Current Trends in the Implementation of Educational Concerts of Symphony Orchestras: A Review of Literature

Since the beginning of the 20th century, every season, many symphony orchestras include educational concerts for students in their programs in order to expand the services offered to the public and to train their future audience. At the same time, educational concerts are an important part of the curriculum of music education and give students the opportunity to gain additional experiences by interacting with the community to which they belong.

This presentation is focusing on the current trends in the implementation of educational concerts of symphony orchestras. Our aim is to collect, organize and present innovative approaches on how to design enjoyable educational concerts for the students and provide them with a unique experience that they will remember for a lifetime. Data was collected from orchestra websites, interviews of conductors, and published thesis and doctoral dissertations.

Results show that nowadays many major symphony orchestras have education departments responsible with designing and implementing their educational concerts, which take into consideration objectives from the school music curriculum. Teacher and student resources are freely given to the teachers before the concert in order to prepare the students for the overall experience. Sometimes, teacher training is provided for the delivery of the material. Research suggests that when choosing repertoire for an educational concert one must take into consideration the musical tastes of the students, so apart from classical repertoire, film music is often performed. Research also suggests that even though the performance of a movement of a concerto may be costly, the students tend to be impressed by the soloist`s performance and may be more attentive and responsive. Moreover, educational concerts sometimes include pre-concert talks by the conductor and hands-on activities for the students. The performance may also include multimedia, theatre acts and dance. Recently, there is a tendency of the concerts taking the form of collaborations between the orchestra and the audience while the conductor guides and facilitates the process. Assessment of educational concerts is usually carried out by giving questionnaires to students and the results are used internally by education departments to improve their projects.