- So I know the Albany Symphony has kicked off this amazing initiative called Convergence.

- [David] Yes.

- Can you give us a little bit of history about Convergence and what it is?

- Sure, well, as I said, you know, the orchestra and I are always trying to figure out ways to reach out to more people, to different communities.

And we were in discussion with a great philanthropist here in the region, Charles Touhey, who I know you know as well.

- Yeah, Charles Touhey.

- He's a real champion of all good things in the region, but very involved in education and in empowering our Black community here.

And we were talking about how we could work together to formulate something that would kind of help the orchestra get deeper, more deeply involved with different traditions and cultures than orchestras normally do.

And so we conceived this idea together called Convergence, which is really at least in this iteration about celebrating and exploring different streams of Black culture and history, particularly in the region.

But we have these great artists that we recruited to the project who are kind of national/international practitioners.

We have the great jazz violinist, Regina Carter who's been with us regularly during the almost three years of this project.

And great spoken word artist and kind of thinker, Marc Bamuthi Joseph who's at the Kennedy Center.

And a brilliant choreographer/dancer who specializes in Afro-Caribbean and Haitian dance, Adia Whitaker.

And then in addition we've made wonderful friends with what we're calling our artistic ambassadors who are local practitioners of different Black cultural, historic trends, et cetera.

Barbara Howard's one and Carol Daggs, great jazz pianist is another.

Jordan Taylor Hill who does African drumming and dance is another.

And we have a number of different people we're collaborating, D. Colin as well.

So we have a a great, we're having a great time, and the idea is really to get the orchestra, the musicians themselves and the staff and the board as well as the community to engage really deeply with these artists and these art forms that we aren't necessarily that aware of or that experienced in.

So Regina had a bunch of us trying to jam on the violin, even though classical musicians classical violinists are usually pretty afraid of having to improvise.

Classical everybody, we're always a little afraid, but really getting out of our comfort zone and trying to develop a greater awareness of and appreciation for, I mean I think we all have appreciation for it, but for these different traditions that aren't inherently the ones we've been dealing with in our training, et cetera.

- And how's that engagement look like?

You said like you're engaging with these, so is it just like folks who have more of a classical orchestra symphony background just engaging these folks who are part of Convergence?

- Well, that was the thing.

We're really working with Charles and designing the project not to have it just be like show and tell, which is a lot of how orchestras and other institutions do things.

It's like, look, here's a practitioner of such and such who's gonna play a piece with us?

So we really wanted it to be much deeper than that.

So during the past three years, two and a half years, these artists have been coming at regular intervals essentially every month a different one of these, of our curators, we call 'em, curating artists is with us here for a weekend or a few days working with the orchestra in collaboration with community members, both symphony goers and people who've had nothing to do with the symphony.

You know, Regina Carter's there as the middle of the Albany Athletic Center, you know, working with just anybody who wants to be part of it and having these incredible kind of deep interactions about what they do in their practice and different art forms.

And then we all have wonderful food from Black-owned businesses.

- Oh, I bet the food, mmhmm.

- Delicious, the food has been great, and you know, Adia's got us all dancing Haitian dance together.

The orchestra, the board, community members, and so it's just been this incredible kind of joyful set of happenings that in a certain way is going to be culminating in June.

In early June when we have our big American music festival.

And then that's actually gonna stretch into early July.

We'll be doing all sorts of events in June and July around the ideas brought forth from the Convergence project.

- That's amazing, very beautiful.

- [David] Yeah.

- So we have all these different art forms and curators.

How do you balance that relationship with Symphony Orchestra so it feels organic and natural and cohesive?

- Yeah, I think we're kind of lucky in terms of orchestras cause we're an orchestra that, you know, for 40 plus years, even long before I got here has had a real culture of innovation.

We don't wanna just play the same old, same old music.

We love to play it, and we play the Beethovens and the Tchaikovskys, but we always play them with new living, vibrant, vital music.

I'd say at least half of what we do if not more is music of our own time and looking toward the future.

So we find it's pretty seamless, and you know, it's gonna be incredibly thrilling.

This weekend in Troy that we're doing in early June because Marc Bamuthi Joseph's gonna be doing a half hour collaborative work with the great DBR, Daniel Bernard Remain who's an amazing composer, Regina and her band are coming and doing a whole project about the Empire State Plaza and the sort of destruction of largely Black neighborhoods.

because of urban renewal, quote renewal projects.

Adia's gonna be doing this incredible dance piece with her dance company with us kind of in the streets of Troy.

So lots of, you know, we love to do kind of out-of-the box stuff, and this is the ultimate out-of-the-box experience for an orchestra.

As you know, orchestras are sometimes very narrow in their focus, and we just don't want to be that.

We never have been, and we never want to be that.

- Exactly, exactly, cause that's how you keep growing that's how you keep evolving.

