About Keeping Score™

Starting October 15, 2009, the second season of Keeping Score, featuring the San Francisco Symphony and hosted by Michael Tilson Thomas, premieres nationally on PBS (check your local listings). Keeping Score is much more than a critically acclaimed PBS television series: it is a natural outgrowth of the San Francisco Symphony’s almost century-long commitment to bringing the joy of classical music to people of all ages and musical backgrounds. Keeping Score provides innovative, thought-provoking classical music content on PBS television, national public radio, the web, and through an education program, a national model for classroom arts integration for K-12 teachers.

Keeping Score Components Include:

TELEVISION SERIES on PBS

Keeping Score Season 2 presents three one-hour documentary-style episodes and two live concert programs that begin airing nationally on PBS stations beginning Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 10 p.m. (check local listings). In Keeping Score Season 2, Michael Tilson Thomas and the musicians of the San Francisco Symphony explore the music and stories of Hector Berlioz, Charles Ives and Dmitri Shostakovich, composers who each struggled with musical language as a unique expression of their ideas. Shot in a variety of locations throughout the world, the Keeping Score programs offer audiences a unique journey into the lives and music of the featured composers.

WEB SITE: www.keepingscore.org

The Keeping Score web site is designed to give people of all musical backgrounds an opportunity to explore signature works by composers Hector Berlioz, Charles Ives, and Dmitri Shostakovich in depth, and at their own pace. www.keepingscore.org offers an interactive area for each composer, with clues and context to illuminate the musical mysteries presented by the television episodes. The interactive audio and video explores the composers’ scores and pertinent musical techniques as well as the personal and historical back stories. The site is designed to particularly appeal to high school, college and university music appreciation students and their teachers, and its interactive learning tools offer a unique and in-depth online learning experience. The site includes groundbreaking and acclaimed interactives on composers Beethoven, Stravinsky, Copland and Tchaikovsky. The site also includes a new historical timeline that takes users deeper into the seven individual composers’ political, social, and cultural milieus as well as downloadable lesson plans created by teachers who have experienced the Keeping Score Education program.

RADIO SERIES

Keeping Score’s new radio series debuts next winter with thirteen episodes revealing thirteen musical revolutions: composers, compositions or musical movements that changed the way people heard, or thought about, music. Each program will explore the historical backdrop and musical precursors to the revolutionary change, as well as examine the aftershock and the lasting influence of that moment in music history. Host Suzanne Vega returns to join Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, collaborators on the Peabody Award-winning The MTT Files and American Mavericks radio programs, some of the most listened-to classical music programs of all time.

EDUCATION PROGRAM

Designed to help students learn through the arts, the Keeping Score Education program builds on the themes and concepts from the Keeping Score television series. The model program offers K-12 teachers training, materials, and support to integrate classical music into their classrooms, including core subjects such as science, math, English, history and social studies. Participating teachers from partner school districts receive training by San Francisco Symphony musicians, educational staff and a variety of arts educators. The Keeping Score Education program is working with partner sites in Fresno, Sonoma and Santa Clara counties; Flagstaff, Arizona; and the Oklahoma A+ Network statewide program. An integral part of the program is the annual Keeping Score Summer Teacher Institute, this year scheduled for June 17-21, 2009, a multi-faceted professional development experience that builds teachers’ understanding of both music and integrated curriculum design. The Keeping Score community engagement program aims to further participation in, and exposure to, classical music through distribution of specially prepared Keeping Score materials and partnerships with schools, arts organizations and presentations in community and cultural centers.

HOME VIDEO and DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION

Keeping Score Season 2 will be released on DVD and Blu-Ray High Definition formats through SFS Media, the San Francisco Symphony’s own label. Each of the three DVDs features the documentary episode coupled with the concert performance of the work, with Michael Tilson Thomas leading the San Francisco Symphony. The concert performances are captured in full HD at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, with outstanding production values. The San Francisco Symphony is the first orchestra to distribute its product on Blu-Ray disc. DVD sales begin this fall at the San Francisco Symphony’s online store at www.shopsfsymphony.org and retail outlets worldwide. After the fall 2009 broadcast, PBS will release Keeping Score Season 2 through its digital distribution channels, including iTunes, Zune, and others. Keeping Score Season 1 will be available on download-to-own channels in the fall shortly before Keeping Score Season 2 premieres on PBS in October.

CONTACT

Inquiries may be directed to .

SUPPORT FOR KEEPING SCORE

Lead funding for Keeping Score is provided by:

with generous support from Nan Tucker McEvoy, The James Irvine Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Marcia and John Goldman, Ray and Dagmar Dolby Family Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, William and Gretchen Kimball Fund, Lisa and John Pritzker, Mrs. Alfred S. Wilsey, Koret Foundation Funds, Lynn and Tom Kiley, Anita and Ronald Wornick, Roselyne Chroman Swig, Margaret Liu Collins and Edward B. Collins, the Acacia Foundation, Matt Cohler, The Bernard Osher Foundation, Betty and Jack Schafer, Felipe R. Santiago and Barry T. Joseph, Mary C. Falvey, Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, Dr. and Mrs. Jeffrey P. Hays, Mark Heising and Liz Simons, David and Janyce Hoyt, Laurence and Michèle Corash, and others.

"[The Keeping Score programs] are, hands down, the best classical-music programs of their kind to be aired nationally in the U.S. since Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts. [Michael Tilson Thomas] is the finest American conductor of his generation, and the only one who learned the lessons of Leonard Bernstein, using them to turn the San Francisco Symphony into the most adventurous, audience-friendly orchestra in America."

— Terry Teachout,
The Wall Street Journal

"Playing music well is difficult, yet the world has an abundance of fine performers. Explaining a little about music is easier, yet few do it well. Those who can do both supremely form a tiny club, whose honorary chairman is the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas."

— Justin Davidson,
Newsday

"The MTT Files [is] an illuminating and often profound look at the way classical music informs many of the larger concerns of our day, such as who we are as Americans and who owns music."

— Mark Swed,
Los Angeles Times

[MTT] has turned the San Francisco Symphony into an admirable education enterprise. The orchestra offers workshops and resources for K-12 teachers. It has produced flashy TV shows on Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Stravinsky and Copland, all out on DVD and including some fine performances, plenty of scenic travelogue shots and rapid-fire morsels of information. If all the fast cutting isn't fast enough, a website — www.keepingscore.org — provides many of the small segments for those who like to click for tidbits.

– Los Angeles Times

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