Connie Shakalis Special to The Herald-Times

The Bloomington Symphony Orchestra encourages the public to help it celebrate five and half decades of local orchestral music. For those who imagine symphonies as stuffy or hyper-serious, here come surprises. Wolves, werewolves and howling will accompany October’s concert, “Once upon a Midnight,” geared toward grownups this year.

Scary October show not just for kids

“Kids can certainly come,” said the orchestra’s executive director trombonist Donna Lafferty, “but it’s not cutesy.” Instrumentalists and audience members will enjoy designing their costumes for this one, at 5 p.m. Oct. 20. Last year’s scary concert called for Lafferty to don a head-dress bedecked with tentacles. Early on, she ditched it; the tentacles had been dangling across her vision field.

Musician-friendly head-dresses, nightmares, swirling witches, dark night and fear itself come in musical and narrative form this Halloween season at the symphony. Bloomington’s Lauren Bernofsky’s rousing “Wild Ride on a Broomstick,” Camille Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre, Leonard Slatkin’s “The Raven” and Edvard Grieg’s creepily memorable “In the Hall of the Mountain King” are intended to inspire audience thoughts of “Nevermore!” 

“We spice things up with extra-musical elements,” Lafferty said. So be on the lookout for the strange and startling plus some diminished and dissonant chords.

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The rest of the BSO season

For “Celebrate the Season,” at 7 p.m. Dec. 3, both attendees and performers will put on their “bling” clothing and accessories as they gather at the historic Tivoli Theatre in Spencer for that concert.

Next April brings one of the orchestra’s two chamber (smaller) concerts. On April 5 the orchestra partners with Reimagining Opera for Kids, bringing Anthony Prog’s original operatic version of “Aesop’s Fables” to the Monroe County Public Library’s West Kirkwood Avenue location. A chamber orchestra will accompany Prog’s five frolicsome arias, performed by local opera singers wearing costumes — and masks designed by Bloomington-based director/actor/artist Ansley Valentine. He also directs Reimagining Opera for Kids this 2024-2025 season.

“American Voices for All Times” comes at 5 p.m. March 9. The orchestra partners with the Bridges Youth Orchestra and Indiana University’s Archives of African American Music and Culture. George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris,” Florence Price’s “Ethiopia’s Shadow in America” and William (Bill) Banfield’s Symphony No. 6: Four Songs for Five American Voices highlight American music from jazz to spirituals.

According to program notes by K. Dawn Grapes for Fort Collins Symphony, although “Ethiopia’s Shadow in America” premiered as late as 2015 — Price died in 1953 — last year alone it was programmed by 31 professional, university and community orchestras.

“And Bill Banfield is actually coming from Boston to Bloomington for this concert,” Lafferty said.

Banfield is a composer, professor and scholar of Black music and is founding director of Africana Studies at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. He earned a bachelor’s of music degree from the New England Conservatory, his master of theological studies from Boston University and his doctor of musical arts in composition from the University of Michigan. In the 1990s he directed the IU Soul Revue and was a professor in African American studies and music at Indiana University. 

May’s concert, “BSO: Past, Present, and Future,” begins at 5 p.m. May 18. It will feature the piece the orchestra performed during its inaugural season in 1970 with Otto Nicolai’s “Merry Wives of Windsor Overture.” Camille Saint-Saens’ “Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso” and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2 complete the concert.

Bloomington Symphony Orchestra wants your ideas

Lafferty said a committee, which meets monthly and comprises representatives from all of the orchestra’s facets, decides which pieces to play, when to schedule them and with whom to partner. Decisions are made one year in advance and include input from people outside the orchestra as well.

“The orchestra is integral to community,” Lafferty said, citing an example where a couple of its musicians became a literal couple. “A violinist and a cellist happened to be seated so that they could see each other in the front row during rehearsals and performances.” In one another’s sight-lines, they kept looking and eventually married.

“We make long-term friendships, too, with others in our group and with outside groups,” Lafferty said.

Lafferty is asking musicians, audience members and volunteers to reflect on the reasons they attend performances of Bloomington’s community orchestra. If you have a story, memory, favorite piece or an idea, the orchestra would like to know. Answers may be emailed to bso@bloomingtonsymphony.com.

To find details and to order tickets to the Bloomington Symphony Orchestra’s concerts, go online to visit bloomingtonsymphony.com/news/55seasons/.