- Absolutely, yeah.

- So why is being experimental and out of the box important for the health of like Albany Symphony but beyond?

- Well, I think it maybe comes down to the simple idea of relevance that sure a Beethoven symphony can be relevant in any time and place, but to make art that's really about and for and connected to our present and our own experiences, like I always say, you know, Beethoven's great, but you can't commission him to write a piece about the Adirondacks.

You know, so these are pieces about our time, about our place.

What Bamuthi, Marc Bamuthi is doing a whole project around forgiveness and the idea of forgiving and how can we forgive in this crazy charged political world environment we're in.

So I mean that's a really relevant question for today.

And Regina just cause of the nature of her work, it's all about the present.

And so I just think that's how arts entities stay fresh and stay alive and stay relevant.

So it's never been a question for us about why new art.

I mean, new art is the most essential thing we do, and you know, we wanna embrace people in all sorts of new and unusual and wonderful ways and bring them into our family, and also not just bring them in but also go to where people are.

- Exactly.

- Not just assume that everyone's gonna come to us because we play music, you know?

- Yeah, and what's some of your methods of inviting people into the space?

- Well, a lot of it is going out.

I mean, it used to be like, come to our concert.

Now it's really much more about going out there.

I mean, we do these wonderful outdoor concerts.

We're gonna have some of them in early July.

We're doing one in Schenectady at Mohawk Harbor and one in Amsterdam.

And then a bunch of smaller ones.

We're gonna be up at the Harriet Tubman homestead in Auburn, New York and the John Brown Farm in Lake Placid.

And they're all free events, and we just invite the community, and we're really going out to places we normally aren't seen.

And what's been wonderful about that in Amsterdam, you know, even getting 5,000 people who normally never hear an orchestra just wanted to check us out.

And then in addition, all of this kind of community work that our curating artists and our artist ambassadors, our local great arts practitioners have been doing with us is really similar to that.

It's all free and open to the public, and it's all kind of our just saying we wanna participate with you in exploring new art.

So that's really something that I think we're proud of, and I think we're gonna see more and more of that as we evolve.

- Yeah, you should be proud of that because that's how you get people involved.

It creates accessibility and that accessibility creates want.

So, awesome.

- And as you and I both know, I mean music is a very powerful medium, and it's a very beautiful medium.

And I haven't met too many people who say, well, I don't like music.

I mean, they may not like this music or that music or think they like this music or that music, but to me music is one of the great communicative arts.

So it's not a matter of you need to like our music.

It's a matter of how do we create musical experiences that really speak to all sorts of different people.

And that's what I think the Albany Symphony's really about.

- Love that.

Go Albany Symphony!

Yes.

- Thank you.

- So a little bit more about the Convergence piece.

So I know it's wrapping up soon, the Convergence program.

So what's gonna happen after?

Is it wrapping up or is it gonna continue on?

- Well, we're hoping it's not wrapping up.

I mean, that was sort of the danger of doing this big festival in June around the Convergence idea that we don't want it to seem like everything's been leading toward that.

And then boom, we're done.

We've solved that issue.

It's not, it's not like that at all.

It's really just a kind of blueprint for how we're gonna continue forward.

So in the next season we have an amazing collaboration with this brilliant, a young Black flutist, Brandon George, who's gonna be working with us and with the Albany High School vocal arts students and building a whole new piece with a living composer, Michael Gilbertson.

And then we're doing all sorts of things around the Big Erie Canal.

We did a Big Erie Canal project in 2017, but the completion of the Erie Canal will be in 200th anniversary will be in in 2025.

- [Jade] Wow.

- And we're really working on a whole project that's about all of the untold stories of all those people in that history whose stories were never told.

Women, children, people of color, immigrants, et cetera.

You know, the way history's told usually is told by the victors or the people who've dominated.

And we're really gonna be looking in a very deep way at alternative histories and, you know, stories that maybe haven't been told.

So we're always working on new and exciting ideas about greater engagement with our community, with our history, with our culture, with our state.

- That's beautiful.

So this initiative is pretty much gonna be a permanent piece of Albany Symphony going forward.

Like staying experimental, thinking outside of the box and inviting yourself into spaces that may seem a little bit untraditional.

- Absolutely, and that's really what the whole project was about.

And that's I think what Charles Touhey was kind of challenging us to do, to think in really different ways from every other orchestra.

You know, what can we do that's really powerful and unique and fresh that goes completely away from what people expect orchestras to do.

- I love this.

So I'm definitely gonna try to be involved and show up to as many of these as I can personally, and I hope others do the same.

- Great, love to see you at any of it.

- Yes.

- I just hope people, you know, check out our website albanysymphony.com and see what's up cause every month we've got different wonderful things happening.

- Awesome.

Well, thank you, David, and thank you for coming here to chat with us.

- Great to talk to you.