Music Written for the Broken Instruments That Public Schools Couldn’t Afford to Fix

By Annabel Graham
December 6, 2017
Garage Magazine

With “Symphony for a Broken Orchestra,” David Lang and Temple Contemporary are bringing new hope to arts education in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia’s 23rd Street Armory is an awe-inspiring venue: vaulted four-story-high wooden ceilings and exposed brick walls, generous arched windows, polished-concrete floors, all housed within a medieval fortress-style granite structure in the heart of the city. It’s the kind of place you can easily imagine strung with bistro lights for an industrial-chic wedding. This past weekend, however, the Armory was transformed into an unconventional concert hall for the singularly unique, transient musical experience that was “Symphony for a Broken Orchestra”—a piece imagined by Robert Blackson, director of Temple Contemporary at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, and written by Grammy- and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang. The Symphony was composed specifically for 400 of the broken instruments owned by the School District of Philadelphia—instruments which the district previously could not afford to repair due to drastic budget cuts in arts education.