At Philly’s esteemed music schools, playing together as an orchestra is a much-missed opportunity

On the long list of artistic pursuits thwarted by the pandemic, many are obvious: Choirs meet at their peril, actors mostly remain separated from their natural habitat of the theater.

Less visible, perhaps, is the precious time slipping away for young talent training in the arts, and orchestral musicians are particularly stymied. For many instrumentalists, the main point of music school is to emerge having learned to function in that biggest ocean of ensembles. At the Curtis Institute of Music, exactly a year has passed since the last time the orchestra of world-class musicians in training was able to meet, and it’s unlikely that a rehearsal or concert of the group will be possible during the rest of the school year.

“I never really thought I would miss it so much,” says 20-year-old violinist Maya Anjali Buchanan, a third-year student at Curtis, which is now operating entirely on a virtual basis. “I feel like now that it’s gone, I didn’t realize how much of an impact that had on my musical growth and who I am as a person.”

Curtis and other schools have done much to fill the breach, holding instrumental lessons and classes online and urging students to learn repertoire they might not have had time to learn before.

But certain skills are available only by being physically present as a live orchestra functions around you. When you, dear orchestra lover, catch the entire ensemble changing mood or direction as one as if a school of fish, that’s decades of experience revealing itself in real time.

“There is nothing that can replace the orchestral experience,” says Joseph Conyers, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s acting associate principal bassist and a fervent educator.

The dimming of collective music-making has also left a learning gap for students aiming to be on the podium professionally someday.

“Conducting is not something you can learn about from watching other people do it. You really have to do it yourself,” says frequent Philadelphia Orchestra guest conductor Thomas Wilkins, who holds conducting titles with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, as well as a chair in orchestral conducting at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music.

Normally there are six orchestras in operation at Indiana’s school of music. Currently, none of them is meeting.

Wilkins recalls leading Copland’s Symphony No. 3 and being able to talk in rehearsal about correspondence in the Boston Symphony archive between the composer and Leonard Bernstein.

“Those are the intangibles that inform people’s ability to make decisions about how they make music that we don’t get to do right now,” he says.

The traditions and stories that get handed down through classical music are often available outside of rehearsal, of course, “but to be able to talk about that in the moment and then put the instrument in your hands is what gets lost,” Wilkins says.

“I definitely learn a lot from what my friends sitting next to me are doing and following them and noticing what kinds of fingerings and bowings they do,” says Buchanan, who was born and raised in Rapid City, S.D., and now lives in Philadelphia.

She says she misses playing in the Curtis orchestra when aspiring conductors come through to audition for admission to the school.

“I always find it so interesting to see so many conductors one after the other conducting the same thing. You can really see the difference in terms of how they conduct and interpret things — small things, like tempos and phrasing, but it differs so much from person to person. It’s always astonishing to see how different the same piece can sound.”

At Temple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance, smaller orchestra groups have been meeting. Safety protocols such as frequent rehearsal breaks, acrylic barriers, and distancing are in place. Also in use: cloth bell-coverings and filters like the one Temple student Geoff Deemer places at the end of his oboe — a mask for a musical instrument.

The size of the ensembles is smaller, which means different repertoire: Mozart and Haydn, as opposed to, say, a Mahler symphony or the Verdi Requiem.

“I really enjoy doing the Classical [-era] repertoire,” says Deemer, 43, a well-known area freelancer who went back to school at Temple in the fall to work on a master’s degree. “As a professional, it seems like we never have trouble with playing a Puccini opera. It’s the Mozart and the Gluck that seem to be more difficult, so it’s nice to be able to concentrate on that because you’re going to see it on orchestra auditions.”

Students are missing something by not playing bigger pieces, says Temple chair of instrumental studies Terell L. Stafford. “But when you haven’t made music with another individual, and can then make music with 15 or 25 or 30 people, it feels pretty good,” he says.

The Philadelphia Orchestra’s Conyers sees other silver linings during this grand pause. For some instrumentalists — like double bassists — playing in a smaller ensemble develops the skill of being more in control of the sound of the ensemble than usual. This has also been a chance for students to learn new repertoire, he says.

And this period of being deprived of so much music-making promises to end in a renewal for the profession.

“When we go back, the orchestral setting will be that much more on fire,” says Conyers. “There will be an appreciation for the gift of being able to do what we do.”

Many are eager for orchestras to return, but not for them to come back exactly as they were before the pandemic.

“I think from an industry standpoint, we don’t really want to go back to status quo,” says Wilkins. “Because so many things happened all at once to this country, from a societal standpoint as well as an artistic standpoint, we are now faced with the opportunity to present the great canon from the past but also encourage the present and the future, and now doing it through a different lens that speaks to the inclusivity necessary to go forward.”

The pandemic has also driven home the point that for emerging musicians, resourcefulness will be key.

“I say to young conductors that every opportunity you get to conduct is a chance to grow and learn. Even if it’s an ensemble of 12, it’s still conducting,” says Wilkins. “That’s the great lesson we have learned as a human society: You are always faced with obstacles of one kind or another. This is just something we’ve never seen before.”