Photo by Yuyang Wang ‘24
Rebecca Gagnon ’23
Features Editor
From the first note to the last, the music that floats through the air during a concert has the ability to transform an audience of individual people into a collective group. This transformation occurred on Friday, March 4, 2022, in Abbey Chapel, during the Mount Holyoke Symphony Orchestra’s annual Mary Lyon Concert, which was reconstructed this year into a fundraiser for Ukraine.
“The Mary Lyon [concert], I created in 2012 or 2013, to honor the works of women,” Tianhui Ng, associate professor of music, chair of the music department and director of orchestral studies, stated. “It was purposefully vague that way because it’s evolved into different things … [the] concerts have always tried to say something about the current situation.” In this way, the concert is a prime opportunity for members of the orchestra to make a statement about current events around the world.
“I think it was sort of a simultaneous decision,” Sarah Day ’22, president of MHSO, recalled as they thought about the orchestra board’s decision to shift the annual concert to a fundraiser. “[Ng] was the one who brought it up initially, but I think it had been floating around in everyone’s minds because of how quickly everyone was like, ‘Oh, yes, absolutely. That’s what we’ve been wanting to do.’”
From the time of the board’s decision to alter the concert into a fundraiser on Tuesday and the performance itself on Friday, the orchestra had only three days to solve any logistical questions.
“It was a little hectic [because] we had a few extra responsibilities that we had to do,” Isabel Myren ’24, co-stage manager and orchestra member, said. “We had to print out QR codes for the fundraising so that you could scan the QR code and get taken to a donation page, and we had to organize things like that on relatively short notice with the printing department. So, it got a little more complicated, but it ended up working quite well.”
Day and Myren both laughed as they recalled how they returned to their dorms late after the board meeting and sent out numerous emails to begin spreading the word. They reached out to many academic departments to notify them about the changes with the hope that they would let other people know as well. This task resulted in both Day and Myren staying up until one or two in the morning.
“[It] changed entirely our publicity approach,” Day stated. “It’s one thing to say, ‘Hey, come to our concert, we’re going to be playing these lovely pieces. It’s a great opportunity to come listen to women composers,’ and [another] to say, ‘We need you to be here because we’re trying to do something different.’ So then, of course, we’re … posting around the campus in a way we don’t usually do and being pretty aggressive about [it], saying, ‘Hey, you really should come to our concert this time,’ to friends, family and professors.”
The orchestra decided that, instead of collecting the money themselves, they would simply provide a QR code to the audience which would allow them to make donations directly to the organizations.
“We decided not to be a middleman for the whole fundraising purpose,” Ng explained. “We didn’t collect money and then transfer because … we’re not set up for that. We are [a] student org.” Instead, Ng continued, “We assemble[d] a list of trustworthy agencies that are working on the ground in the Ukraine, and these were the ones that were recommended by the State Department, and by reputable news sources like the Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times and so on.”
Ng continued that doing the fundraiser in this way allowed money to go directly to where it was needed with efficiency. If they had collected the money themselves, it would have been required to go through Mount Holyoke, the College would have to write a check, and then, finally, the money would be sent to the organizations. Instead, through this direct approach, the money could go straight to those in need.
Day added that, since they didn’t have a large amount of time to organize this change, other Mount Holyoke organizations such as the International Student Organization helped by providing resources for other reputable foundations to donate to. With this assistance, the board quickly chose one specific organization — Razom for Ukraine — to represent their concert while using the QR code to provide additional places to donate.
“I think we picked [Razom for Ukraine] within 10 minutes because we didn’t have time to do any more deliberation,” Day said. “It was maybe the night before [the concert] when we finally settled on what we’re going to do, because, this is during midterms, so we were running around. We had instrument issues, things were breaking, and we’re trying to put forward a concert that’s going to actually do something.” Razom for Ukraine is an organization centered around the idea of “unlock[ing] the potential of Ukraine,” according to their website.
At 8 p.m. on Friday, the orchestra took to Abbey Chapel with their guest player and began their concert to a large crowd. To initiate their set, they played Nkeiru Okoye’s symphony “Voices Shouting Out.”
