Arts Activities Support

One of our proposed outcomes was having 1,500 concert attendees and 1,000 paid guests. We had 909 paid guests and 1,182 concert attendees. Our other outcome was to have 85% or more of the musicians see artistic growth over the past four years. Survey results indicated that 82% of the musicians were seeing growth. We reached a large number of young people and got them excited about classical music. The Bloomington Symphony Orchestra’s goals for this project were to present works of living composers as well as standard classics in order to maintain and stimulate interest in classical orchestral music. We feel that we achieved these goals this year by presenting four diverse subscription concerts, plus a side-by-side performance with students from the Bloomington High Schools’ string programs. One of our artistic challenges was choosing repertoire that stretched the musicians as individuals and as an ensemble. The repertoire for this project included well-known pieces like Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. It also introduced lesser-known pieces like Shostakovich’s First Symphony, which is not performed frequently, as well as the world premiere performance of Grant Luhmann’s Flute Concerto. The orchestra was challenged by Manny Laureano’s uncommon interpretation of Symphonie Fantastique, and by learning the Flute Concerto, which had never been heard before! There was no recording of the Flute Concerto available because of the extended techniques the piece required. However, the musicians rose to the occasion during every artistic challenge, putting their best effort forward, to achieve a strong musical outcome. The Bloomington Symphony Orchestra also undertook a mighty challenge by presenting music from all of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle operas, in a concert featuring a cast of ten singers and a narrator. This repertoire was challenging from a language perspective (music with notes written in German, score with notes written in Italian), from a musical perspective and from a personal preparation perspective. This experience caused the musicians and Music Director to confront the importance of repertoire selection and personal and ensemble preparation. One way we will try to encourage personal practice in the future is by making the parts available on our private members-only website as early in the season a possible, so musicians can download and practice their parts earlier in the season. We hope that a small effort like this will motivate people to practice early and often, and make it easy for people to get the music or parts they need to do so. The Bloomington Symphony Orchestra’s community goals were to serve the audience, the City of Bloomington community and the musicians. We met all three of these goals. We served our audience by presenting diverse programs that were of interest to old and new audience members alike. Audience surveys told us that more familiar programs were more likely to make people want to attend our concerts and conversely, unfamiliar programs were not the reason people attended. In the future, we will strive to message our programs so that all concerts will be compelling to potential attendees. The City Bloomington and its businesses, schools and nonprofit organizations were impacted by our project through venue rental fees and supporting local workers. All venues were easy to locate, handicapped accessible, well-lit for ease in reading program notes, and offered generous, free parking for audience and musicians. According to concert surveys, about 25% of our audience lives in Bloomington. About 25% of our audience members indicated their intention to dine out in the City of Bloomington before or after a Bloomington Symphony Orchestra concert, which provided indirect income to local businesses. Our musicians were served by preparing quality, challenging repertoire. We had the chance to perform the Mozart Violin Concerto No. 4, under the baton – or rather, bow – of our concertmaster and soloist Michael Sutton. 80% of the musicians who completed the survey felt the 2016-17 season repertoire was enjoyable to play and appropriately challenging. We reached a very age diverse audience with our project. 60% of our audience self-identified as being 60 years of age or older. We distributed 130 free student tickets over the length of the project, which means 11% of our audience was made up of young people. We were able to serve not only our traditional older audience, but also a diverse group of young people, which was very exciting for us. In the area of accessibility, we had a busload of seniors from the Mount Olivet Lutheran Home in Minneapolis, who attended a concert. We also had a group of home-school students who attended a concert. We also worked with each of these groups to make sure it was accessible to them in terms of physical need (wheelchairs, walkers, etc.) and the opportunity to meet with the Music Director after the concert (home school group). We would like to increase our reach to both of these groups and will do so by making sure more groups know about our concerts and discounts we can offer to make attending more accessible to them. Another way we made our project accessible, was to players. We have one player who has Parkinson’s and needs some assistance to make it possible for her to play. Everything from helping her carry in a special chair, to allowing her to miss rehearsals when she was not well enough to attend, were important ways that we helped her to be able to play and contribute to the success of the Bloomington Symphony Orchestra.