Great lengths

I chopped 10 inches off my hair on Monday. Well, I didn't do the deed personally, by regardless, I now have short hair. My sister and I donated our ponytails to the Pantene Beautiful Lengths program, which is like the more famous Locks of Love but more honest, according to Aliza. She's donated three times before, and she and Jerry, who cuts our hair, totally peer-pressured me into it.  ("Trying to look like the girls on Mad Men is really more important than charity??? So what if you can't wear your hair up to the Met Gala?" OK, OK, fine: CUT ME.)

The whole ordeal (all three minutes of it) reminded me of those times in elementary school when, if the students raised enough money or brought in enough soup cans, the principal or teachers would do something crazy like wear jeans to work. Now, I don't think I look as ridiculous without hair as, say, Mr. Grushner (Mom, am I spelling that right?) at East School looked without his mustache, but there is a certain degree of silliness in sitting in a chair and having someone cut your 'tail and then move right on to another pony. Also, it is a Universal Truth that doing crazy things with people you care about is fun.

The Pantene Beautiful Lengths website has a page rather unfortunately called "Cutting Parties" where they encourage folks to "Host a cutting event". We'll get back to the post/my point in a moment, but tell me this does not read like a Saturday Night Live commercial:


Regardless, this all got me thinking about orchestras and charity. Insert "playing for an orchestra is charity" joke _here_. My intern Nate brought the Boston Symphony Orchestra's recent run to Tanglewood, which I hadn't heard about, to my attention. From BBC Music Magazine:

Members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) are to swap their instruments for running shoes to run a 150-mile relay race to their summer home in Tanglewood. Each year the orchestra decamps from its winter home in Boston for its summer season at the Tanglewood estate in the Berkshire hills in Massachusetts. And this year 14 musicians will be making the trip on foot, arriving in time for the opening night on 3 July.

The musicians asked family and friends to sponsor them and raised funds for the BSO. I had intended to write this post about group acts of charity as community-building and publicity-gaining initiatives. Members of a string quartet all grow out and then cut their hair for charity together just before a concert starts. An entire orchestra wears pink if everyone in the audience brings a soup can. While these things are technically publicity "stunts", they are for a good cause and would humanize the musicians a bit. There's never anything wrong with showing you have a sense of humor.

Out-of-character acts like the BSO members running a relay race could also prove to be valuable fundraising events for the orchestra, though, and still make for good public relations that way. If everyone donates an extra dollar at a concert, the musicians will swap instruments and play a movement that way? I'd pay a dollar (or more) to see/hear that. (Would the unions allow it?)

It would be an illuminating look into the orchestra-as-community, anyway. Is physically participating in raising money for the orchestra part of a musician's job? I'm not friends with anyone who plays for an orchestra full-time, so I really have no gauge for how much they care or should care about the orchestra as an organization. And if it is part of their job, how committed to their ensemble, quartet or orchestra are musicians required to be beyond rehearsals and performances?