This Saturday (January 26), the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra turns 100 years old—and in a welcome reversal of birthday protocol, it’s giving us all a present. The VSO’s Day of Music, which takes over 10 downtown stages including the orchestra’s home base, the Orpheum, offers 100 separate performances and over 1,000 musicians, spread out over 12 hours of nonstop sound. And it’s all free.

Among the artists present will be the VSO itself, in conjunction with the Vancouver Youth Symphony Orchestra; global luminaries Silk Road Music, Itamar Erez, Hamin Honari, and Nicole Li (as part of the Piano and Erhu Project); representatives of Vancouver Opera; jazz-pianist composer John Stetch; and a variety of choral ensembles, including Elektra Women’s Choir, EnChor, and the Vancouver Youth Choir. It’s a diverse crew—and it signals more diversity in the VSO’s future.

In fact, even as the orchestra celebrates its storied past, it’s enjoying a process of renewal, beginning with the appointment of a new musical director, Dutch conductor Otto Tausk, and concertmaster, English-born Nicholas Wright. Things are changing in the VSO’s management as well, with two relatively recent arrivals in executive positions spearheading a more aggressive—and creative—program of outreach and education.

VSO president Kelly Tweeddale, who assumed her role in 2015, is largely responsible for Day of Music, which builds on similar celebrations she’s organized in Cleveland and Seattle. “I thought it was the perfect opportunity for us to give back to the community—and what you learn from a day like that, where you invite people beyond the orchestra to come and celebrate together, is that it removes barriers of size and opportunity,” she tells the Straight in a telephone interview from the VSO’s downtown offices. “You allow people to be on different stages that maybe they’d never been invited onto, and you allow the community to sample without any risk that they invested in the wrong thing. So we’ll have a lot of pollinators out there going from thing to thing and talking about it and getting a good sample of the rich musical offerings of Vancouver.

“I don’t think we do that enough,” she adds. “And I do think it’s the responsibility of something like the orchestra, which is a big institution, to use its resources to make sure that we have a broad music community both as performers and as audiences.”

Angela Elster, hired as vice-president for the VSO School of Music and community programs last year, agrees that a radical expansion of the orchestra’s outreach program is the key to its ongoing vitality over the next century. “Under the community engagement umbrella, we have a Women’s Voices program, where we interview women guests—artists who come into the symphony, but also women educators, women composers, women conductors,” she explains in a separate telephone conversation. “It’s an underrepresented demographic in the field, and we really want to do what we can to advocate for more women being educated in music, and more women in the spotlight.

“We also have a number of organizations who are part of our community-engagement development program,” she adds. “For instance, through the [Downtown Eastside] Women’s Shelter, the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, and the YWCA, we are able to give several thousand tickets a year for those who do not have access to the symphony.”

Through the School of Music, the VSO is even beginning to grow its own audiences from scratch, with its innovative Early Years music-education program. Enrollment is open to young listeners aged “four weeks to seven years,” Elster explains, “and we are in the process of expanding that to early-childhood centres in the Lower Mainland and beyond, helping early-childhood educators, who may not have a music background, begin to use music throughout their day.”

“In technology, they call this ‘agile development’,” Tweeddale says of the VSO’s varied audience-engagement strategies. “Basically, it’s a series of small experiments until you figure out what works.”

The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s Day of Music takes place at various downtown venues on Saturday (January 26). Find the full schedule HERE.