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To celebrate its 15th anniversary, a Los Altos-based orchestra is doing something that it doesn’t do very often: performing a concert.
The Terrible Adult Chamber Orchestra performs together regularly and also occasionally performs for the public, including a well-received Fourth of July concert. They have also donned costumes for Halloween shows, and staged concerts at the holidays, too. But the typical routine for most orchestras, which involves rehearsing for weeks to prep for a concert — and repeating that cycle numerous times over a season — isn’t usually TACO’s thing.
Although the orchestra’s membership comes mostly from the Peninsula, it draws musicians from throughout the Bay Area and the surrounding regions, including Monterey and Tracy.
“People come for all kinds of reasons. There are people who have retired and haven’t played their instruments since high school or college, and this is a chance to get back into it. And there are people who play with performing orchestras, but they come play with us because they can work on a second or third instrument, and it doesn’t matter with us. There are people who have waited till they retire to finally learn violin or cello because they’ve always wanted to,” said Cathy Humphers Smith, founder, director and conductor of TACO.
This freeform group, which boasts 80-90 members total, brings musicians of all ages and experience levels together once a month to play just for the enjoyment and love of the music, Humphers Smith, said. The orchestra is modeled after the idea of inviting friends over to play music together — and in fact, that’s just how it started, with Humphers Smith and her husband asking about 15 or so musician friends to their home to play. TACO quickly took off from those casual get-togethers.
Building a musical community
TACO gathers on a monthly basis on Sunday afternoons. Humphers Smith chooses about six different tunes for the musicians to play over the course of the afternoon, with music drawn from many different genres — while mostly classical, the group also plays pop, musical theater and more. She chooses music for the group that’s more simply arranged and not in a challenging key so that it’s easier for all members to perform it.
A particularly unique aspect to TACO is that in any given month, the group might, for example, boast a flute section of 13, where traditional orchestras would have two, or six bassoonists might turn up one month but the next gathering might not have any. The group always makes it work.
Everything about TACO is designed to be inclusive and to give members many ways to take part and build a sense of community, Humphers Smith said. (That includes the orchestra’s humorous name, which, far from throwing shade on anyone’s skills, simply aims to take the pressure off. It was inspired by the Really Terrible Orchestra of Scotland, according to TACO’s website.) At each gathering, members take turns bringing snacks, and setting aside time to socialize is a key aspect of each event.
Conventional orchestra rehearsals, Humphers Smith said, don’t afford musicians much free time.
“There really isn’t time to get to know people in a (traditional) orchestra. You might get to know the person who you share a stand with, or the people in your section a little bit. But what we planned in was social time, and it’s really important.”
She said that TACO musicians often use that time to share resources and ideas — the best place to get reeds for a saxophone, for instance, or where to take lessons, or which ensemble might be looking for a violinist. It’s all about building community.
For the members of TACO, there are no auditions, and usually, no rehearsals. Their March 30 concert is an exception to the latter.
TACO’s 15th anniversary concert may be a break from their typical format, but the group is making the most of this unique occasion. The concert will feature the world premiere of “Shoreline to Skyline,” the last commissioned orchestral work by the late Bay Area composer Nancy Bloomer Deussen. TACO commissioned the piece from Bloomer Deussen, who took inspiration from local landscapes for the three-movement piece. In addition to the new composition, TACO will perform four other works by Bloomer Deussen and they will be joined by special guests who include local maestro Tony Quartuccio, Bay Area pianist Bob Sunshine, New York pianist Ron Levy and other area musicians.
About 80 of TACO’s musicians are set to perform at the concert. The concert also features the debut screening of “Silence to Sound,” a short film about Bloomer Deussen and her artistic process.
Finding the way for ‘Shoreline to Skyline’
Humphers Smith met Bloomer Deussen at a Christmas caroling party in 2017 where the composer was performing on the piano. As a fellow pianist herself, she was impressed at once by Bloomer Deussen’s skill and versatility. They became friends and the composer visited a TACO gathering or two. Soon, Humphers Smith had the inspiration to commission a work for TACO from the composer.
The resulting piece has a personal connection, as well. Humphers Smith’s husband donated an inheritance from his mother to TACO in order to commission the work. “Shoreline to Skyline” is dedicated to the memory of his mother.
“(Bloomer Deussen) wrote a lot of things in pictures, like painting the landscapes in music, almost. And I wanted this piece to be based on local landscapes. So we agreed, after a lot of discussion, it would be called ‘Shoreline to Skyline,’ and it would be based on Shoreline Park and also Rancho San Antonio and the middle movement, we argued over,” Humphers Smith said. “For the second movement was, I thought about how this area used to be the ‘Valley of Heart’s Delight.’ It was covered in apricot orchards, and now there’s so much technology, a kind of ‘clashy’ middle movement is what I envisioned.”
But for the piece’s second movement, Bloomer Deussen was more drawn to a theme inspired by space — she lived near Ames Research Center in Mountain View and her husband was an amateur astronomer. After some debate, Humphers Smith and the composer compromised on the second movement, dubbing it “NASA at Moffett Field,” with themes that embrace space and technology as well as the natural landscape around NASA’s Bay Area headquarters.
To gather inspiration for the composition’s third and final movement, Humphers Smith enlisted the aid of a ranger with Midpeninsula Regional Open Space to bring the 88-year-old Bloomer Deussen to a vista at Rancho San Antonio County Park and Open Space Preserve in Cupertino.
“We went up to a viewpoint at Rancho San Antonio, at the top of Wildcat Loop Trail, where I was hiking regularly at the time, and I wanted her to see that, and see the valley below, to understand what I wanted the third movement to be like. That was really special,” Humphers Smith said.
TACO had planned to debut the new work in celebration of their 10th anniversary, in a collaborative concert in April 2020 with a local high school band that was working on another of the Bloomer Deussen’s pieces. The concert would have included a Q&A with the composer about her work and process.
But Bloomer Deussen died unexpectedly in November 2019. Although she completed “Shoreline to Skyline” before her death, learning the piece without being able to consult the composer herself proved something of a challenge for TACO, as there is usually some back and forth between a composer and musicians when a new work is being readied for its debut, Humphers Smith said.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in spring 2020 canceled TACO’s plans for their 10th anniversary performance.
Much of Bloomer Deussen’s process in composing “Shoreline to Skyline” was captured by filmmakers working on a larger documentary about TACO. They pointed out that the footage of the composer’s work could be a film of its own, leading to “Silence to Sound,” the short film that will screen at the March 30 concert.
“They filmed many of these visits that I had with her to capture how she was working on this, and we were going to share that with student musicians and TACO musicians,” Humphers Smith said. “And then the pandemic hit, so this project got shelved, and we came back in the last couple of years thinking, ‘how can we make a concert out of this and honor her, but also wrap our heads around what we didn’t do?'”
Five years later, it has all come together in a new way. A larger scale performance may not be TACO’s typical way of doing things, but inviting the public to come celebrate with them — and experience new music and a new film all at the same time — seems to make perfect sense for a group founded on offering a welcoming place for enjoying music together.
“It’s so fun to get together, to share an afternoon, to read and learn a new piece of music, and then play it through beautifully together, and it’s really fun to watch the friendships that are made among the group, and how satisfied people feel when we’ve played through something and it sounds good, and then you get to anticipate doing it again,” Humphers Smith said of TACO.
TACO and Friends’ 15th Anniversary Concert takes place March 30, 2 p.m., at Visual and Performing Arts Center Theater, De Anza College, 21250 Stevens Creek Blvd., Cupertino. $40 general admission; $20 students/children. tacosv.org/events/2024-2025-season-anniversary.
