St. Louis

Go one block north from Powell Symphony Hall, where the St. Louis Symphony plays, and suddenly it's hard to think about classical music. All at once you're in the projects, on streets with cluttered yards and broken windows, though some homes, let's note, are immaculate.
And if we can't think of classical music when we're passing through, what about the people who live here? Turn the clock back 50 years and you'd find St. Louis just a heartbeat from the segregated South. Powell Hall, then a movie palace, forced African-Americans to hide themselves in the balcony, and when it was rebuilt into a symphonic shrine in the 1960s, they remembered that, and picketed.
In 1989 came payback, of a kind. The Symphony, now internationally famous with Leonard Slatkin as its music director, wanted extra funding from a proposed tax increase, which would have funneled money to the St. Louis Science Center and the Missouri Botanical Garden, as well as to the orchestra. But voters had to approve the proposal, and they rejected it decisively, with the Symphony getting the smallest favorable vote, barely 30%.
"We didn't understand," says Cheryl Havlin, the Symphony's marketing director, looking back a little ruefully. "We thought we were accessible. Wouldn't we sell tickets to anybody?" But even wealthy St. Louisans weren't happy with the orchestra, and when their donations sagged, Bruce Coppock, then the Symphony's executive director (after a stint at Carnegie Hall, he's about to become a vice president at the American Symphony Orchestra League), proposed a remedy -- revolutionary change. Or, as he puts it, "Rather than wagging our finger and saying 'You don't appreciate how good we are,' we said, 'We'll change our profile.' "

With Mr. Coppock in the lead, they did just that. "There's a lot of rhetoric out there," says Mark Volpe, managing director of the Boston Symphony, who in his previous job as head of the Detroit Symphony faced and met much the same challenge. "But St. Louis has connected with the community in ways that very few orchestras have."
Other orchestras work in their communities, of course, and in certain areas, some have more extensive programs, like the Milwaukee Symphony, half of whose players work year in and year out in local schools, even helping plan curricula. The St. Louis program can't match that. But it's the range of community outreach that makes St. Louis stand out. In 1994, under Mr. Coppock's direction, the orchestra acquired a school of its own, a well-liked institution that had been teaching music in St. Louis for many years. It also began a uniquely broad Community Partnership Program, inviting all its musicians to pick their own community activities -- not just working in the schools, but also playing chamber concerts, or accompanying local choral groups.
And six years ago, to address its problem with its neighbors in the projects, the Symphony began a project called IN UNISON, in which it builds partnerships with, by now, 28 African-American churches. I watched a French hornist from the orchestra demonstrate his instrument in All Saints Episcopal Church, deep in the inner city, and, though he was certainly engaging, the event itself was nothing special. But when I spoke to people at the church -- including one who's also a St. Louis city councilman -- I learned that there's a deeper story. "I feel welcome at Powell Hall," said Elizabeth Hynes, assistant principal at a St. Louis elementary school, who as a member of the church qualifies for discount tickets (which the church must sell, to honor its share of the partnership).
That inspired me to call John Mason, director of the Monsanto Fund, the principal financial backer of IN UNISON and himself African-American, who two years ago had told me he couldn't say that for sure the program worked. Now I could almost taste his excitement. "The difference in black attendance at the Symphony is phenomenal," he says.
And back at Powell Hall, the director of IN UNISON, Kerri Gwinn Harris, told me that her own father had been one of the anti-Powell pickets. She herself last held a social service job in a YMCA in the nearby projects, and now says she'll stand in the Powell lobby whenever there's a concert, ready to assure older African-Americans that yes, they really are allowed to sit in the orchestra seats they'd paid for.

Which brings me back to where I started -- how forceful orchestras have to be, to change perceptions that they're inaccessible. The need for this has become almost a mantra in the symphonic world, but priorities can vary. Polly Kahn, education director of the New York Philharmonic, happily says that her orchestra does three times as much community outreach as it did three years ago, but she also stresses, carefully, that its most important mission is to play the great symphonic classics. In contrast, Don Roth, Bruce Coppock's successor in St. Louis, says that performance and community work are "completely integrated."
Does that mean -- as some in the orchestral world might fear -- that the musical performance suffers? Part of the answer comes from a surprising new direction from an unusual third priority in St. Louis. "How," asks Mr. Roth (just as Mr. Coppock had), "can orchestras establish a different style of working with their musicians?"
He's referring to one of the classical music world's unhappy secrets -- orchestral players don't like their jobs. They're trained as artists, then put to work on something like a musical assembly line. "They're frustrated," Mr. Roth amplifies, "because they have no influence over what they do."
But in St. Louis, they do have influence -- and even substantial artistic control -- over their community work. All but three of them participate, a percentage no other major orchestra comes near to matching. There's a financial motivation, since they get up to three weeks off with pay in exchange for community activity. But as trombonist Gerard Pagano told me, "You think you're doing it for money, and then you find you get something out of it. It's the only time I'm in complete control of my artistry, and the most important, most satisfying part of my job." Four other players in the orchestra confirmed this, stressing that -- as is not the case in most orchestral outreach programs -- they're in charge of what they do.
A happy orchestra will play well, and under its new music director Hans Vonk the St. Louis Symphony has a deep, rich sound, and (especially in a performance of Stravinksy's "Petroushka" that I heard in St. Louis), delightful clarity, along with a wonderful kind of relaxed precision. Some people in the symphonic world think a community emphasis will hurt an orchestra artistically, but here the opposite seems to be true. Mr. Vonk, who supports the community programs but isn't directly involved every day, feels that he's been liberated from the usual tensions between conductors, musicians and management. "For the first time in my professional life," he says, "I can simply concentrate on music, just as I dreamed of when I was a student."
Maybe, then, it's lucky that the projects are just a block away. They helped inspire Bruce Coppock to create, and Don Roth to continue, a new vision of an orchestra -- one that bets its future on its civic duty, and on its musicians' happiness.

{There's more to this story, which space didn't allow me to tell. Come back soon for an update, with much more information.]

Wall Street Journal, June 26, 1998