Themes and Style 

With one foot in the past and one in the present, ORCHESTRATED will take us back into a world depicted dynamically and relevant to the present moment. The directorial choices will serve and be motivated by our core questions: Who owns the music hall? How were the lives of our characters affected by the lack of access to those stages, and how is it playing out today? The tone of the film will be grounded, busy, and unsentimental. Creative choices will be guided by the spirit of hustle, passion, humor, and artistic excellence that describes our flawed but earnest past and present characters. ORCHESTRATED is about a project that brought together people fed up with second-class citizenship and ready to buck the system. The spirit of powerful collaboration in the arts will fuel the film, showing how the daring goal to elevate lives through creativity, regardless of the end result, becomes a triumphant process in itself. That process permanently transforms the community it serves, laying the ground for lasting social change.

In an unorthodox way, ORCHESTRATED will use the practice of research as a dramatic device. Primary research specific to this film is also one of its themes: to ask questions, to nurture curiosity, to reinterpret the past, to study who we truly are. In the spirit of Eco/Annaud’s THE NAME OF THE ROSE, the scenes of Kyle’s discoveries should be suspenseful and as exciting to the audience as they can be to any scholar who has spent time scrolling through miles of microfilm or sifting through boxes of documents.

ORCHESTRATED will also pulsate with music. The compositions of William Grant Still, Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, James P. Johnson, Noble Sissle, and Eubie Blake, works from the NSO’s repertoire, old radio recordings, and the eclectic, vivacious, layered soundtrack of the era will move to the foreground to support the narrative structure. The audience will experience Ignatz Waghalter’s full melodic force when an orchestra of color performs the “New World Suite” in the movie’s finale. 

Contexts 

Music is called a “universal language,” but the stage door has not always been open to anyone who can play. A 2023 study by the League of American Orchestras reveals that only 2.4% of orchestral musicians and 6.7% of conductors in the U.S. are African Americans. Only in 2021—nearly a century after the Metropolitan Opera rejected a proposal to find a Black soprano for Verdi’s “Aida”—has an opera by a Black composer embedded in African American musical heritage made it to the Met: Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.”