The League held its annual luncheon and annual meeting at noon, and announced this year’s winners of the MetLife Awards for Excellence in Community Engagement, the Bank of America Award for Excellence in Orchestra Education, and the Gold Book Awards for Symphony Volunteer projects.
Lowell Noteboom, the League’s Board Chair, presented an award to Bruce Clinton, Treasurer of the League and long-time symphony supporter.
Then Lowell gave a tribute to Henry Fogel’s long career in radio, in orchestra management, and at the League, accompanied with great photos of Henry in the kitchen, Henry with his dog, Henry at the radio station in Syracuse, and Henry with his 20,000 CD collection. Henry will be stepping down as League President at the end of June, to be succeeded by Jesse Rosen, current League Executive Vice President.
Henry has been traveling the country during his tenure at the League, visiting over 125 orchestras and mentoring countless orchestra administrators. He is beloved by so many because of his willingness to share his wisdom and experience.
The League has planned a most unusual parting gift for Henry – they have already raised $40,000 to commission a new orchestral work to be performed by a consortium of orchestras and dedicated to Henry. The Executive Director of the Reno Chamber Orchestra was most eloquent in asking other orchestras to join in the consortium – there are currently 5, including Reno and Memphis.
I’ve never seen Henry speechless before, never mind verklempt! (I got a little verklempt myself.) He was absolutely stunned and overwhelmed at the gift, and said that he guessed he didn’t have control over his staff as much as he’d thought he did!
It was a really lovely tribute to a man who has done so much for orchestras all his life. I remember meeting him for the first time at Wolf Trap when Paul Judy founded the Symphony Orchestra Institute and asked me to be on the Advisory Board. Paul had stashed champagne in a cooler near the stage, and we all gathered at the intermission of the concert to toast the birth of SOI. I started to tell Henry what an honor it was to meet him and he just brushed it aside, preferring to get down to real conversation. He’ll stay involved with the League next year as a consultant, continuing to visit orchestras and fundraising.
Henry and Jesse talked a bit about the future of the industry and we adjourned to the plenary session.
Radical Ideas from Beyond the Border
Marin Alsop, Music Director of the Baltimore Symphony, was the moderator of the NPAC session on Friday, which featured renowned African dancer and choreographer Germaine Acogny and Venezuelan Music Educator José Antonio Abreu, who founded the El Sistema movement. Each interview (with translator) was preceded by a short video showing the artist at work.
In Ms. Acogny’s case, it was about her International Centre for Traditional and Contemporary African Dances in Senegal, which is a school for dancers from all over Africa. A few interesting comments:
- She strongly believes that the students must have a solid grounding in their own traditional dances before they can interact with dancers from other places. Tradition vs. innovation.
- She considers her school to be a modern sacred forest, where traditional initiation rites or rites of passage were held.
- She did an international tour with a show about the Rwanda genocide. She said that the idea of the show was to help people get rid of their inner feelings of vengeance. “Shows can help to change people and this is the role of art – to change people.”
José Antonio Abreu then came out and talked about the founding of El Sistema. He appeared later that afternoon at a session for the League and, because of the translation pause, I was able to transcribe almost everything he said about the history of Venezuela and the history of El Sistema. So I’ll put that up in my next post.
In this session he focused on the fact that music education had been only for the elite, and he wanted it to be for everyone – to build a strong system of music education for social change and improvement. El Sistema now has 265,000 children and young people involved after 33 years, but he wants it to grow to 1 million children. There are currently more children doing music in Venezuela than doing sports! They’ve started to create similar programs all throughout Latin America.
He talked about music education as causing a transformation and dignification of the person. The program has been very successful in combating drugs, alcohol, and pornography in the poorer sectors of the country.
Marin asked him how we could copy the program in the US and he said that we need to interconnect the initiatives we already have (in terms of excellent music schools, teachers, instrument availability, etc.). He then went on to urge the US to interconnect with the rest of the continent, and invited the Denver Youth Orchestra to come to Venezuela to give a concert with one of their youth orchestras. (The Executive Director of the Youth Orchestra accepted his invitation at the afternoon session!)
More in the next post.
I then went to a session given by Eric Booth, Teaching Artist Extraordinaire, who passed out a rubric for teaching artists that was prepared for Young Audiences in 2003, and was refined by Polly Kahn and Heather Noonan at the League for orchestral teaching artists. Eric broke us into groups of 4 and 5, and we each went over a page of the rubric in depth, sharing our comments with the whole group at the end.
Interesting thoughts from Eric:
The AP exam in studio art is graded by rubric – the only AP exam to be graded this way. And it has the highest agreement amongst scorers than any other AP exam.
The word “rubric” comes from the Latin word for red. Jesus’ words in an early Bible were printed in red. Thomas Jefferson cut out all the red words from his Bible, bound them together, and carried them in his pocket as his rubric – the essential core information with everything else stripped out.
“Nobel prize winners are not better problem solvers; they’re better at problem identification.”
It was a fun session, particularly as I was sitting with a few old friends in the back of the room and we were getting a little punchy as it was getting late in the day of the almost last day of the conference. 
