My kids have been laughing at me again.
It’s not as if they need a reason, but this time it’s my abject failure as a musician. Before a recent Sunday afternoon concert at Tanglewood, the verdant retreat of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the three of them readied to buzz their lips into brass mouthpieces at an instrument playground tucked under the roof of the old Theater.
There they were — ages 9, nearly 7 and just about 4 — sitting patiently for once as they waited to be handed a trumpet or a trombone. None of them has proved all that musical so far, but the middle one had wielded a trombone in exactly this spot a year earlier, and she had talked about trying it again ever since. So here we were.
Instruments went to mouths, and notes blasted out. But when I tried? Not so much.
There is one man to blame for this debacle, and his name is Glenn Bergman. Bergman, 73, is the star of the instrument playground, overseeing its loudest section with improbable energy and ceaseless good humor. A substitute teacher, he has been coming to Tanglewood for three decades, and for the past couple of years has been among the hundreds of volunteers who make the festival possible. He gave ushering a shot last season, but it wasn’t really his vibe. As an amateur brass player himself, he tried out for the instrument playground instead.
“That was it, I was done,” Bergman recalled in a phone interview. “I just think it’s exciting to see a kid make some noise. To see a 3-year-old actually make a toot and have everybody start clapping is a wonderful, positive thing. That’s why I do it.”
At Tanglewood, as Bergman cajoled parents and even grandparents to join the little ones at play, Mark Orenstein looked on from his seat down the path.
“Glenn, I think, has a background as a carnival barker — he can really draw people,” Orenstein said wryly in a phone interview. Orenstein, 80, takes a more serene approach, but he has the wisdom of experience. He’s been involved with these activities since near enough the turn of the century, and started out as an instrument sanitizer, a crucial role that his wife, Dianne, takes on today. He also has a secret weapon, which he sits holding still as preschoolers wander up, looking curious. Orenstein has a tuba.
“It’s just a joy to see it,” Orenstein said of the rumbling that invariably results. “Sometimes the joy is in the kids, sometimes the joy is in the parents. It’s a great time.”
Families are hardly new around Tanglewood, where children have picnicked on the lawns and gotten lost on the way to the maze decade after decade. The festival is widely known as the place where the Boston Symphony trains the next generation of professional musicians through its fellowship programs, but it’s also where it most effectively trains its future listeners, starting a hoped-for journey from tot to trustee. The orchestra projects that attendance topped 182,500 at classical events this summer, including 10,000 or so children.
“If you want to see what the future of classical music audiences looks like, come to the lawn at Tanglewood,” said Chad Smith, the Boston Symphony’s president and chief executive. “We want to be imprinting on these kids a positive experience around music, so that they’re going to come back with their kids or their grandkids.”
THE ORCHESTRA IS AWARE that happy faces are not always a given when it comes to children and classical music. Concerts come with rules, and mortifying requests for calm and quiet, with implicit demands that kids be anyone other than themselves. This is true, in my experience, even of summer festivals. Sometimes Tanglewood’s Shed feels like Symphony Hall in exile; children under 5 are rightly banned, but my elder daughters often get glares for joining me under its roof. Even on the lawn, there has been no guarantee that kids — some of whom arrive for evening concerts in their pajamas, sleeping bags in tow — won’t be shushed for the slightest infraction.
“I really do remember times when parents would be told, ‘Your kids are being too noisy,’” said Amy Aldrich, a 29-year veteran of the Tanglewood staff who serves as senior director for patron experience. “It takes a lot for you to pack your kids up, to get them dressed, to get them fed, to get their naps all taken care of. You get in the car, you come here, and that’s already a feat unto itself. And then to come here and have a bad experience like that, that’s a horrible feeling. I don’t want anybody to feel that way.”
In the last few years, Tanglewood has become noticeably more welcoming to its youngest guests, as older traditions have expanded and new initiatives have been put in place. Lawn tickets for up to four kids per grown-up are free at the door at standard concerts. (Adults pay $23 to $37 at the gate, and more in advance.) Cornhole is ready and waiting, and there are art tables on weekends, with crafts tied to the concerts at hand. Ushers have been told to redirect Frisbee games to more distant grass instead of killing playtime altogether. Ice cream carts are suddenly everywhere. Crucially, dedicated programming is ramping up beyond existing family favorites like John Williams Film Night — much of it from the Tanglewood Learning Institute, whose TLI for Families programs barely keep up with vigorous demand.
