John Denver and Beethoven can agree that music brings people together but, music can also help those in need. The Oregon Symphony is using their musical talents to do both during the coronavirus pandemic.
What We Know:
- Since 1896, Oregon Symphony has performed for large crowds, enticing them with the wonders of classical music. They continue to do it now but went even further and used their musical talents to give back to the local community.
- The Lullaby Project is one of their ways of giving. Through this project, Oregon Symphony musicians and local singer-songwriters team up with parents or soon-to-be parents experiencing housing insecurity and other challenging life issues to compose lullabies for their children that express the parents’ insurmountable love for their children.
- How it works is the parents write a letter to their children and are paired with a professional musician to turn the letter into lyrics while adding music to them. With these professional musicians, everything needs to be perfect, which is why they dig a little deeper and ask the parents the reason for wanting to incorporate a certain lyric in the song. This allows parents to open up about what they see in their children, what their children have done for them, or how their children make them feel. Through this, without even realizing it, the parents have generated new possible lyrics for the song. Eventually, more instruments are included to add flare to the song and the song gets recorded.
- During the coronavirus pandemic, the Oregon Symphony has shown gratitude to essential workers by creating a series called Essential Sounds, dedicated to essential workers. “We wanted to figure out how we could use our unique musical voice to somehow create content that will be relevant and resonate with our community and connect with our community because what was happening is people were so thankful to essential workers in Oregon and Portland, where they were banging pots and pans every night,” stated Russell Kelban, vice president for marketing and strategic engagement for Oregon Symphony.
- In Essential Sounds, musicians who are essential workers or close to essential workers are given a platform to share their story and their talents. There are six episodes and each one is dedicated to certain types of essential workers, for example, episode one is dedicated to health care workers and episode two is dedicated to food service workers.
- Although no one knows when the pandemic will be over, the Oregon Symphony is looking to continue their work. “We’re focused right now on creating new digital content,” Kelban said. “We’re looking at Essential Sounds 2.0 and what that’s going to be. We are talking where to take it next and hopefully, we will make it an announcement in the next few weeks.”
- Since school is around the corner and kids are going to school from their homes, parents are forced to be the teachers and, according to Kelban, they want “meaningful digital content” for their kids, instead of cartoons and video games. Because of this, the Oregon Symphony launched Symphony Storytime. These are fifteen-minute segments where a professional narrative reads a children’s book and kids can watch them go through the pages, and an Oregon Symphony musician plays the soundtrack while the story is being read. This also allows kids to learn about musical instruments.
- According to Kelban, Symphony Storytime has received “global recognition” and that a nursery school in South Africa sent them a thank you note for the program. “It has sort of taken off and we have nine episodes in English, four in Spanish and we’re going to start creating more of those because parents want more and more.”
- But, the Oregon Symphony isn’t only using their talents to shine a light on issues caused by the pandemic, they are also showing their support for the Black Lives Matter movement with the African American Requiem. This is an event full of music and poetry to honor African Americans who have been victims or targets of violence. It was initially scheduled for March but the coronavirus caused the event to be canceled.
- Despite its cancellation, the concert seemed more relevant than ever after the tragic incident with George Floyd. The African American Requiem has now been rescheduled for January. “With the movement that’s happening with the awareness of the systemic racism and inequality that everyone needs to address it, every facet of society including orchestras,” Kelban said.
The African American Requiem will be taking place on Jan. 22, 2021 at 6 p.m. in Portland, and tickets are on sale now.
