Two years ago, Deborah Card, then the brand new President of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, spoke at a meeting of the Illinois Council of Orchestras about how an orchestra is initially formed stays a part of the culture of the organization throughout its existence.

She gave an example how the Seattle Symphony (the orchestra she managed before coming to Chicago) was founded by some prominent women in the community who pulled together a band of musicians, lent them their husband’s suits and held concerts. She also discussed the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, who was formed by a group of business men who decided that a great city needed to have a great orchestra.

I found her talk to be fascinating and have since thought about the formation of the Elgin Symphony Orchestra. The ESO was formed 57 years ago by three people; Doug Steensland, Marian Laffey and Jean Hove. All three were public school music teachers who effectively tied the ESO with the community leaders on the school district’s Board.

Doug wanted to be a conductor, Marian wanted to be a Concert Master and Jean was willing to do whatever was necessary, so she played Principal Viola. The three of them then recruited an ensemble of teachers, high school students, doctors and lawyers who wanted to make music. This combination integrated the musicians with the funders of the symphony from the start. It also ingrained a sense of ownership amongst our musicians for the success of the organization.

These are two traits that I think are, and will always be, profound aspects of who and what we are. Now we – the Board, Musicians and Management – need to decide what we will do with them. If we are not conscious of these elements and do not harness them, they will undermine what we try to achieve.

In the 1970’s, Margaret Hillis became our music director and introduced annual auditions to the orchestra, making it so that some people could no longer play with us. In 1985, we became fully professional, decreasing the number of Elginites who could play with us. In 2000, we committed to a multiyear run at reaching Chicago AA scale (the pay set by the American Federation of Musician’s Local 10-208 for playing symphonic music in Chicago’s loop) so that we can attract the best freelance musicians in the region, making it yet harder for Elginites to perform in the orchestra.

During these profound changes, we can either be aware of the facts both that we have a fundamental connection between our community and our musicians and that we have a clearly defined plan to place the best musicians in the region on our stage (regardless of where they live), or we can simply move forward and assume everything will be alright.

If we do not remain cognizant of our history, the bonds between our musicians and our community will erode. This will likely undermine the structure of our fundraising and ticket sales. Our community members will cease to support the organization, and the musicians will start to put up barriers to our advancement. This could be overcome with new ticket sales and fundraising strategies, PR and Board management, but we would be starting from scratch.

If we remain conscious of it, we can have clear dialog about the fact that we have members of our orchestra who have grown up in Elgin and who we are lucky to have on our stage. We can be aware of the fact that we need to make concerted efforts to encourage musicians to move into Elgin so that our patrons see them in the grocery stores and hire them to teach our patrons’ children.

We can recruit musicians to prominent positions throughout our committee structure. We can make sure that we are consciously building informal bonds between our musicians and community. And we can continue to develop new techniques of building on these existing connections.

In the end, we all have basic traits that define us. It then becomes our jobs to understand them and figure out how to harness them as propellers.