community engagement

Charlotte Symphony Partners with CONNECTIONS Underground Railroad Project

Healing Hand of the Charlotte Symphony
Ensembles of CSO musicians perform at area hospitals and nursing homes for patients and residents.

Lollipops Pre-Concert Festival
The Pre-Concert Festival puts the musical experience right in kids' hands, through activities coordinated by the CSO Education Department. Kids meet the instruments of the orchestra at The Musical Petting Zoo, participate in educational musical activities, and have fun making musical arts and crafts.

The Mill Community Project
Sponsored by the Wallace Foundation through the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mill Community Project was a special two-year initiative. The goal was to connect a group of people in a community to music through encounters with the art form that drew upon the community’s experience.

The Charlotte Symphony focused on the mill communities of the Piedmont because of the importance that mills and the textile industry have played and continue to play in the shaping of the area both culturally and economically. Over a two year period, CSO musicians, education staff and composer David Crowe collected oral histories from mill community members, attended seminars at the Levine Museum of the New South, explored images and artifacts from the textile mills and the mill villages, and read texts about the textile industry. From these sources, David Crowe created a multi-media work entitled Mill Village: A Piedmont Rhapsody for chamber orchestra. A CSO 12-piece chamber ensemble continues to perform this work, touring throughout Mecklenburg and the surrounding counties, and even to other parts of the state and into surrounding states.

Mill Village: A Piedmont Rhapsody
Commissioned by the Charlotte Symphony and made possible by a grant from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, this multi-media work focuses on the mill villages of the Piedmont region. Composed by local composer David Crowe, “Mill Village” work honors the men, women, and children who worked in the mills and acknowledges the profound influence the textile industry has had on the Charlotte community and the Piedmont region of the Carolinas.

Musically Speaking: Pre-Concert Talks
Prior to each concert on the Classics Series, the Symphony presents Musically Speaking, informal and informative presentations about the music and its broader context. These events include presentations by expert speakers, interviews with guest conductors and artists, special performances, and brief but substantive analyses of the works on that evening’s performance to further enhance the musical experience of the audience.