Bourbon, bats, and basketball. Mint juleps, fast horses, and “Keep Louisville Weird.” Muhammad Ali, Jennifer Lawrence, and Mitch McConnell. And, happily, Teddy Abrams.
LOUISVILLE, KY — Horses race in the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs on the first Saturday of every May. The college’s sports teams (the ones who wear red, not the ones who wear blue) tend to be pretty good (although not so much this year). The Greatest of All Time was born here. Great writers are from Louisville – Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Marsha Norman, internet storyteller Jon Bois, alphabetically-obsessed detective writer Sue Grafton, and the Gonzo icon Hunter S. Thompson, among others.
And then there’s this orchestra.
The Louisville Orchestra (LO) won a Grammy® Award in 2024 — Best Classical Instrumental Solo (The American Project – Yuja Wang; Teddy Abrams, conductor). And while an award is a special kind of acclaim, Abrams would give it back if it meant that they couldn’t bring their music to the people – all the people, not just those with Krugerrands in their Hermès Birkin bags. They are expert chefs who have prepared exquisite food – and don’t insist that all of it has to be served within the same four walls of a chichi bistro. In fact, the LO would prefer to give away their version of artistic sustenance if it benefits those who might never get it any other way.
The Open Fifth
The perfect way to describe the culture of the region can be found in the principal feature of the music of this region, “the open fifth.” In Louisville, the birthplace and chief purveyor of bourbon whiskey, an open fifth might mean there’s a party going on. Or, that it’s, I don’t know, Tuesday.
But in a musical sense, the open fifth is that bare, unfulfilling sound when the two notes DO and SOL are played together. Sometimes it is transposed to appear to be an “open fourth” when the two notes are SOL and the higher DO. But the feeling is the same either way. Whether the open fifth is performed by a choir, a bluegrass fiddle, or a symphony orchestra, it has a mischievous, reedy quality, even when played quickly. Unresolved, it offers the idea that something is afoot. “Could be/Who knows…” (Higher DO-SOL/Higher DO-SOL) the opening of the song “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story, has that unsettled air.
If you add a note between DO and SOL, the feeling of the music changes radically. Adding MI, for example, makes it a bright, major, birds-are-singing-and-all-is-right-with-the-world musical moment. But if you drop that third note by a half-step — ME (pronounced “meh” or “may”) — the result is a dreadful, minor, sorrowful, everyone’s-dying musical moment. The tipping point between happiness and sadness is determined by a half-step.
When the LO decided to bring its music to the people — rather than just being another good orchestra playing for rich, White people — they could have celebrated the notion by hoisting major-chord praise upon themselves. It could have been a moment of happy inclusiveness, one that required no additional support or fulfilled no other need.
But they didn’t do that. Abrams refused to add that third to the chord. The “open fifth” remained intact and ready to adapt. Abrams called it a “distinctive American sound.”
“I think if you look at it as a metaphor,” he said, “then as we come to communities locally or throughout the state, we’re not trying to tell people what to think or how to think. This is not some kind of subliminal program to get people to think something politically. We’re not trying to sneak in a hidden message through our music. We’re not trying to sell people on an ideology. This really is a celebration of largely American and Kentucky music. But also music from all eras with no agenda.”
Connecting with the people of Kentucky by providing services where arts organizations have never been in the past is the primary goal of the company. However Kentuckians can be made more tolerant, more open to change and cultural shifts, and more engaged — in essence, more whole — can be done through the work of the LO. The same applies to almost every region in America, and the key to success is intent. The orchestra just has to want to.
America doesn’t have just one orchestra or is part of some fictitious National Orchestra League in which there are franchises in Cleveland, New York, Los Angeles, Louisville, or San Francisco. That would be ridiculous.
As such, and this emphasis is a key to this particular success story, this is the Louisville Orchestra. No other orchestra creates the powerful impact for Louisville and the rest of Kentucky. It could not exist anywhere else because these people partner with the people who live here — all the people, not just the elite.
“The pandemic was when this all really shifted for us,” said Abrams in an exclusive interview, “because that’s when I basically said to our people that we needed to frame the institution as an essential part of the town, not as a vestigial thing that could be cut, something no one would notice. We talked about what we do as something that can be framed and structured around an essential thing that people love and care about and can’t imagine living without. If we could do that, we’d be just fine.”
He continued, “This was the first time in my entire life that we’ve ever actually thought about the results, and not the result of artistic excellence, but it’s not a result. That’s a practice. You should be artistically excellent anyway. Who doesn’t want to be artistic? Who goes in saying, ‘We’re going to do the community engagement thing, but now we’re not going to be artistic excellence.’? That’s insane, that doesn’t mean anything at all, that’s just words thrown together. We as an American orchestra ecosystem still have not fully recognized the value of what American culture really might be, which is crazy.”
The commonwealth sponsored a two-year tour of every county in Kentucky, performing free of charge in rural and urban areas; in high school gyms, local theaters, libraries, and myriad other types of meeting places (even a performance at Mammoth Cave), in which they not only performed orchestral work, but played with Kentucky music legends such as Grammy® winning bluegrass aficionado Michael Cleveland and his group, Flamekeeper. From experience, I can tell you that bluegrass and orchestral music combined to make “Orange Blossom Special” an unmatched, runaway-train, magical, all-Kentucky sound. Even in a high school gymnasium. Now that I think of it, especially in a high school gym, with people step-dancing in the aisles.
What’s next? Well, the commonwealth just put another $4.3 million in the budget to cover the next two years of performances. Their reasoning is sound.
“You always hear about the rural/urban divide,” said GOP State Senator Robert Stivers, the Senate President, in an interview with PBS about why he helped steward the first round of funding. “What we’re doing and what [the LO] is trying to do is to bridge those gaps.”
Everyone in the state should catch a performance. But every orchestra in the country should re-think their reason for performing orchestral music. Is yours? How about your theaters, dance companies, and operas? If it’s not for the people who are paying your taxes, then who is it for? Acclaim? History? Vainglory? I’ll have more on the Louisville Orchestra at a later date. Until then, there’s a bourbon neat with my name on it.
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