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The power of Marin Alsop – Maestra Alsop – sneaks up on you.
She is the music conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the first female conductor of a major American orchestra and considered one of the world’s leading conductors.
The power wielded in that little baton in her hands is enormous; a conduit for an audience’s imagination to take flight.
But the woman guiding those flights of fancy remains surprisingly down to earth.
“Classical music became quite extreme in that you’re not supposed to clap. You’re not supposed to cough. You’re not supposed to wear this. There’s so many things you’re not supposed to do but I always found that very off-putting,” Alsop said. “Whereas my parents and our home life of classical music was all fun.”
The child of professional classical musicians, she decided she would become a conductor at the ripe old age of 9.
“My dad took me to the New York Philharmonic and this guy came out and he was charismatic, and he turned around talked to his audience,” she said. “I’d never seen that in a conductor. And he wore a turtleneck…He was having so much fun.”
For Alsop, classical music should be about “inclusion and accessibility for people.” But when she moved to Baltimore in 2006, she immediately noticed the orchestra didn’t exactly represent the city. What she saw driving to work was a world apart from inside Symphony Hall.
“Baltimore, like many big American cities, has some real challenges, particularly in this huge divide between the poor and the wealthy,” Alsop said. “That combined with the fact that the majority of the population is African-American and yet, in our orchestra and in most orchestras, there are very few African-American musicians. Now, why is that? And what can we do to impact that?”
Her solution? Orchkids, a series of after-school music classes of all kinds of music taught in five public elementary schools, with 50 full- and part-time teachers every day in some of the roughest parts of Baltimore. She started the program with $100,000 from her MacArthur Genius Prize as seed money. The program started in 2008 with 30 kids. Today, there are 750. Alsop’s goal is to get to 83,000 kids in the program – the same number of kids in the Baltimore City Public Schools.
“You learn things don’t come overnight,” she said of what kids get out of the program. “You actually have to practice. You have to keep at something to improve. You have to learn to budget your time. The athleticism involved in playing an instrument is enormous. Then, of course, there’s working with others.”
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