Elgin Youth Symphony Orchestra gears up for 48th season in 2024

As the Elgin Youth Symphony Orchestra enters into its 48th season, Artistic Director Matthew Sheppard takes a look at the exciting times ahead for the organization in 2024.

“We serve about 400 students from across the Fox River Valley in the Greater Chicago area,” Sheppard said. “We have a total of five orchestras, a brass choir, percussion ensembles, flute choir, a thriving Chamber Music Institute and percussion ensembles. So, all sorts of different groups for students to perform in.”

Three times a year, the student groups come together to perform on concert days.

“This year’s season theme is called ‘GAIA,’” Sheppard said. “Each year, we have a specific season theme that allows us to dive in and explore the music through a lens of metaphor and analogy. With ‘GAIA,’ we’re using this now debunked, old hypothesis of Gaia by James Lovelock, in which he hypothesized that all of the world, organic and inorganic, is one responsive organism.”

Sheppard acknowledges the theory may not hold much water in the scientific community, but for EYSO, it’s perfect.

“It’s a way for us to examine our role in the world, our role as artists, our role in the musical ecosystem, literally the role of a flute player interacting with a violinist or with a timpani player or a trumpet, all of those different elements,” he said. “It’s been really a cool experience so far for the kids. Each one of our concerts then takes on a certain different element of this idea of the world and ecosystems.”

Their first concert was dubbed “Terra Naturalist,” and the musicians specifically focused on embodying the natural world through music.

“We wanted to portray the ways that artists, composers, performers, philosophers, scientists and humans have generally been influenced by their experiences in the natural world,” Sheppard said. “And the way that translated to us as artists, as musicians, as performers, as well as the way that it translated to the composers whose works we’re studying – it was just a blast.”

For the second concert series, “Terra Nostra,” coming up in March, Sheppard will focus on highlighting the polar, or opposing, elements of nature.

“Our world is a false dichotomy, we don’t just have the natural world and then the human world, there’s tons of intermingling of those two things,” he said. “We’ll be exploring the human world, the built world, the constructed, designed world, and how that has played into both the construction of our traditions. As orchestral musicians we have loads of traditions and they are all things we’ve come up with in some way.”

The May concert, “Terra Una,” and EYSO’s final performance series of the year, will dive deep and explore the way elements of natural dichotomy interact together.

Check out EYSO’s website at www.eyso.org for dates, details and ticket information for the remainder of their eighth season.