Running through it all, a basic philosophy has emerged. Longing for new audiences on the one hand and convinced of their art’s inherent greatness on the other, classical music organizations sometimes come off as desperate when appealing to kids, but an eat-your-greens, isn’t-this-Mozart-cool approach has predictably woeful results. Nowadays, Tanglewood is trying just to let kids enjoy themselves around music, so that it feels normal, and good.
“For me,” the TLI for Families organizer Mark Rulison said, “it’s about kids hearing that sound, and associating that sound, in this place, with positive memories.”
YOU MAY GO to Tanglewood to see Yo-Yo Ma. Eight-year-olds go to see Rebecca Sheir.
If your nearest preteen hasn’t filled you in, Sheir is the queen of children’s podcasting, a former NPR reporter who left Washington after the 2016 election and settled in the Berkshires with her partner, the composer Eric Shimelonis. They started “Circle Round” soon after, adapting folk tales as audio plays, complete with guest actors and original scores that make it as much a musical enterprise as a story-time standby. A WBUR show with almost 300 episodes and counting, it gets about 1.5 million downloads per month, Sheir said. Hilary Hahn has starred in it.
Sheir wasn’t a Tanglewood tot herself, but she and Shimelonis have raised one of their own, and “Circle Round” has created many more by taping live in concert from the Linde Center for Music and Learning since 2019. If I take my kids to Tanglewood and it isn’t a “Circle Round” weekend, I hear about it. And I bet other parents do, too: There used to be one show, now there are two, and the events pack Symphony Hall as well, all with Boston Symphony musicians lending their skills. “It might sound kind of cheesy,” the bassist and podcast veteran Ben Levy said, “but I do just love sitting in those concerts and seeing the kids.”
“Circle Round” is directly responsible for Rulison’s efforts to start and grow TLI for Families, and not just during summers. The hip-hop artist Baba Israel is a regular collaborator, but more traditional classical events get a twist, too. Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” got a hilarious July performance with Jayne Atkinson as the narrator. There was an energetic troupe of local actors armed with comedy props, a creative staging that used every inch of available space and let kids tie up the villainous wolf, and an orchestra of Boston University Tanglewood Institute youngsters wearing animal ears. Everyone could meet the musicians and their instruments afterward; having tentatively engaged with a bass drum on his way out, my youngest declared that he wanted to see it all again — immediately.
Some of Sheir’s deeper beliefs seem to be rubbing off, too. If there’s a basic impulse behind “Circle Round,” it’s that children are not idiots. “There’s no need to talk down to kids, there’s no need to pander to them,” Sheir said, and noted how the podcast is totally unafraid to use long words and totally uninterested in poop jokes. “They understand and enjoy more than you realize.”
That’s the bet behind Tanglewood’s broader array of family concerts, which ask a fair bit of kids. Coming a lunchtime after “Peter and the Wolf,” a charming Concert for Very Young People was conceived by the composer Allen Feinstein and hosted by Sheir. It smushed several different ways of engaging into an hour: a story with musical backing; a sequel that asked kids to imagine what a score was depicting without words; singalongs of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”; even a Q&A period, which my wife told me was adorable. I had to miss that part because my very young person found it all a bit much and decided he needed the bathroom instead.
If there’s a flagship in all this, it’s the annual Family Concert in the Shed, which is presented on a weekend morning under the youth and family concert conductor Thomas Wilkins. This year, he appeared in a T-shirt with the word “maestro” emblazoned on the back. He truly welcomes children taking a stroll down the aisles or chitter-chattering through Beethoven, but make no mistake: These are real concerts, properly rehearsed by the Boston Symphony and with enough serious, offbeat repertoire — George Whitefield Chadwick, Morton Gould — to make a critic sit up straight.
But Wilkins primarily wants people to have fun, too, and he makes sure that a theme like “family” gives everyone a hook. He talks, giggles and clambers off the stage, telling as many jokes aimed at parents as those at children. Even with his distinctive combination of grandfatherly kindness and flaming zeal, the balancing act is nearly impossible, especially as it attracts patrons with toddlers through teens. Whether it works probably depends on the mood of a family on any given day. What is never in doubt, though, is his commitment to the cause.
“I think it’s a great point of pride for all of us, that we, together, are helping usher in a new generation of listeners,” Wilkins said. “People often talk about education as our future, but they’re talking about dollars and cents. I’m talking about the moral responsibility that we have of creating new generations of listeners.”
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