Programs: Music that matters deepened an existing relationship between cop and melmark, a comprehensive, multi-service agency that provides residential, educational, therapeutic, and recreational services for children and adults with developmental disabilities. Over the course of this partnership, our relationship grew from the attendance by the joybells to our open rehearsals into a full performance collaboration and recording session with the joybells, a melmark handbell choir. Led by two professional musical directors, the joybells are comprised of adult melmark members with intellectual disabilities who use a variety of handbells, chimes, and percussion instruments for their selections of sacred, classical, popular, and patriotic music.
of our fy15 kimmel center subscription concerts, cop performed six pairs of concerts at the perelman theater and one concert in verizon hall. The choice of verizon hall was due to a programmed organ work that required the cooper organ. As the capacity is over four times the size of perelman theater, we only needed to produce one concert there.
our orchestra is an important employer of musicians, as many as 200 annually, living in the philadelphia area, and the greater region. For example, this season we launched a nationwide tour with branford marsalis that included 20 cities and we made an appearace with josh groban. This was important and prestigious employment for the musicians that were able to take advantage of it.
in fy15, the chamber orchestra of philadelphia (cop) introduced heartstrings, a new outreach program in which cop musicians gave hour-long programs at the children's hospital of pennsylvania's (chop) seacrest studios. Seacrest studios is a closed-circuit radio station and multimedia center. The studio, located in the main lobby of the hospital, provides young patients and their families with an outlet to engage in activities related to radio, tv, and new media, ranging from broadcasting to watching live artists perform and being interviewed (are the patients or the musicians being interviewed. Each heartstrings combined performance and presentations that included discussions about the artists, their careers, their instruments, and the music that they performed. Though patients were invited into the studio for interaction with the artists, most patients were unable to leave their rooms due to health-related challenges. For that reason, all productions in the seacrest studios were broadcast live and repeatedly rebroadcast to all patient rooms and most treatment rooms. Thus, patients were able to tune in at their choosing. Incredibly beneficial to both the patients and their families, heartstrings granted a respite from their treatment with the opportunity to focus on arts instead of illness. Furthermore, at one program, one of the doctors came and played a duet with a cop musician. This was immensely valuable for her patients to see her in this very humanizing vane, as opposed to only in conversation about treatment or therapy. In addition, it helped us broaden our branch and interactions with the musicians outside of the concert hall. As we sought to diversify our reach and include young professionals and millennials, we created concert and cocktails, an initiative aimed at cultivating informal conversation and discussion among young audience members following our monday evening concerts. Extending the operating hours of the peco bar located in the kimmel center's commonwealth plaza, we encouraged attendees to join us for a post-concert mixer. Our staff, music director and/or guest artists, board, and musicians were all in attendance for each event, thus providing a social platform for our audiences to interact with each of us individually. This synthesis of culture, socialization, and engagement broke down the traditional barrier between audience and artist in a concert setting and allowed us to get to know our patrons more intimately and more organically. Our greatest success was after the monday performance of our february 2015 mahler/schoenberg concert. This concert drew a younger audience as it featured more adventurous programming--a departure from the standard classical masterworks comprising most of the season. Concert and cocktails audience participants ranged from 40 to 70 attendees, all of which were young professionals.
