certainly, but also many trained in non-Western and contemporary music traditions. Following these workshops, the stories were fashioned into music. But instead of individual composers taking these stories away and writing a piece of music, the music was written as a large-scale collaborative exercise, with everyone involved in the composition”
- “It’s hard to explain exactly what Floods of Fire is, in part because the end result is less important than the journey to get there. Throughout 2020, the ASO invited a wide range of South Australian arts organizations, community groups, and professional and amateur musicians to a series of workshops. The aim was to have the entire state of South Australia represented: First Nations peoples, members of the state’s diverse migrant communities, artists with disabilities, schoolchildren, and many more. But instead of gathering them specifically to write music, the workshop participants told stories of fires and floods—not just stories of surviving disasters, but tales from various cultures explaining the significance of these natural phenomena.”
University and Orchestra Partnerships
- The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the University of Maryland’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center and School of Music Announce Groundbreaking Partnership | School of Music
- MCICM Maastricht Centre for the Innovation of Classical Music
- Seibert, C., Toelle, J., & Wald-Fuhrmann, M. (2020). The Researching Orchestra: Innovative Collaborations between Symphonic Orchestras and Knowledge Institutions. In Classical Concert Studies (pp. 342-350). Routledge.
Community Embedded Musicians
Related General Resources
Related Publications
- McPhee, P. (2002). Orchestra and community: Bridging the gap. _HARMONY-DEERFIELD, 25-33.
- Seibert, C., Toelle, J., & Wald-Fuhrmann, M. (2020). The Researching Orchestra: Innovative Collaborations between Symphonic Orchestras and Knowledge Institutions. In Classical Concert Studies (pp. 342-350). Routledge.
- Smith, N. T., Peters, P., & Molina, K. (2024). Classical Music Futures: Practices of Innovation . Open Book Publishers.