Keeping Score is the San Francisco Symphony’s national, multi-year program designed to make classical music more accessible to people of all ages and musical backgrounds. Keeping Score uses media in its most public and accessible forms to show that classical music can speak to everyone and instill a lifelong love of music.
Keeping Score components include:
- A national PBS television series featuring programs on composers Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Copland
- Multiple Web sites that explore each composer and his music, and music in general, with in-depth interactive content
- A series of national public radio specials hosted by SFS Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas
- Four documentaries and four live San Francisco Symphony performances available on DVD
- An education program for professional development of K-12 teachers, to further teaching through the arts by integrating classical music into core subjects
The Keeping Score PBS television programs on Beethoven, Stravinsky and Copland have been seen by over 4.5 million viewers in the United States, with additional airings across Europe and Asia. The music documentaries and complete San Francisco Symphony performances of works including Beethoven’s Eroica, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and music from The Firebird, and Copland’s Appalachian Spring, are now available for purchase on DVD. A pilot program featuring a documentary about the making of Tchaikovsky’s 4th Symphony, including a complete San Francisco Symphony performance of the work, aired in 2004. The second series of Keeping Score episodes is in production, with Michael Tilson Thomas hosting shows focusing on Berlioz, Shostakovich, and Ives to air on PBS in 2009.
The MTT Files radio shows, hosted by Michael Tilson Thomas and produced by American Public Media and the San Francisco Symphony, have aired on more than 90 stations nationally and internationally. The eight-episode series features MTT reminiscing with and about some of the great artists he’s known, including one of the last interviews given by the late James Brown.
The Keeping Score Web sites on Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Stravinsky and Copland give people of all musical backgrounds a way to explore the music in much greater depth on their own terms and in their own time. Each site features a historical section about the composer’s life and influences; users can explore musical concepts such as Beethoven’s use of themes and key or Stravinsky’s intricate use of meter, interact with the musical scores, and explore audio and video content about the music and the composers.
Keeping Score Education partners with schools districts and orchestras in select communities around the country to realize the goal of bringing classical music into today’s classrooms. More than 100 K-12 teachers from five communities in three states receive training to integrate classical music into core subjects such as science, math, English, history and social studies. Teachers work with San Francisco Symphony educational staff, SFS musicians, and arts educators, and receive professional development training and assistance throughout the school year.
“[The Keeping Score programs] are, hands down, the best classical-music programs of their kind to be aired nationally in the U.S. since Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts. [Michael Tilson Thomas] is the finest American conductor of his generation, and the only one who learned the lessons of Leonard Bernstein, using them to turn the San Francisco Symphony into the most adventurous, audience-friendly orchestra in America.”
— Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal
“Playing music well is difficult, yet the world has an abundance of fine performers. Explaining a little about music is easier, yet few do it well. Those who can do both supremely form a tiny club, whose honorary chairman is the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.”
— Justin Davidson, Newsday
“‘The MTT Files’ [is] an illuminating and often profound look at the way classical music informs many of the larger concerns of our day, such as who we are as Americans and who owns music anyway.”
— Los Angeles Times
Lead funding for Keeping Score is provided by:
with generous support from The James Irvine Foundation, Marcia and John Goldman, Nan Tucker McEvoy, William and Gretchen Kimball Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, Ray and Dagmar Dolby Family Fund, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Lisa and John Pritzker Family Fund, Mrs. Alfred S. Wilsey, Koret Foundation Funds, Tom and Lynn Kiley, Anita and Ronald Wornick, Margaret Liu Collins and Edward B. Collins, the Acacia Foundation, The Bernard Osher Foundation, Mary Falvey, and others.
Broadcast partners:
