(rapid orchestral string plucking)
- Music is literally the soul of this city.
It's the soul of the residents.
It's an expressive town,
I think sometimes Philadelphia we feel like
we're always the underdog,
because we're between Washington D.C. and New York City.
But Philadelphia has a lot to offer.
- It's just an incredible place for music.
- We see it in our churches.
We see it in our jazz history.
- Any kind of music has some kind of something
here in Philadelphia.
If you can't find something you like,
something's wrong with you.
(energetic drumming)
- And it is also the poorest largest city in
the United States.
(violin screeching)
- The music programs in the public schools are suffering.
It's kind of like an inside joke in the school district
of Philadelphia, when something's broken, it's always like,
"Yeah, welcome to Philly."
- I remember instruments just, like, literally
falling apart in a student's hands.
- I had a trumpet where the valves,
they always had a problem with it
and they always stick in the middle of songs.
- The E, D, and all that, they weren't working right.
- But most of these pianos, when you click a key it sticks,
and when it sticks you can't play it.
(static)
- Probably the worst thing that I would see as an educator
is we'd hand a beginning student an instrument,
and they can't produce a sound or something's
not working and they just think it's their fault.
- That's a result of underfunding, and things getting cut.
So, it's a shame but,
that's the reality.
The first time I came across broken instruments was in
a closed school, meaning that that was a school that had
been closed by the school district in 2013,
and they had been stockpiling instruments
into the gymnasium.
And that, in many respects, became the tip of an iceberg
that just got bigger and bigger.
And that's when I kinda felt like there's something here
that we need to do something about.
(dramatic drumming)
- When some place starts to look badly
and look like it can't function,
then people take even less care of it.
- For me it's like a proxy for many of the communities
that are in Philadelphia.
At some point it was vibrant.
At some point it was exciting to behold.
At some point it was able to do what it was made to do.
And somehow along the way,
probably for a lot of different reasons,
that kinda compounded on each other,
it no longer became functionable.
- The opportunity with Symphony for a Broken Orchestra,
was to actually put the lack of support for music
and arts education back into the spotlight.
It only, in an odd way, made sense, um, to think of
broken instruments as a whole new universe of sound
that has never been tapped.
- We have a problem, we need to make people aware of it,
and raise money to fix the problem.
- A lot of people want to see things change
and a lot of people haven't made it happen,
so, I'm up for it, let's give this a shot.
Let's put all these broken instruments in front
of the public and try to play them,
and try to make it be meaningful,
and try to fix this problem.
- When I heard that there was going to be this project
with outside funding that was bringing music back into
the schools, and was restoring broken instruments,
and was going to call attention on a national level
to what was happening to the crisis in our educational
system, I thought, "Yes, absolutely."
- We're assembling a volunteer orchestra from ages
10 to 80 full of people who want to support instrumental
music in the school district because I have 1000
instruments that are broken,
and have the capacity to be repaired with this project.
(jazzy woodwind run)
- So one of the things I thought was so beautiful
about this project was that the people who were playing it
looked very much like the people who were listening to it.
It really seemed like people were making
this project for each other,
and that's really the way our culture should be working.
- We we're all skeptical about what it was actually
going to be like.
- This was more about finding something awesome
on your instrument.
Well that could be a note, or you know, not.
- You just make sound on them however you can
using your own internal pitchfork,
finding what resonates, finding what feels the best.
(single flute lilting)
- That is a beautiful and subjective way to approach
and appreciate music.
And that's what had to be asked of each of the 400 musicians
that performed in Symphony for a Broken Orchestra,
was, "Take this thing. Now you make something
beautiful with it."
- The most impressive moment from the night was walking into
the venue itself and finally seeing what we had talked about
in words come to life.
And the band and the orchestra members came walking through
the door, you know, it just, it elevated everybody's feeling in
the room that we were about to be part of something.
- We were all sittin' there,
the first thing you see the people 'em walkin' in,
footsteps steppin' all around me,
all of a sudden,
you see different instrument.
I said, "But wait, what that? That can't play a nothing, man."
