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The\u00c2\u00a0San Francisco Symphony<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0is celebrating its Centennial this season with gusto — they’ve invited six major American orchestras to perform in their home at Davies Symphony Hall, created three national symposia on the state of American orchestras, issued new recordings and produced new television, web, and radio broadcasts, and produced the second\u00c2\u00a0American Mavericks festival<\/a>, the brainchild of the Symphony\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s energetic music director, Michael Tilson Thomas<\/a> (MTT).\u00c2\u00a0The festival ended Sunday in San Francisco and now is traveling to Chicago,\u00c2\u00a0Ann Arbor<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0and\u00c2\u00a0New York<\/a>.<\/p>\n I was happy to be there last week-end for at least some of the festivities. My expectations were high. Full disclosure: I was executive producer of a 13-hour radio and web series inspired by the first American Mavericks festival in 2000. The series, hosted by Suzanne Vega, with MTT, was heard on public radio stations nationwide. (Documentation of that series is\u00c2\u00a0here<\/a>.) It took producer Tom Voegeli and the team a couple of years to gather the festival\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s concert audio, interview participants, collect contextual information, build the website, and get the series into circulation. None of us went to Mavericks the First, but we were excited to work with the music and ideas it represented.<\/p>\n This year’s festival reminds us not only of the energy and vitality of American music but also of how much has changed in 12 years. The landmark 2000 festival was created before we had social media, live streaming, and so many other digital discovery platforms. In 2012, the Symphony and artists are blogging, streaming, video-chatting, and using social media to talk about the work in real time (although the concerts themselves are not being live-broadcast or webcast). The Symphony\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s website is chock full of links to biographical and contextual information, and recordings of the highlighted composers. To celebrate the festival’s New York visit next week, WQXR’s\u00c2\u00a0Q2<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0channel is already offering us a live web stream of “mavericks\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 music” on demand. And Carnegie Hall, partner in the project, has been releasing artists’ videos and information on its Facebook page for a couple of weeks now. Beyond its digital reach the festival is also traveling \u00e2\u20ac\u201c physically — this time (and to think of touring with the huge band and battery called for in Edgar Varese’s\u00c2\u00a0Ameriques<\/em>!\u00c2\u00a0<\/em>—<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0<\/em>it is like a production manager’s Olympics).<\/p>\n Another big difference in the 2012 Festival — four commissions and world premieres (there were none in 2000). New works from John Adams<\/a>, Mason Bates<\/a>, and Meredith Monk<\/a> were festival highlights last week-end, with all three composers in residence, performing and engaging with audiences. \u00c2\u00a0If you agree (and I do) with Ed Sanders, Google Creative Lab’s Group Marketing Manager, who said at last Saturday’s\u00c2\u00a0Orchestra Forum<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0that classical music should connect with “maker culture” to engage broader audiences, then the Symphony’s efforts to include new works in the 2012 Mavericks Festival are an especially important addition. We can argue about what a maverick composer is, or what maverick means, period, in a musical context. But it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the right impulse to show audiences that “makers and do-ers” are alive and kicking in concert music.<\/p>\n But Sanders’ comment also stayed with me as I’ve thought about what more the Symphony could do to connect more people – from festival newcomers to long-time subscribers – to the universe of American music that lies outside the mainstream of symphony concerts, which is to say, a lot of American music. How could a festival connect us with the pioneering spirit of “American-ness” that distinguishes so much music, but also so much visual art, poetry, film, and dance? And how can a festival about the new, be new itself? How can it inspire \u00e2\u20ac\u0153maker culture\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in its audiences?<\/p>\n And here is where the festival let me down a bit. While the content of the concerts was an ear-opening experience, the production values were as traditional as any other orchestra concert. The audience experience from start to finish was the same we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve become accustomed to, only with longer set changes for these complicated works.\u00c2\u00a0 The same length, format, and pacing; the same program books and stage set up. The same distance between performer to audience.\u00c2\u00a0 The same formality.<\/p>\n The gap? The content of the American Mavericks festival puts the Symphony in an ideal position to not only present the work, but also to present it in new ways, and I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mean digitally, I mean physically. They could open our minds by disrupting our expectations and surprising us with new sounds and<\/em> new experiences. How? By immersing us in the other art forms that could help us understand the context for a maverick sensibility, or by giving us the tools and opportunity to make art ourselves, or by breaking from standard-delivery-two-hours-with-intermission concerts to create unexplored and unexpected encounters with works of art. How about the artists talking from the stage? How about a poetry reading during the long set changes? Or multiple intermissions with activities that use Davies\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 grand lobby spaces? How about an all-day instrument-building festival culminating in a concert, or other projects that could unleash the DIY energy that the Bay Area personifies? The festival could move out beyond the downtown concert hall and into other venues, or its themes could be amplified by local museums, at movie theaters, in local restaurants, at universities, or in the street. In marathons, pop-up concerts, symposia, or other formats the festival could more boldly embody the voices that are so clearly present in the music itself. I now long for a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Mavericks the Third\u00e2\u20ac\u009d that would bring the whole city of San Francisco into the mix in ways that celebrate the region\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s own role as maverick, a place that represents discovery, free-spiritedness, and innovation. And please, let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not wait 12 years for this to happen!<\/p>\n