Sigma Alpha Iota

sai-national.org • WINTER 2018 • PAN PIPES 7 MUSIC NOTES I magine your school district has insufficient funds to support its music program (alas, a common occurrence). en imagine the district has accumulated about a thousand broken instruments that cannot be repaired since there are no funds. en, imagine the district has a thousand students who would love to use the instruments if they were repaired. is is the situation in the Philadelphia School District. Robert Blackson, director of the Temple University Contemporary art gallery, decided something should be done about this musical tragedy. He, along with others, conceived the idea of commissioning a piece of music to be played on the District's broken instruments. David Lang, on the faculty of Yale University, accepted the challenge and composed "Symphony for a Broken Orchestra." is is the highlight of a two-year collaboration among a variety of music and arts organizations in the Philadelphia area initiated by the Tyler School of Art and the Philadelphia School District. e Philadelphia Orchestra, the Curtis Institute of Music, the Boyer College of Music & Dance, and hundreds of musicians came together to advance the project. e collaborators collected broken instruments from the city's public schools, assessed the damage, and made an archive of the sounds made by each instrument. "Using this archive, the fiercely innovative composer David Lang has created a work that embraces the idiosyncratic behavior of these instruments in a leap of artistic faith as loving as it is daring," said Susan Cahan, Dean of the Tyler School of Art. When Mr. Lang's piece was ready, around 400 musicians of all ages came together and played the broken instruments in two concerts on Sunday, December 3, 2017 at the 23rd Street Armory in Philadelphia. SAI sister, Martha Frampton, who attended, described the venue as "cavernous." e renowned conductor, Jayce Ogren, was chosen to direct this unique work. He has conducted the Boston, Utah, Pittsburgh, and Dallas Symphonies, the New York, Copenhagen and Los Angeles Philharmonics, the Cleveland Orchestra, and the Deutsches Symphonie- Orchester in Berlin, among others. He is the newly appointed conductor of Orchestra 2001. SAI sister Rheta Smith, possibly the oldest orchestra member, described the physical set-up as "completely different from a typical orchestra concert, but then, so was the music!" She continued, "Everything was in the round. Jayce Ogren was elevated on some sort of high mound in the middle of the room so he could be easily seen from everywhere. Around him sat the audience, but their backs were to him. Around the edge sat the performers, close to 400 of us! We were facing the audience, which was seated fairly near us…e performers were divided into 10 groups, each with two section Symphony for a Broken Orchestra Photo: Karl Seifert courtesy of Temple Contemporary, Tyler School of Art Members of the Broken Orchestra take the stage for the debut of the symphony written for instruments in need of repair. BROKEN continued on page 8

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