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

Community Connections Ensembles and Musical Mosaics
These are community-based ensemble performances that assist us in strengthening our relationship with audience and community and developing a stronger sense of connection with new and potential audiences. The Symphony is currently partnering with Mi Casa Su Casa, The Mint Museum of Art and the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County.

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

The Charlotte Symphony has 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 the past two years, CSO musicians, education staff and composer David Crowe have collected oral histories from mill community members, attended seminars at the 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 has created a new multi-media work entitled Mill Village: A Piedmont Rhapsody for chamber orchestra. A CSO 12 piece chamber ensemble performs this work, touring throughout Mecklenburg and the surrounding counties.

Partners for the Mill Community Project include the Levine Museum of the New South, Wonderworld Film and Video, The United Arts Council of Gaston County, Arts Council of Rock Hill and York County, local scholars, The Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, and individual members of the mill communities.

Mill Community Project Performances:
More information coming soon for the 2007-2008 schedule

Photo By: Janice Avery Paine