“I think for many of us, we [were] all caught up in emotions, and if you want us to say in one sentence exactly what we feel, we [struggle] to do so, but we can kind of express it through the complexity of a musical piece,” Ng said, discussing the Okoye piece. “[Okoye] was asked to respond to 9/11, and she didn’t want [it] to just be a mournful piece. She wanted to not focus [on] the atrocity, but to focus on the people who rose up despite that, and triumph over adversity, and those were the voices that were shouting out. I think … that really speaks to the moment right now, because, in a way, the whole world is trying to figure out what to do with this. We have all these emotions that we can’t quite express, but those of us who can, we are shouting out in protest.”
Once they finished the Okoye symphony and before they moved on to their next piece, Emilie Mayer’s “Symphony No.1 in C Minor,” Ng turned to the audience, and a silence settled in Abbey Chapel.
Ng addressed the room, speaking on how, coincidentally, he has been working on Ukrainian music since 2017 through the work of Thomas de Hartmann, who was a Russian composer born in Ukraine to a family of Russian aristocrats in the late 19th century. Hartmann spent a great deal of his time in Ukraine composing, until he was forced to flee to the United States due to the Russian Revolution. In the past few years, Hartmann has been established as a rediscovered Ukrainian master, and is now used as a milestone to understanding lesser known sides of Ukrainian culture. Ng was scheduled to perform Hartmann’s piano concerto, commissioned by the Boston Symphony, in April 2020. The performance was canceled due to COVID-19.
“So fast forward through COVID[-19], I ended up recording this music in Lviv in Ukraine in September this year, and I was just there with a whole orchestra of musicians — so let’s just say 80, plus the entire team, the conductors, the producers, the recording engineer and everybody who was nothing but kind to us,” Ng said. A sorrowful look fell upon his face as he recalled everyone he met during that time, and one in particular who he recently received a devastating message from.
“The day before the concert,” Ng recalled, “I got an email from my recording engineer, who had been hiding in the subways of Kyiv, and he said, ‘You know, we’ve been told that things are looking pretty bad out there. I’ve spent the past few days uploading all of the data from the project that we worked on together onto Google Drive. Here, you have it. I’m not sure whether you’ll hear from me again.’ And that is how close to home is all this, you know? … It’s very humbling to live in the privilege of peace here and to see your colleague suffering and the very, very real life and death questions that they’re facing every day.”
After Ng’s speech, the orchestra began Emilie Mayer’s “Symphony No.1 in C Minor.”
This was Day’s favorite moment throughout the entire concert. “I think it was moving that [Ng] was trying to ask us all to think about someone that he knew,” Day said. “[He] was asking us and asking the audience to send our minds outwards, and I thought that that was powerful. Then to turn around and play the Mayer’s symphony was like, ‘Well, this is awesome — We’re doing something.’”
The two pieces performed and the speech given by Ng were not only moving for the members of the orchestra, but for people in the audience as well, as Ng learned after the concert finished.
“I don’t know how many Ukrainian students we have on campus right now, but one of them came up to me, and her eyes — we didn’t have to say very much, let’s just put it that way. Our eyes were brimming, and she just said, ‘Thank you. It just means a lot to me,’ and then that was about as much as she could manage, and about as much as I could manage,” Ng said, his eyes welling once more. “[I’m] kind of near tears [just] thinking about it, and then she left, and I thought to myself, ‘You know … this is perfectly an example of how music brings people together.’”
Although they were unaware of how much money they truly raised, Ng, Day and Myren believed the concert was a success. They were also proud of the efforts of the whole orchestra to assist those in need.
“I was quite happy that we were helping make the world a little bit better and helping the Ukrainian people through this tough time,” Myren said. “Honestly, I’m quite honored that I could help in such a way.”
Ng, Day and Myren all emphasized how proud and grateful they were for not just the board of the orchestra who made this significant change, but to the organization as a whole — those who volunteered their time to help this idea become a reality and the audience who arrived to show their support.
“[The concert] could be a reminder [of] the value of coming together to do something,” Ng said. “I think that that could be helpful for some people, especially people who are feeling particularly lost right now, that the College’s community is here — and that if they feel alone, … there’s always someone in the music department, in religious life, and student services and student activities that will respond and reach out, [because] you’re not alone and that’s important for us to say.”