Grand Rapids Symphony takes music to zoo with free Neighborhood Series
The Symphony is expanding its efforts in diversity, inclusion, and equity with a Wege Foundation grant. These efforts include free neighborhood concerts for all.
The Grand Rapids Symphony is bringing the community a free concert at John Ball Park on July 21, at 7:00 p.m. with “Symphony on the West Side.” Attending this family-friendly concert does require reserving tickets, though, and they’re going fast. This first event in the new Neighborhood Concert Series is just the start to the Symphony venturing out into various Grand Rapids neighborhoods.
The Grand Rapids Symphony has been a fixture in Grand Rapids arts since 1930. Many Grand Rapidians have visited the DeVos Performance Hall and enjoyed classical music and crossovers alike. Since their start, the Symphony has expanded to new venues, festivals, and more. And now, the Symphony is going to the zoo.
“What we’re trying to do is take the music out of the concert hall and bring it to the people,” says Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk, Grand Rapids’ Symphony’s Senior Manager of Communications and Media Relations.
Taking the music out into the community, starting with John Ball Park, is just one part of how the Grand Rapids’ Symphony is utilizing a $1 million grant from the Wege Foundation.
“The spirit of the grant is to expand our work towards diversity, equity, and inclusion. There are many components to that, but one of them is to take music out of the concert hall to where people live,” says Kaczmarczyk.
Symphony performances usually start at about $18 a ticket, though they already have in place plenty of lower-cost opportunities for students, military, and other programs like MySymphony360. But this concert is completely free, providing a great chance for more people to dip their toes into classical music.
“With the Wege funding we get to do it for free, and an orchestra concert is expensive [to produce]. If you think about it, you’re going to have 60 to 70 musicians on stage who are getting paid for their work, and the backstage support staff,” says Kaczmarczyk. “So it can be an expensive art form. Putting on a free concert is something we love to do and we’d certainly do more if we could.”
John Ball Park has been a local fixture on the West Side for a long time, and hosts a variety of events for families every year. The concert itself will happen outside the zoo on the south side of the park.
“We decided to try the zoo because it’s a large park, it’s close to downtown, and the West Side is sometimes overlooked,” says Kaczmarczyk. “It seemed like that was a good spot to have the first event, and we have a great partner with John Ball Park Zoo.”
The concert will have a variety of music, from Shostakovich’s Festive Overture to the theme from Jurassic Park. Local jazz singer Edy Evans Hyde will also be performing, accompanied by Terry Lower, a jazz pianist. The wide range of music aims to appeal to the wide audience the Symphony hopes to serve.
“This program that we’re doing…is a little of everything. We hope to especially attract people who live in the neighborhood. It’s music that you’ve heard of or you would know once you hear it. You would say, ‘Ah, yes! I recognize that.’ Or it’s music we know from experience that audiences seem to like,” Kaczmarczyk says.
This is just one of the Grand Rapids Symphony’s next steps in making classical music more equally accessible for all Grand Rapids residents.
“Music is the universal language; nearly everyone loves music. The challenge for a symphony orchestra is it’s a European art form. It comes from that culture and that background, but this isn’t Europe,” says Kaczmarczyk.
The Symphony now wants to take their outreach a step further and go into the communities, rather than just inviting the community to the Symphony’s space.
“We want to make the music available for everyone. It’s not as simple as saying, ‘We’re doing our concerts of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, and you’re invited.’ We’ve been doing that that for years,” he explains. “We’re trying to step our game up more, and approach it more from the standpoint of, ‘What are you interested in? What do you like to hear? And what can we do?’”
Symphony on the West Side
John Ball Park
July 21
Event Page
Tickets: Call the Grand Rapids Symphony at 616.454.9451 x4, or visit
Grand Rapids Symphony online
