Education Director at Orchestra of St. Luke's: The First 6 Months

If you could improve a life, would you?

This is what greets me everyday I walk to work at The DiMenna Center.  It’s displayed on a giant billboard for Shriner’s Hospital, with faces of children looming over it, facing east on W.37^th Street between 9^th and 10^th Avenue, and it’s a gentle reminder of why I’m doing what I’m doing. Everyday that I see it, I answer to myself, “Yes!” I love this work passionately, and there’s nothing I’d rather be doing than creating meaningful experiences for people through an orchestra, a collective of musicians that exemplifies what a society can be: a collaborative (though sometimes disagreeing) community that has the same vision to perform great works of music as authentically as possible.

When I first started at Orchestra of St. Luke’s in June, I felt a sense of urgency to record and communicate my experiences. But now I’m beginning to wonder why. Why write this all down? Who am I really aiming to share this with? Basically, I've found that some of the most helpful advice I’ve been given has come from people who were transparent about the processes they went through to get their programs off the ground, so this is a way to share the process with others in the field who may be having similar experiences.

So in the spirit of transparency, I invite you to pick through the bits that interest you and comment if you feel it.

(Note: the blogs are organized into subjects and chronologically, not according to the date of posting. Also, I wrote some of these blogs back in August, and some of them in retrospect in the last couple of weeks.)