Healing the Community through Music
Longwood Symphony Orchestra is the award-winning Boston-based ensemble founded in 1984 made up primarily of medical professionals who are Dedicated to Healing the Community through Music.
Longwood Symphony's three programs were developed to enhance healing and humanism in the community and among its medical musicians.
- The LSO's Healing Art of Music™ program, which celebrates its 20th anniversary in the 2011-2012 season, has raised nearly $1,000,000 for worthy causes and has been nationally recognized with the League of American Orchestras' MetLife Award for Excellence in Community Engagement and the highest cultural recognition in Massachusetts, the Commonwealth Award. The orchestra's Community Partners for 2011-2012 are the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, the Sharewood Project, the Japan Disaster Relief Fund-Boston, and the Rachel Molly Markoff Foundation.
- Off stage, the orchestra curates LSO on Call, a community outreach initiative that brings free chamber music directly to patients across Massachusetts in hospital wards, rehabilitation centers, and health care facilities. The program kicked off with LSO on Call: Health and Harmony in the City, a single-day, city-wide project that involved over 70 musicians visiting 24 different hospitals, community health centers, hospices, and other healthcare facilities throughout the Commonwealth on October 17, 2009. Today, the orchestra has a number of standing chamber ensembles who present free LSO on Call performances regularly across the city, while the LSO Chamber Players program offers chamber ensembles for hire for non-hospice purposes such as weddings, medical meetings, and conventions.
- Through LSO's Community Conversations program, the orchestra promotes community-wide dialogue among today’s experts in the arts and sciences on the intersection of music and medicine. In 2009, the orchestra convened Crossing the Corpus Callosum: Neuroscience, Healing, and the Arts, a day-long symposium that combined musical performances with lectures on arts and healing and brought together experts from across New England. In 2011, Crossing the Corpus Callosum II was convened in partnership with The Lab at Harvard, and attracted more than 350 delegates. Individual orchestra musicians also regularly speak and present on these topics around the United States and internationally.