JOINING A COMMUNITY
According to Collins, who campaigned for president under a platform of making HRO more social, the orchestra has a unique, constantly evolving dynamic uncommon to most professional-class classical groups. Everybody is friends with each other, Collins says, and orchestra members usually hang out together after rehearsals, either watching movies or going to the Kong as a massive group.
Even during rehearsals—the time Collins says is reserved for serious playing—the trombone section chatters incessantly, and the bolder members of the orchestra will occasionally call out jokes during interruptions.
“That’s the unique thing about a college orchestra,” Balliett says. “At a conservatory, it’s just part of your life, and you get kind of blasé about it.”
In years past, interaction didn’t move much past the occasional hello on the way to one’s chair, but Collins set out to change all that. He is currently planning a beach party for May, and the post-rehearsal get-togethers are often hosted in his room.
“It goes beyond just kind the stiff, classical outlook on things,” Collins says. “We’ll laugh at things, and we’ll have a good time. We’re pretty serious during rehearsals, but people can really get into it. A lot of people on HRO will hang out together, party together, and there is a kind of solidarity within the group.”
Collins is thrilled about the newfound camaraderie, and his enthusiasm appears to be reciprocated—every time he starts his mid-rehearsal speech, the orchestra shouts “Hi Jimbo!” in unison. Although he has been in HRO since the beginning of freshman year, his musical career at Harvard began with a smattering of posters calling for hip young gunslingers to join him in a rock band—pretty unorthodox for a guy who would later become president of the biggest classical group on campus.
CURTAINS FALL
If nowhere else, the bond between the musicians is evident in their playing, and as they launched into the bleak but gorgeous “Four Last Songs” by Strauss with Lucy Shelton singing soprano, the audience could only look on with admiration. The music, for all its complexities, sounded deceptively effortless.
Although it wasn’t visible from the stage, first violinist Dickerman has developed a light bruise on her neck where she holds her instrument—an affliction that appears to plague at least half the string section. Many of them practice for hours a day in the week before a major concert, although their busy Harvard schedules put them at an inherent disadvantage in comparison to the pre-professionals enrolled in conservatories.
Only a handful of HRO members go on to careers in music every year, Yannatos says, and most people put the orchestra second to their academics.
“I think, largely, HRO is something people do on the side,” says Jae Y. Kim ’05, who shares the first violin seat with Dickerman.
Still, they take their music extremely seriously, as the behemoth Hindemith symphony they play after the intermission attests. The audience erupted into a standing ovation as the last note rang out, and after several rounds of bowing, the orchestra left the stage. Collins says he was thrilled with the performance, adding with a smile that, despite the initial stumbles, he was never really worried.
They always pull it together one way or another, he says, even if it’s not until the week before.
It seems like HRO has quite a bit in common with the average Harvard student after all. Even if they do know more about classical music than those of us who prefer Biggie to Bach.
—Staff writer Leon Neyfakh can be reached at neyfakh@fas.harvard.edu.