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Music of the Superpowers
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17104 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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12 / 1990 |
2,518 Words |
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Tom Pniewski
Tom Pniewski is a musicologist at Hunter College in New York. |
Two years ago, the American Soviet Youth Orchestra was formed in a pioneering attempt to bring together the best young musicians from the two superpowers. The ASYO has proved a resounding success, directly and indirectly affecting millions of people, and justifying the high hopes of its founders. As the ASYO would up its summer 1990 tour of three continents with concerts in New York and Philadelphia this past August, it treated its audiences to the highest levels of musical performance and programming, achievements hard to recall or imagine for any youth orchestra.
Complex Organization
The brainchild of S. Frederick Starr, president of Oberlin College in Ohio and a prominent Sovietologist, the American Soviet Youth Orchestra was founded, in Starr's words, "to prove that Russians and Americans can cooperate in one of the most complex human organizations of all: a symphony orchestra." The orchestra was created by the Conservatory of Music at Oberlin College and the Moscow State Conservatory as a biennial summer event, bringing together a hundred accomplished young musicians (this year seventeen to twenty-four year olds), fifty from each country. The Soviet musicians this summer all came from the Moscow State Conservatory, while Oberlin auditioned 1,000 instrumentalists from around the country for the American half.
"It's unheard of to put an orchestra together this quickly," Starr says. "We accomplished what normally takes orchestras one or two years to do. The conductors had just days to rehearse twenty-four works and to transform 100 extremely talented but disparate individuals into a major orchestra and into a third nationality." The
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