Lowering the barriers to listening
A few years ago, conductor and musician Orlando Cela asked a particularly talented young flute student at UMass-Lowell to run through a popular piece well-known in the orchestral world. To his surprise, she didn’t know it. “She told me it’s because she had never seen an orchestra live before,” he says. Her reasons were numerous — the expense of tickets, the long drive from Lowell to Boston, plus the added cost of parking. “I’m poor,” she told him.
That’s when an idea crystallized in Cela’s mind. Why not “bring” an orchestra to his students?
