With 55 members and counting, Greenbelt Community Orchestra has started rehearsals at the Community Center. On Thursday, July 20, 18 string players met for their first rehearsal with conductors Derek Maseloff and Seth Glabman. With one high school student and 12 members over 60, the group has a wide range of participants, and nearly half are Greenbelters.
Both conductors brought pieces in different styles, all emphasizing that playing music together should be a source of enjoyment. Glabman, a teacher, composer, performer and scholar, shared an original piece with the new orchestra: Soundscape Rhapsody #1, a dramatic piece that he wrote with the objective that everyone would have fun playing it. Glabman also led the musicians through Mozart’s Impresario overture, saying, “It’s a can’t miss piece. No matter what you do it’ll sound good.” He teaches general and instrumental music at Forest Knolls and Viers Mill
Elementary Schools in Montgomery County.
A Greenbelt resident, Maseloff is a horn player and works internationally running programs for young emerging professional musicians, including an opera program at the Estates Theatre in Prague, the last building standing in Europe where Mozart actually worked. After running the players through the Serenade for Strings by English composer Edward Elgar, Maseloff congratulated them on a great first rehearsal. “Greenbelt is already a fun place and getting to know more people in a musical context is great,” he said. “One of the best things to do is make music with your friends. It’s an inherent good to do that!”
Organizer Anne Gardner was inspired to start a community orchestra in Greenbelt by the baroque concerts Natalie Kress brought to Greenbelt in February. “It reminded me how much I missed playing in an orchestra,” she said. Growing up in England, Gardner played in community and university orchestras, and since 2010 has played in pit orchestras for musicals at Goddard Space Flight Center such as The Sound of Music and Beauty and the Beast.
Gardner advertised for members and applied to the city for Recognition Group status. This allows the group to use a room at the Community Center, where they are able to use the Greenbelt Concert Band’s percussion instruments.
Gardner assembled a planning committee including concertmaster Susan Stewart, lead cellist Katie McCarthy (also married to Maseloff), violinist Sarah Rusk and the conductors, who selected the music. The committee worked on the logistics of how to run rehearsals and how to balance the different sections of the orchestra: 30 strings, plus flutes, clarinets, bassoons, oboes, trumpets, trombones, French horns and percussion. The orchestra rehearses weekly for two hours, alternating conductors, although the wind instruments do not meet every time.
As a recognition group, the orchestra has not sought funding their first year. “No money is changing hands. All the music is public domain,” Gardner stated. “Eventually we’ll begin to collect donations and do fundraising but right now we’re keeping things really simple: we have no money and own no property.”
More information is available at greenbeltorchestra.org, and concert dates will be posted there.
