In my second season creating and conducting educational concerts with Greensboro Symphony Orchestra for 7th grade students in Guilford County, North Carolina, we tried something new: a concert about orchestration with several interactive components, Thrills, Trills and Transformations.

The concert opened with The Thrill of the Orchestra, a lively composition for narrator and orchestra by Russell Peck that introduces kids to the instruments, colors, and capabilities of the symphony orchestra. Bill Flynn, a favorite radio personality in North Carolina, narrated Greensboro Symphony’s first performance of the piece since the passing of Russell Peck in 2009. Cameron Peck, Russell’s wife and 2nd Horn in Greensboro Symphony for a number of years, was in attendance at rehearsal and performance.

We continued with excerpts from the last movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as well as the famous “love theme” from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, animating on a large screen the layout of each orchestra score and zooming in to highlight several features in the orchestrations of each.At this point (and in reckless disregard of the advice of Erich Leinsdorf – see here), we departed from the letter of the score. Playing the Tchaikovsky excerpt again, we altered several details of the orchestration without specifying what they were in advance … the famous melody at rehearsal G was proffered by the clarinet rather than the English Horn; low brass were inconspicuously added to the subsequent divisi string passage; and where the melody returns in the woodwinds shortly thereafter, this was substituted with a trumpet. Hands shot up in the audience as kids took turns identifying the differences, some of them shockingly observant, such as ”The trombones were playing the viola part!!”

Unable to resist the temptation to take this idea to its obvious conclusion, we played the passage again, orchestrations becoming ever more preposterous: the melody moves now to the tuba; the strings pluck rather than bow their passage; the melody returns cartoon-like in the trombone with plunger mute, accompanied by the xylophone; delicate counterlines lose all nuance as they are chugged inelegantly by low strings and brass; snare drum, tubular bells and cymbals render climactic points ridiculous; the melody grinds to a halt two octaves too low as a tam-tam reverberates into the hall. Every conceivable bad orchestration idea was carried out with utter conviction, throwing into painful relief the superiority Tchaikovsky’s original choices.

With that, we performed the famous return of the love theme near the end of the overture, this time with Tchaikovsky’s notes intact. And to avoid ending on a tragic note we concluded with the humorous “Celebration Dance” from Billy the Kid by Aaron Copland.

A short video and example scores will be posted shortly.