Making Music Together

Book excerpt: This book is the result of our love for music, for our families, our musical colleagues, and even our dogs. The story is by no means chronological, though after a "Prelude," it does follow very loosely accounts of our youth, our education, our musical experiences, and adventures. Those experiences have included playing with the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Boston Pops, Peter Nero's Philly Pops, our concerts in Moscow (in the midst of a revolution), St. Petersburg, Carnegie Hall, the Salzburg Festival, Havana, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, Slovenia, Denmark, Norway, Italy, England, Germany, Peru, and the Library of Congress. It is also a history of Orchestra 2001, the Swarthmore College- and Philadelphia-based contemporary music ensemble I founded and directed from 1988 to 2015. It includes in the appendices a complete list of O2001's concerts, repertoire, and recordings, as well as highlights and critical commentary about many of those performances and CDs.