Town Symphony Strikes a Chord With Residents

By day, Kim Bowlby jockeys a school bus over slick, winding, rain-forest roads.

By night--on those very special nights--she dresses in elegant black, takes up her B-flat trumpet and joins her volunteer colleagues in the Port Angeles Symphony Orchestra.

“I love it. I don’t know what I’d do without it,” said Bowlby, a 25-year veteran of the community orchestra, which since 1932 has brought “The Greatest Music of the Greatest Composers” to an Olympic Peninsula town more closely identified with logging and heavy industry than classical music.

“The community support is really miraculous,” said conductor Nico Snel, the former conductor of the Seattle Philharmonic, now in his 18th Port Angeles season.

“When I found out how much support there was here, and how willing these people were to serve on committees and do things, actually roll up their sleeves and go to work and make things happen--I haven’t regretted it for a moment,” he said.

Port Angeles, with a population of 19,000, is one of the smallest cities in the nation to support a full orchestra. It’s also one of the more remote from a university or population center--a 30-minute ferry ride and 2 1/2-hour drive from Seattle.

Snel acknowledged he faces some challenges foreign to conductors in Seattle, Boston or New York.

In New York, for instance, they don’t sell pies to balance the books.

Funds for the Port Angeles 85-member orchestra come from an annual auction of donated art--where the pies also are a featured item--and from community concerts and other events, in addition to donations from individual patrons.

“We need to raise approximately $175,000 every year to take care of our financial needs, and by golly, we’re doing that,” Snel said.

John Sparks, spokesman for the American Symphony Orchestra League in New York, which represents 900 symphonies, said the success of symphonies like Port Angeles’ “speaks to some kind of need for people, regardless of their actual education level or their previous exposure to this kind of music. There’s a need to go to the same place at the same time with other people and listen to this experience.”

“We get a lot of warmth and positive feedback from the audience,” said bassist Mary Chamberlain, a third-generation Port Angeles resident. “They enjoy it as much as we do.”

Most of the musicians in Port Angeles didn’t exactly train at the Juilliard School.

Chamberlain, a 42-year-old who has been playing bass for three years, learned from a local music teacher.

Nick Burnette, 23, also a native, earned his trombone chops playing in the Marine Corps band at Cherry Point Air Station in Havelock, N.C.

“In the Marine band, everything is really brassy and edgy,” he said. “They’re all marches, and they’re all in your face. In the symphony, the brass is supposed to be felt and not heard. I see a certain note and I want to blast . . . it, but I can’t.”

Other players have decades of experience, including one retiree who played with the Cleveland Symphony.

At a recent Monday night rehearsal, Snel ran about 65 members, ages 14 to 74, through their paces at the Port Angeles High School Auditorium, which doubles as the symphony’s concert hall.

“Can I have the first violins please? It’s tee dah dah dee,” he sang during one of several instructional timeouts.

“You want to partially get your butts out of the seats on ‘bubba bub bub bum,’ ” he added, jabbing the air with his baton for emphasis.

Snel, who conducted both the Seattle Philharmonic and Port Angeles Symphony until 1995, was unfailingly patient in rehearsal.

“You’re dealing with an all-volunteer orchestra here,” he said. “They put in such an incredible amount of time that, even though sometimes the artist in you says you’ve got to yell, you don’t.”

Seventeen-year-old Sharon Talbot already had logged a full day of high school classes and two hours of practice with the North Olympic Youth Symphony.

“I eat in the parking lot before rehearsal” with the Port Angeles Symphony, she said. “Monday nights are definitely a big commitment for me.”

Bowlby, who supplements her bus-driving income working as a speech therapy assistant for the Cape Flattery School District west of Port Angeles, travels 100 miles round-trip for rehearsal.

Sixty-year-old trombonist Jay Williams is blind and unable to sight-read music. He learns his parts by practicing along with rehearsal tapes at home or downloading them from the Internet.

Principal clarinetist Otto Slehofer, 74, a retired highway engineer, is a 50-year symphony stalwart who has no plans of retiring soon.

Many members’ involvement goes beyond rehearsals and the half-dozen or so major performances per season, to international touring during the summer.

The smaller touring symphony has performed in recent years in Vietnam, Thailand, Greece and Peru. In 1996, the Port Angeles Symphony was the first from the United States to play in Bulgaria.

Bowlby said players’ fund-raising efforts for the trips have included “picking up garbage along roads, playing in small ensembles for events, in grocery stores. I played at Safeway at 4 o’clock in the morning.”