Cultural Harmony The Oakland East Bay Symphony Reaches Out The Monday morning string orchestra rehearsal at Westlake Middle School in Oakland was in full swing when the violin strings snapped. Around 20 seventh and eighth graders looked up from their music stands and put down their bows, leaving the A minor scale they had just been practicing suspended in the air like a half-finished sentence. Westlake's music teacher, Randy Porter, stepped hurriedly off his podium and ushered the two students with the malfunctioning instruments into an anteroom for repairs. "Fixing one broken string isn't a big deal, but fixing two might take a while," said Porter, disappearing behind a glass door with the casualties in tow. This type of incident all too often brings school music rehearsals to a premature end. But because Oakland East Bay Symphony (OEBS) violinist Carla Picchi was on hand to assist Porter with his class, within minutes, Westlake's students were able to pick up their bows and finish their scales. By the time Porter had replaced the broken strings, the orchestra, under Picchi's guidance, had moved on to playing concert repertoire. An Oakland native, professional violinist and longtime OEBS member, Picchi is part of a corps of OEBS musicians dedicated to supporting music-making in underserved Oakland public schools. In addition to sponsoring professional orchestral players like Picchi to help out in classrooms, OEBS donates instruments to schools, undertakes in-school workshops and demonstrations, provides high-profile performance opportunities to Oakland's most promising young musicians through competitions and special concert series and offers students discounted or free tickets to each of its six main-stage concerts each season. "The Oakland East Bay Symphony has been a major force behind the return of music instruction to the Oakland public schools," says Oakland City Council President Jane Brunner. The orchestra allocates roughly one third of its total operating budget to its nationally renowned education and outreach programs, which currently touch some 20,000 students in approximately 100 Oakland schools. Westlake Middle School, which is based in one of Oakland's lowest-income neighborhoods, benefits greatly from its relationship with OEBS. Of the 150 students who currently study music at the school, Porter estimates that only six or seven own the instruments they play. "We've had more musicians get into the prestigious Berkeley Young Musicians' Program over the past five years than other schools because OEBS mentors have been on hand to give private lessons and help prepare students for auditions," says Porter. "Our partnership with OEBS runs pretty deep." Making its home in a city more renowned for crime statistics than cultural offerings, OEBS has grown since its inception in 1988 to become both a leader in music education in the U.S. and a fine professional symphony orchestra beloved by the local community. Each year, close to 50,000 people attend the orchestra's performances at its home-base in Oakland's historic Paramount Theatre, as well as at a wide variety of community centers around the region. The ethnic profile of these audiences is considerably more diverse than that of similar organizations around the country. Nearly 20% of OEBS ticket-buyers identify themselves as non-Caucasian, compared to the national average for classical concert-goers of just 5%. The organization's ability to reach out to audiences stems from the visionary leadership of its music director, Michael Morgan - a conductor known as much for his commitment to building close community ties as he is for trouncing widely-held perceptions of classical music as being the sole province of dead, white guys. "Michael is a remarkable music director who heads up a very unusual orchestra in terms of its alignment of artistic and community strategies," says Polly Kahn, vice president of learning and leadership development at the League of American Orchestras. The League awarded OEBS with an Excellence in Community Engagement award in 2006. "He has big ideas for what a concert might look like in terms of the diversity of musical styles it might embrace and artists it might involve." A Washington D.C. native and one of the relatively few African-American conductors working on the professional classical music scene today, Morgan joined OEBS in 1990 following a successful five-year tenure as assistant conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Sir Georg Solti and Daniel Barenboim. While in Chicago, Morgan earned a reputation for unorthodox endeavors, and he brought his status quo-shaking sensibilities with him when he came west. The music director's innovative approach to programming -- which won OEBS an Adventurous Programming Award from The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) in 2006 -- does nothing if not reflect the diversity of Oakland's wide-ranging local community. It was Morgan's idea to present the first performance anywhere of a Concerto for DJ and Orchestra. In March 2004, guest artist DJ Spooky was featured soloist in the world premiere of Anthony De Ritis' Devolution, a work combining orchestral excerpts from Beethoven and Ravel with DJ virtuosity on turntables, laptop computer and mixing board. Contemporary composers like Nathaniel Stookey and Nolan Gasser regularly rub shoulders with such historical heavyweights as Johannes Brahms and Sergei Prokoviev in a single evening's musical entertainment. Recent programs have ranged from a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. featuring the west coast premiere of Gasser's Black Suit Blues (a work based on a poem about King's legacy by Robert Trent Jones, Jr.) to a concert performance of Stephen Sondheim's Follies as part of OEBS' "American Masterworks Series" starring Rita Moreno and Sharon McNight together with members of Oakland Ballet. Meanwhile, a concert celebrating the Persian New Year in March 2008 proved so popular that OEBS is considering a remount in an upcoming season. "It's not a given that a community as ethnically and socioeconomically diverse as Oakland even needs an orchestra, so we have to be as inclusive as possible to make people see the value of what we do," says the 51-year-old Morgan. "To that end, I'm interested in balancing new pieces with standard repertoire to try to cover as many facets of our community as possible, collaborating with local arts organizations such as the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir to increase community engagement, and exposing young people to music in their schools so that they might come to it now or later in life." Over at Westlake, the string orchestra is packing up. "Be sure to loosen your bows," says Picchi, holding hers aloft to demonstrate. "It takes five turns. The hair should be close to the wood." The students neatly slot their instruments and music into cubbyholes and head out as a new group of budding musicians streams in for the next session. "Some of these kids come from really rough homes. They look tired when they walk into class," says Picchi observing the comings and goings. "But when you get in there and you say, 'rest position!' and 'violin up!' they start smiling. When you see their shining faces, you know you're doing something right. They just love to play." ~By Chloe Veltman for OEBS, February 2009