- I kind of knew that there were gonna
be a lot of people present
but I had no idea how many people.
- It was like a sea of black shirts and all these
different instruments and everybody was together.
- There was people from all over the place,
from all different walks of life,
from all different parts of the city.
- There was a father there with his two kids.
There was retired school teacher.
There was a visual artist.
- It was one of those 'ooh-ahh' moments,
like, "Ooh! Ahh."
One of those kinda moments.
- And you felt the unification of that moment,
of each individual musician's attempt
at a collective beauty.
(orchestra crescendo)
(eerie strings)
(series of dramatic orchestra hits)
(crowd applauding and cheering)
- The fact that these instruments got together,
organized,
performed,
stated their case,
and then inspired thousands of people to donate,
that is an inspirational story to me
and to be a part of that is really, really exciting.
- In fact it was a really galvanizing moment, I think,
for our city and in support of the school district.
- You don't get to really do something that means
that much to everybody who was there so often.
- And it just really hit home for me that this was... this had come from
a child and it was going back to a real child,
and I don't know who has it now,
I don't know where it is.
I hope it's somewhere good,
I hope that somebody is loving that cello as much as I did.
- The project had been a success.
You know, people came together, they played this music,
the community came together,
and also by the time the concert happened we knew that
we would have the money to repair all of the instruments.
And so, that meant that the entire lifecycle
of the piece was a success.
- 1500 instruments are back in schools.
- It's kind of like Christmas morning when you give
a new instrument to a kid.
- I was at a school in south Philly,
dropping off a bass that had been fixed through the project.
And this bass, it was really pretty busted up,
so it took the repair professionals longer to repair it
than a lot of the other instruments,
so this sort of a latecomer.
So, the majority of the fixed instruments had already
been returned back to the schools.
And so I'm showing up with this clunky-clunk of a bass,
get it up the steps through the door,
down into the auditorium where the kids are in music class,
where they're practicing.
And so I say 'hi' to the music teacher, I recognize them
from being a part of the project previously.
I say, "Hey, here's this bass".
And, he says, "Oh, why don't you say something
to the students, you know?"
"You did this, you should sort of like say something here".
And so I said, "Hi everybody." "Hi Mr. Blackson,"
You know, all this kinda stuff, it was really sweet.
And I said, "So this is the bass that's coming back to your
school because someone cared enough to adopt it,
and we'd like to give it back to you now
so you guys can continue playing it."
And I said, "You'll know that it's part of the project
'cause it has this little tag on it."
And this little kid,
says like, "Oh I have that tag on my instrument too!"
And it was just a really nice moment where all the kids
looked at their instrument,
looked at their cases,
and they started seeing that the majority
of the instruments that they had,
excuse me,
that they were playing with,
were all part of the project.
There was that moment that,
"Wow, this is a whole class."
So that was nice –
"that could play, because,
they couldn't play before."
(dramatic orchestra music)
- A lot of conversations started after the performance.
One was, "Where did these instruments come from?"
Two, "I didn't know we had so many
instruments in the district."
Three, "How many students are in music education?"
And all these things started to, um, be unearthed.
- You know this is a metaphor for something much bigger
that we're dealing with in our community,
which is broken.
- Philadelphia is not the only city that has this issue.
- And I know in Michigan there's a problem,
I know in Cleveland there's a problem.
- It's all of our responsibility to take that inspirational
moment and bring it back into the sort of mundane everyday,
and I think that's where the incredibly hard challenge is.
- This needs to be the inception.
It need to be the do-over, it needs to be the start.
I think that it's great if you're going to use it
as the beginning of something else,
as the beginning of a real true dedication to our students,
to our community,
and to art.
(school bell ringing)
- This is something that really should be a given,
we should not have to have extraordinary measures
to do such simple fixes.
So I look at music as being one of the last opportunities
we have to save our society.
- It's just a show of something,
that no matter what is broken,
you can fix it.
(booming brass)
(static)
(voices talking in classroom) (orchestra tuning)
(several orchestra instruments play various notes)