Baytown orchestra gets funds to continue

For now, the musicians play on.

A emergency fundraising effort brought in enough to get the Baytown Symphony Orchestra through its 52nd season, which begins Oct. 6, orchestra founder David Corder said. The group, which now has about $48,000 in the bank, still needs about $25,000 more, he said.

The community’s response has been excellent, said Corder, who hopes the orchestra uses this curtain call to focus on modernizing its work.

“After 50 years, people might get sort of tired of listening to you,” Corder said. “We need to enlarge our scope of the kind of concerts we do and where they are.”

Local orchestras such as the one in Baytown perform across Houston and its suburbs. It can be hard for them to find the necessary support. The Woodlands Symphony Orchestra, for example, faced financial problems so severe that it shut down for several years prior to 2013.

Still, Houston Symphony Executive Director John Mangum has called such groups “a vital part of the city’s musical ecosystem.” Members of the orchestras include volunteer amateurs and advanced students, who find them an important way to keep playing.

Those involved say these orchestras serve an important role in their communities, offering an affordable way for people to hear music close to home.

Baytown’s orchestra may seem out of place in the shadow of the area’s plants and refineries, but its members are passionate about the cause. A doctor, music school graduate and high school student are part of the group, which operates in partnership with Lee College.

With funds running out, the orchestra entered emergency mode this year. Baytown’s mayor said he was rooting for the group’s survival. The donations ranged from $30 to $10,000. A couple matched funds up to $5,000.

After postponing its gala twice because of the Intercontinental Terminals Co. fire, the event turned out to be a “rousing success,” principal flutist James Marioneaux wrote.

Marioneaux described these efforts in a letter-to-the editor this week in the Baytown Sun. It was cause to celebrate and a reminder that the orchestra still needed help. Marioneaux asked people to buy program ads or consider joining the board, even if they weren’t musicians.

All that was required, he wrote, was an interest in helping “continue to bring fine music to our community.”