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?
“Is physically participating in raising money for the orchestra part of a musician’s job?”
Strictly speaking, no – I think it’s hard to argue that an orchestral musician’s job is anything other than making music within the ensemble as well as possible.
But that’s speaking strictly.
If “stunts” like this work in raising funds and making a deeper connection to the community, then they’re just dandy.
( IF they work, of course, and as long as there aren’t so many of them that they interfere with the group’s primary purpose.)
Would musicians be likely to do it? That depends, with the general rule being, I’d guess, that orchestra members in smaller markets would be more open to it than players in larger markets.
Even in large markets and top-level organizations, the cultures and attitudes within particular orchestras would also make a difference, of course – with, I’d suppose, players in the San Fran Symphony or LA Phil (for instance) more likely to go along with cutting hair or wearing pink than those in (for instance) the Philadelphia Orchestra or NY Philharmonic.
Would the union’s cooperation be necessary? Definitely. Would it be easy to get? Again, it depends on the atmosphere in a particular orchestra. Certainly there are some orchestras where the players’ union seems to see management as The Enemy on general principle (cough cough, Philadelphia, cough) and might possibly take any proposal like this as an opportunity to wring some concession, any concession from management.
Around the country, audiences are calling for classical music to humanize the art & reach out to the community. At the same time, the arts organizations are struggling to reach out/connect with the community. It seems that “publicity stunts” or “community-involvement fundraisers” or whatever your title of choice may be would be a good first step towards addressing both concerns. Obviously different communities will respond to different initiatives and the musicians will participate at different levels, so the challenge is to find something that would be effective and meaningful.
So do the BSO musicians run the relay in full tuxedos?