When someone turns 100 years old, that's huge, as an organization to turn 100 is also
just as large. Many nonprofits in particular never make it this long. My name is Robert
Reid. I'm the executive director of the Madison Symphony Orchestra. We're celebrating 100
years. An amazing thing is we've only had four music directors, so that means that they
usually have had an average tenure of 25 years apiece. One, two, three, four. Our current
director, John DeMaine, is going to be stepping down after 32 years. We have 91 musicians under
contract. One of the things I love about being an orchestra of our size, our musicians,
they are here because they want to be here. They want to play, they want to do, have fun
doing that. It's not just a job. And you come here, and all of a sudden you've developed
a sense of family. Many venues across the country and world, you can't fully hear the
orchestra. I'm not making an exaggeration. I think our hall is one of the top twinning
halls in the United States of America. When you come here, it is served to you on a silver
platter, and so you hear everything, and you hear this lush string sound, and you hear
all these things, and it becomes exciting, and you know, you know, lift your spirit when
you're sitting in your seats. The symphony is for the community. And so when we were
thinking about what are we going to do to celebrate the 100th anniversary season, we
thought we have to have something that is as blatantly obvious a community event as
possible. We are involving 40 plus different arts groups. So five performance spaces in
the
Robinshire Center is going to have a revolving door. Our performance is
somewhere up in Lovettio, many years ago. The symphony should be the anchor of the festival
weekend. We want to make sure that we perform music that everybody's going to know, and
is doing some of the best-known selections of a symphonic repertoire.
From the final movement, Oh to Joy of Beethoven Symphony No. 9, to doing American in Paris,
to movements of the planets.
If they have nothing else, if they've heard movies and soundtracks, they will know this
music. So we want people to walk away feeling like, you know, the symphony is for me too.
Any nonprofit could fail if it doesn't have the support of the community. We're getting
enough affirmation for our people buying tickets to our concerts, for people who make
their donations to the symphony on an annual basis. So the community you're saying to us,
we want you here. You know, we're not begging people to