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When 100 string players from four Chicago Public Schools began playing together onstage in Orchestra Hall on Friday, April 25, the fullness of the sound immediately made an impression on several participants. Rehearsing alongside members of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the students were gathered for a daylong convening of high-school orchestras as part of the 2025 Chicago Youth in Music Festival, presented by the Negaunee Music Institute at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Ryan Sheehan, a violinist and senior at Chicago’s Amundsen High School, has participated in the Chicago Youth in Music Festival for three years. “Every year I’ve done it, has been awesome,” he said during a rehearsal break. “It’s great playing in a great big setting like this, because when you’re playing in a smaller orchestra practice room, you don’t really hear all the parts of the song — you don’t hear how the song is supposed to sound. But when you’re playing with the whole orchestra and other orchestras combined, you really experience the music how it’s supposed to be experienced.”
In addition to Amundsen, the combined orchestra included students from Kenwood Academy, Northside College Preparatory High School and Mather High School. Led by conductor Daniella Valdez, the ensemble rehearsed the Allegretto movement from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 and two contemporary pieces by American composers: Turbulence by Williams Owens (a graduate of VanderCook College of Music in Chicago) and Lion City by Soon Hee Newbold. In the afternoon, the orchestra gave a final performance for their teachers and Negaunee Music Institute staff.
The day before the orchestra event, 100 band students from King College Prep, Lincoln Park High School, Mather High School and Northside College Prep gathered at Symphony Center for similar activities with Civic and CSO members. In the months leading up to the band and orchestra convenings, mentors from the Civic Orchestra made more than 250 visits to participating schools to help students prepare the repertoire.
These visits represent one aspect of CSO-Connect, a wide-ranging partnership between the Negaunee Music Institute and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) that provides arts-integration training for teachers and supports school band and orchestra programs. The April convenings represented the culmination of months of hard work by students and Civic mentors.
Sheehan and fellow Amundsen violinists Liz Sanmartin and Charlotte Smyth, both in their junior year, agreed that it was helpful to have a professional violinist work with their section on technical elements, such as shifting, that don’t get as much detailed attention in rehearsals with the full ensemble. “[The Civic mentors] are also really good at identifying what we need to work on in a piece, whereas if the whole orchestra was playing, there would need to be time taken out to help multiple sections,” Smyth said. “But with the violin [mentor], we could play a song and then the leader would just kind of work on the specific parts we needed help on.”
Amundsen teacher Tristan Arnold reflected on what it means for his students to participate in the annual orchestra event. “To have them get to be on the stage at Symphony Center, where the CSO plays, and have that experience of looking around the hall and all the history that’s there, being able to interact with Civic musicians who are further along and can give them help and encouragement, and then being able to connect with their colleagues from other high schools around CPS — they really get to see how what we’re doing in class plugs into the broader musical world,” said Arnold. “Students always come back from this event really inspired by what they’re able to do with the skills that we’re working on, so it really gives relevance to what we’re doing in class.”
Civic violinist Yulia Price mentored students at Amundsen, Northside College Prep and Mather High School this year. The students she worked with represent a range of levels in their musical studies, so she aimed to “meet every student where they’re at” and help each of them feel supported and challenged.
Ultimately, Price hopes to impart an appreciation for music to all the students she works with through CSO-Connect: “I think a lot of them aren’t exposed to [and] don’t know a lot of classical music, so hopefully this will spark an interest in them, and they’ll be the next generation of music lovers.”
