Orchestra Numbers Plummet

The Middlebury College Orchestra will not perform this semester due to an extreme decline in membership. This announcement is the latest development in a trend of declining interest in the program. Membership has fallen from 45 musicians three years ago to 16 in the fall term.

In speaking with colleagues at other colleges, Orchestra Conductor Andrew Massey found that the sudden disinterest of students in orchestra was not unique to the College.

“I don’t think that there is any lack of talent or musicianship or enthusiasm, it’s just that things change,” Massey said. “With all of the worry about student debt and youth unemployment people are just maximizing their time.”

However, he said that other institutions have greater incentives for students to join the orchestra and attend rehearsals. He cited Mount Holyoke College offering course credit for students in the orchestra as one example. As the orchestra can only be taken once during a student's time at the College and does not fulfill any major course requirements, Massey said he lacks a way of requiring students to attend rehearsals.

Without predictable attendance, Massey found himself re-arranging music each week based on the number of students that came to rehearsal.

Jackie Wyard-Yates ’16.5, who joined the orchestra last semester, cited a change in the rehearsal schedule as having changed participants’ attitude toward the orchestra. In an attempt to attract more students and accommodate for the limited free time that participants might have, the rehearsal schedule became more flexible and the group’s professionalism suffered.

“Unfortunately, I don’t think people are taking it as seriously anymore” Wyard-Yates said.

Massey said that by taking the spring semester off, he will have time to reorganize the structure of the orchestra and draw students into the rehearsal process earlier than in past years.

If numbers stay low, Massey will encourage orchestra musicians to practice with the Chamber Music program, which performs with smaller ensembles. He wants to bolster advertising efforts for the next school year in order to prevent a situation similar to what he experienced last fall, when just six people signed up for auditions.

Although membership has declined, Massey noted that he has not experienced a substantial change in concert attendance. He said he was surprised at the size of the audience at the orchestra’s concert last November with only 16 players, in which they performed in tandem with the College choir.

Wyard-Yates has teamed up with Kevin Dong ’16 and other members of the orchestra to form a committee with the intention of rebuilding the program. They put up posters at the start of the spring semester with the hope of attracting new players. Unfortunately, the flyers did not have much of an impact.

Dong says that he knows there are plenty of students at the College with ample abilities to play, having met many competent student musicians in the pit orchestra for the 2014 Winter Term Musical “Les Miserables.”

In the immediate future, students like Dong and Wyard-Yates will look to revive interest in the orchestra for the next academic year. Wyard-Yates said that the orchestra recruiting committee will focus on recruiting first-years in the fall. She also noted that reinvigorating the spirit of the group would be important to attracting more students and maintaining membership. In years past, she recalled upperclassmen hosting parties after concerts — events that made the orchestra more fun to be a part of. In a similar vein, Dong said that one incentive they might advertise would be a tour to a nearby city such as Boston, Montreal or Albany to either perform or attend an orchestral performance.

For Massey, the value of the College Orchestra is the opportunity it affords the students to play a key role in performances. He said that at Williams College, the concern of the orchestra is prestige, where only a select number of students are integrated into a group comprised mostly of musicians from other orchestras in New England. At the College, community musicians are only integrated to fill instrumental gaps for performances.

“You develop your artistic ability and you find yourself in a position where it is only noticed when it’s unwelcome,” Massey said, noting that when playing in a professional orchestra, a musician is only noticed after having made a mistake. “At Middlebury we make a point that every musician has an opportunity to be an individual musician.”