BYU School of Music Celebrates 20 Years of Community Musicianship
Playing a musical instrument is significantly better for the brain than just listening to it, according to Penn Medicine News, but as musicians age, opportunities may dwindle. BYU New Horizons Orchestra was created to provide opportunities for adults to learn and play new instruments. Positive community response has resulted in 20 seasons and counting.
BYU New Horizon Orchestra (BYU NHO) is the university’s local chapter of an international organization that continues Roy Ernst’s vision of providing music-making opportunities for adults. Most of the orchestra plays instruments they haven’t played since elementary or secondary school, but participants can also decide to pick up a new instrument. The main purpose is to offer the opportunity for adults (over 40) to have school-like instruction. There are three New Horizon Orchestras in Utah, and the BYU chapter was one of the first in the state.
“Being a student as an adult can be ideal because adults have more time to practice and funds to buy a nice instrument,” said Allison Taylor, director of BYU New Horizons Orchestra. She said the orchestra also offers seniors an opportunity to get out of the house and make friends who can relate to their experiences of losing family, concerns about children and grandchildren or surviving cancer—or they can forget all those things for a short while as they lose themselves in music-making. “I always tell them that they have the best support team around them,” she said.
The orchestra also offers an opportunity for music education students to have an educational environment without classroom management challenges that they may encounter in their student internships, according Andrew Dabczynski, the founding director of BYU NHO. Dabczynski helped run Ernst's early New Horizons Orchestra groups when he was at Eastman School of Music. He was named Utah Higher Education Teacher of the Year in 2005 for his work with the BYU New Horizons Orchestra and was given BYU’s Joseph E. White Fellowship for Teaching and Learning for adding this experiential learning experience to music education students’ early training.
Taylor took over orchestra direction when Dabczynski left, and she works with Sam Tsugawa to coordinate music education involvement. Students take the course their second or third semester in the music education program, giving them an opportunity to learn a new instrument in addition to a unique teaching experience before their pre-student teaching and student teaching internships.
Taylor and Dabczynski both said that affiliation with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has provided unique support, which, along with community and university support, has kept the organization going strong these last 20 years. Some of the support is practical, such as having free rehearsal and performance spaces. Some of the support is spiritual, specifically the musicians’ interest and discussion in playing church hymns.
"Often, older musicians are intuitively better at sharing emotions than a younger group. Because of that, we do talk more about emotions and spirituality," Taylor said. "I’ve found that if we incorporate these things, they play the music so much better." She said the musicians always ask to play for more hymns, but it has been hard to find arrangements for the orchestra. “It's definitely worth the effort to incorporate these things.”
BYU New Horizons Orchestra starts rehearsals and is accepting new musician registration until September 18. They will start rehearing for a Christmas concert with Centennial Middle School. 'We’ve done that kind of concert before and it is so fun to see the intergenerational cooperation and collaboration,' Taylor said.