Pop Music for Time Travelers

A typical “pops” orchestra tends to fit a well-known mold, playing a repertoire dominated by famous movie scores and large-scale arrangements of popular music. The Harvard Pops Orchestra, celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, is anything but typical.

“What makes us different than all other student and pops orchestras is that we put on a show that’s theater. We’re sort of a hybrid,” says Elizabeth S. Weinbloom ’07. Weinbloom is a cellist and script writer for the group’s upcoming Arts First concert on Sunday, May 6. “We don’t know of any other orchestra group that works the way we do.”

Since its inception in 1996, the Harvard Pops Orchestra has been presenting themed concerts, often pun-based. They’ve ranged from “Pops Goes to the Oscars” (including movie themes, but also Oscar the Grouch and Oscar Meyer wieners) to “Pops Rocks” (including rock music, Rachmaninoff, and “that big rock in Indiana Jones”). The orchestra prides itself on its unique, family-friendly shows, and in recent years, the skits which tie the different musical numbers into a much more complex and theatrical affair.

“Almost all of our concerts end up having some work with silent film, sometimes vintage, sometimes student-made, with original scores,” Weinbloom says. “We do a lot of work with student composers, and it’s basically the newest music you’ll hear anywhere, because a lot of the music is written for our performance.”

But the drama of a Pops performance involves much more than film. This week’s concert, “Pops Travels Back to the Future,” will incorporate time-travel antics.

“Our conductor tends to get shot in every performance,” says Weinbloom. “In the case of this concert, someone will be killed early on in the program, and the orchestra will have to go back in time to correct it.”

The orchestra normally performs in the intimate setting of Lowell Lecture Hall, but for this tenth-anniversary concert, Pops will perform to a larger audience in Sanders Theatre.

Sanders Theater, usually home to the tuxedo-clad players of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, will get a good dose of the whimsical when Pops invades, according to Weinbloom.

“It’s going to be tricky to fit that inclusive group theatricality of [Lowell Lecture Hall]…into the formality of Sanders, but Sanders also gives us a lot more possibility acoustically,” he says.