Get Bach to work: Company orchestras a German tradition
FRANKFURT, Germany — Can performing Beethoven symphonies together help employees team up on projects at work, too? Some companies — above all in Germany and Asia — seem to think so.
A conspicuous number of big German corporate names — along with a handful in Japan and Korea — have their own company-linked symphony orchestra. That means 60 or so accountants, engineers, sales reps and computer specialists who bring violins, cellos, oboes and trombones and gather in their spare time to rehearse and perform lengthy, complex pieces of classical music.
The orchestras serve as public relations tools, playing charity concerts and livening up corporate events.
But there’s more to it than that.
It’s hard to quantify, but the engineer and accountant musicians — and some business experts — argue that a symphony orchestra is an excellent model for the creative teamwork companies need to compete.
“There’s no activity in the world where you have to react so quickly to each other and work together so well as in an orchestra,” says Johanna Weitkamp, conductor of the symphony orchestra at the enterprise software company SAP.
“Down to the hundredth of a second, you have to listen to the other person, respond to the other person, pass the ball to each other — it’s a prime example of good cooperation among people.”
Other companies with employee orchestras include engineering firm Siemens, maker of trains and medical scanners; carmakers Daimler, BMW and Ford; auto components and electronics maker Robert Bosch GmbH; airline Lufthansa, and chemical firm BASF.
At a recent rehearsal, Weitkamp and the SAP musicians filled the cavernous, 2,300-seat Rosengarten auditorium in the southwestern German town of Mannheim with rich, warm string sound, practicing first a bouncy pop mix of Mozart’s Prague Symphony and Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus.” Then the brass blared out the stirring opening notes of John Williams’ theme music for the Olympics, as the orchestra prepared to play at a graduation ceremony for the local college.
Most of the orchestras seemed to have started from the bottom up, from employee initiatives. The SAP orchestra started after Weitkamp joined the company in 1997 and noticed that there were a lot of skilled amateur musicians among her colleagues. “I asked, who wants to join in,” she said.
Weitkamp herself is no mere amateur; she studied conducting at the University of Music and Theater in Leipzig in her native East Germany. Her teachers included the renowned conductor Kurt Masur, a future music director of the New York Philharmonic. But after the Berlin Wall fell, she got another degree, this time in information technology, and moved into the computer field.
She said it’s no surprise that people with math or technology backgrounds are often musical: “You need a high degree of abstract thinking to understand how music functions, and I think there’s a connection that exactly in this field you find so many people who can play violin, oboe, bassoon, clarinet, flute or horn.
Anna Medina, who manages translation projects at SAP and plays in the violin section, said music “gives you skills that you can then apply to basically any job.”
“It gives you a sense of effort, that you have to practice to get things right. It also teaches you that you cannot wait until the last minute. You need to work on it all the time if you want to be successful,” she said before heading out on stage to rehearse.
Management expert Christian Scholz at Saarland University in Saarbruecken says an orchestra embodies the complex blend of skills needed for business teams to perform at a high level.
“It’s team building, but it’s team building in a highly structured way, like business runs. You have the activity of people who are specialized in certain instruments, who have specialized in certain roles, where you even have some competition between them,” he said. “You have democracy, you have hierarchy, you have all these elements of regular business in this task of doing a symphony orchestra.”
In the SAP orchestra, amateur musicians among SAP’s employees mix with professional musicians, giving them a chance to learn from more skilled partners, and giving the orchestra’s sound a glossy finish. All concert proceeds go to charity.
Different companies have different approaches to supporting employee orchestras, ranging from SAP and Daimler, which provide company funding, to BASF, where the employee orchestra, the Collegium Musicum Ludwigshafen, is financially independent and supported by musician dues. While the SAP orchestra is semi-professional, others — like those at Bosch and Lufthansa — are strictly amateur.
Luka Mucic, SAP’s chief financial officer and the orchestra’s official patron in top management, said in a statement that “music, and the complex work of an orchestra, is a great way to amplify our company’s values such as teamwork, discipline and diversity.”
There is one reason behind this burgeoning corporate orchestral scene that should not be forgotten: classical music is a part of Germany’s national culture and a lot of people learn instruments as children.
“It’s team building, but it’s team building in a highly structured way, like business runs. You have the activity of people who are specialized in certain instruments, who have specialized in certain roles, where you even have some competition between them. You have democracy, you have hierarchy, you have all these elements of regular business in this task of doing a symphony orchestra.” – CHRISTIAN SCHOLZ