How a tiny Pa. boro got a big orchestra of its own

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How does a small Pennsylvania borough get its own full-size symphony? 

In the case of Edgewood, home to 3,000 people and the nearly 70-member Edgewood Symphony Orchestra, it came from a neighbor.

The symphony began in next door Wilkinsburg, also situated on Pittsburgh's eastern flank, where several nearby Westinghouse plants fueled a population boom in the 20th century.

After 45 years leading the ensemble through several iterations, founder Eugene Reichenfeld decided to retire and dissolve the band in the late 1980s, leading the players themselves to mount a rescue.

With Edgewood offering more support, they moved there and to what may still be the smallest community in the U.S. to have its own symphony.

The players are volunteers or "high-level amateurs." 

They have day jobs: Butchers, priests, mayors, surgeons, teachers, software engineers, and more have all graced the roster.

Many could have been professional musicians — some even trained for it — but opted for more traditional (read: stable) career paths. 

"We decided to make a living another way but are still very passionate about music and very good at our instruments," said flutist Peggy Greb, who is vice president of the orchestra's board and a realtor by day.

Player Natalie Ann Kasievich added: "I studied [music] all the way from four to 18. I was in youth orchestra and all of these things, and it's part of your identity, and you kind of lose it when you get to adulthood." 

Kasievich is a violinist with the Edgewood Symphony Orchestra (ESO) and executive director of the Westmoreland Symphony Orchestra, a professional ensemble based in Greensburg.

Not all of the Edgewood orchestra's members live there. If they did, the symphony alone would comprise nearly 2.5% of the borough's total population. Some live an hour or more away and make the trek for once-weekly practices at a local Presbyterian church. 

"Every Tuesday for the past, you know, 36 years I've looked forward to practicing with the Edgewood symphony," Greb added.

The group plays four concerts a year. Members must audition to join. There is a sub/waitlist for those willing to hold out for an opening. 

There are other, larger Pennsylvania boroughs with community orchestras, Ambler and Lansdowne to name two. Milton in Northumberland County was the smallest community in the U.S. to support a full orchestra before that group folded following the outbreak of World War II.

Across the country, orchestras found in unlikely places today are sometimes remnants of 1935's Federal Music Project, a New Deal program that sent thousands of out-of-work musicians to communities nationwide, where some formed orchestras and brought live classical music to Americans who had never experienced it that way before.

Many such orchestras have since gone the way of the dinosaur. It is, needless to say, hard to keep an orchestra afloat these days. 

In Edgewood, the orchestra's annual budget is small, around $50,000. That's up from $10,000 or less when it started 36 years ago.

Some people in the tiny borough are still unaware that it exists, recalling a 2019 Washington Post article with the title: "People are upset when an orchestra closes. If only they went to the concerts."

(Grants remain an integral piece of ESO's funding puzzle.) 

Members who spoke with PA Local say the Edgewood orchestra has never been better than it is right now under musical director and conductor Walter Morales, one of the outfit's few paid employees.

Marilyn Myers, the "mother of the ESO," had a direct hand in its post-Wilkinsburg evolution and said of Morales: "He's a spark plug; very motivating," but not in a terrifying Terence Fletcher sort of way.

Greb expanded on this: "I told [Morales] last year, and I know it touched him a lot, that I played better for him, not because I'm afraid of him but because I don't want to disappoint him. A lot of us feel the same way." 

Morales, a native of Costa Rica, who came to the Edgewood Symphony Orchestra by way of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, isn't taking sole credit. "Musicians need confidence, they need to be in a group to feel encouraged to play and inspire something. The players have a — it's a wonderful support system that we have in place, and I think it encourages people to give their very best and play at the highest level they can."

—Colin Deppen, PA Local editor 

The Edgewood Symphony Orchestra's next show — featuring works by Aaron Copland, George Walker, Howard Hanson, and John Adams — happens May 6.

"A peculiar goal is that maybe 100 years from now, written evidence is found proving there was a Philly Pen Circle."

—Michael McGettigan, founder of a new club for Philadelphia fans of fancy pens and vanguards of analog in our current digital age