To see the diversity of our audience grow exponentially in the last couple of years since we lowered our ticket prices and moved to the Lied, and see that the size of our audience has doubled, that has been very rewarding to me." People think of orchestras as being stuffy and only for an elite few," Zach said, "but we exist to serve this community. "We made a huge push to show that we have a very welcoming personality as an organization. Zach also leads an effort to change the image of the orchestra within the community. "Ed, our conductor, and our principal flute player studied math as undergraduates, and one of our violinists, Kristie Pfabe, is the math department chair at Nebraska Wesleyan,” Zach said. Eighty percent of the musicians are teachers or professors, and all of them but the concertmaster live in Nebraska.
The musicians, who receive their music two weeks before rehearsals begin, prepare alone, but then see one another for four nights before the concert, each with a two-and-a-half hours-long rehearsal. Primarily, she enjoys sitting with Edward Polochick, LSO’s music director who is on the faculty at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, dreaming artistically, and keeping "a running list of dream projects."īut her favorite part of the job is a performance week. She oversees the orchestra’s $1 million budget, of which only 25 percent comes from ticket sales and the rest from donations. As a solo pianist, I spent a lot of time alone, and there is something really beautiful about the community in an orchestra and all these musicians coming together from completely different perspectives, even musically, and creating something that is so compelling."Īs executive director, Zach focuses on thinking about the "big picture," through strategic planning and fund raising. I absolutely fell in love with the art form. "I didn’t realize that this would be the perfect career for me. "I was thinking about grad school or a job in the field of mathematics, and I thought I would find part-time employment in Lincoln while I was looking," Zach said.Īs it turned out, LSO was combining three part-time positions into one full-time orchestra manager position, which she was happy to accept. The position has exceeded all of her expectations. She started out as orchestra manager, coordinating all of the details for concert production, and then was promoted to executive director in 2005. Since graduation, Zach has been working for the orchestra. There is something about the way that you synthesize information for both fields that is similar." In music, complicated sheet music can be understood if someone plays it for you and you can hear it. “In math, that translates into complicated equations that can also be shown visually in graphs that you can understand. "I read a book called ‘Mathematics: The Science of Patterns,’ and it points out that math and music are the only two disciplines with their own language that can only be read by someone skilled, but can be appreciated or understood by anyone," Zach said. The executive director of Lincoln’s Symphony Orchestra (LSO), Zach was a dual mathematics and piano performance major at UNL and has found a satisfying career that unites her two favorite subjects. The connections between mathematics and music fascinate Barbara Zach. Barbara Zach, who was a math and piano performance dual major at UNL, is now the executive director of Lincoln’s Symphony Orchestra.
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