South Orange Symphony celebrates 75 years of a musical community
On most Tuesday evenings for a very, very, very long time, a motley collection of cars has parked along the side of Ridgewood Road in front of South Orange Middle School. The cars are reflective of the varied lives of the people who drive them: a Mini here, a family van there, a Toyota that’s seen some miles, a late model sedan.
What binds their drivers is neither occupation, residence nor children. It is music. For 75 years, professional, semi-professional and serious amateur musicians have gathered in South Orange on Tuesday evenings to play music in the South Orange Symphony. They’ve used the auditorium at SOMS for more than 45 of those years.
There are 50 to 60 musicians in the orchestra, of all ages, shapes and sizes. All but a handful of them are volunteers. The youngest are just out of college. The oldest is more than 80. There are no try-outs. String players are always welcome. You’ll know by the end of the evening whether you’ve got the chops to stay, says principal violist Martin “Marty” Gelfond.
They play something for everyone, from serious music for orchestra lovers to accessible pieces for those learning to love what a big group of talented musicians can do. On a recent Tuesday, the musicians were practicing a symphonic poem by Franz Liszt, which they will play at the third and last concert of the anniversary season on April 27 at 3 p.m. in the SOMS auditorium. They will also play Florence Price’s Symphony No. 1 in E minor. Price was a black American whose symphony won a top prize in 1932 and widespread acclaim when it premiered in 1933 and then disappeared, discovered in an attic only 15 years ago.
Last fall, the orchestra played Johannes Brahms’ Symphony No. 4. The orchestra also holds an
annual family concert, intended to introduce children to classical music. Last January, that program included the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” theme, highlights from the “Pirates of the Caribbean” theme and Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.” This year, South Orange Village President Sheena Collum was a guest soloist on “The Typewriter” by Leroy Anderson.
Gelfond, the orchestra’s general manager, has been in the symphony since he was a teenager in West Orange. Fifty-odd years later, he drives from Manalapan each week to take his seat at the front of stage left. “I love to do it,” he says. Taking note of a varied career that included a stint as a carwash owner, Gelfond adds, “It’s an escape from everything else I do.”
His seatmate and fellow violist, “his orchestra wife,” he jokes, is Janet Poland, the president of the orchestra’s board. She is responsible for helping to select, organize and copy music. An accountant, she also oversees the orchestra’s small budget. Its concerts are free and it is supported by an annual grant from Essex County and by donations.
Poland arrived more than 40 years ago after taking a tour of several local orchestras. The vibe was best in South Orange. She has been a member ever since. When asked what she gets out of her weekly stint, Poland talks about the thought that goes into playing. “We enjoy using our brains,” she says. Besides, she adds, the orchestra is her second family.
At the head of that family is Susan Haig, a small woman who dances lightly on her podium, gently guiding the musicians and never raising her voice. She has been the orchestra’s conductor since 2015. Haig grew up in a musical family in Summit and was educated at Princeton and Stony Brook. Although she was trained first as a pianist and violist, she always dreamed of being a conductor and got her PhD in conducting and piano at Stony Brook before embarking on a lengthy conducting career with operas and orchestras across Canada and the United States. She says musicians joke that the viola is the most overlooked string instrument in the orchestra because it doesn’t usually carry the melody. But it is frequently the choice of composers and conductors because the instrument plays “in the middle of the sound, aware of what’s going on above and below ... and help[s] knit things together.”
She explains her love of conducting in similar terms. “The goal is to realize the composers’ intentions and help performers and audiences fully experience and appreciate the work,” she says. “It’s exciting to study and grasp the piece in detail and as a whole.”
About 15 years ago, she returned home from her travels and her then job as associate conductor for the orchestra in Tampa/St. Petersburg to pursue a passion project of promoting the art and music programs happening in New Jersey by creating news videos. That project widened its scope to include environmental and social reporting and became CivicStory. She is its founder, former creative director, and current vice president.
In a way, this orchestra is a paean to the civic life Haig promotes, and to the public schools that might be thought of as the core of that civic life. Public schools introduce music to many students, many of whom remember fumbling their way through a concert as inept, new musicians.
For a select few, those early days on an instrument are just the beginning of a pursuit that comes to define them. Like Gelfond, Haig began playing in her public elementary school. So did concertmaster Joe Tornquist.
He began his career as a violinist at Clinton, played on the SOMS stage as a middle schooler under the direction of William Cook, graduated from Columbia High School in 2014, got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music from Montclair State, and continues to call Maplewood home.
He is in his first season as concertmaster, a paid gig that gives him no end of pleasure. Although he has a day job at Blink Fitness, he keeps his hand in music through the South Orange Symphony and a second paid post with the Brooklyn Chamber Orchestra. Like many SOMA students, he chose his instrument at the end of fourth grade. But because his last name begins with “T” he went late in the selection process. The only instrument left was the violin. “Even the violas were gone,” he says, smiling.
Although he enjoyed the instrument enough to stick with it until he got to Columbia, he credits CHS orchestra teacher Todd Van Beveren with igniting his passion. “He saw that I had some potential,” Tornquist says. Van Beveren gave Tornquist lessons, confidence and a work ethic. “He allowed me to see the value in putting some time into getting good at something.”
Noting that it’s been said that it takes 10,000 hours to master something, Tornquist muses that he has spent many more hours than that with the violin. What he loves most about getting up on stage to spend more hours with it every Tuesday, he says, is the realization of “how good it feels doing something well.”
One senses that the musicians on stage with him at SOMS on Tuesday nights know exactly what he means.
Tia Swanson played the trombone badly in her high school concert band and has not touched it since she graduated many years ago. But she looks forward to being in the audience for the April concert.
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