Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps

Long praised for visionary thinking about the role of an orchestra in its community, in its 2022 – 2023 season The Louisville Orchestra began its Creators Corps program.

Since its founding, the Louisville Orchestra has had a historic and unrivaled commitment to supporting and sustaining living composers and contemporary music. In 1937, the LO board chairman (and later Louisville’s mayor) Charles Farnsley and Robert Whitney, the LO’s founding Music Director and conductor, conceived an adventurous plan: To make the commissioning, performance, and recording of new works a centerpiece of the LO’s global mission. Between 1950 and 1992, the Louisville Orchestra commissioned and recorded up to 52 new compositions from composers worldwide, releasing nearly 150 LPs on its First Edition Records label of more than 450 works by living composers.

Conceived as a successor project to First Edition Records, the Creators Corps also represents a giant leap forward. The initiative asks the three invited creators to act as artist-leaders, developing meaningful relationships with neighborhood residents and embodying the orchestra’s conviction that music is a fundamental part of civic life.

When Teddy Abrams arrived as Music Director in 2014, the LO renewed its dedication to new music with a variety of innovative programming. The LO Creators Corps is the boldest embodiment of this mission to date, connecting the LO’s foundational ethos with a new vision for how creators can sustain and be sustained by the cultural life of a city, a neighborhood, and a community.

The Creators Corps, a first-of-its-kind program that deeply integrates artists in the city of Louisville and with the orchestra, selects three Creators each year to move to Louisville for the upcoming season and live in the Shelby Park neighborhood for at least 30 weeks. The Creators serve as LO staff members, receiving an annual salary, health insurance, housing, and custom-built studio workspaces. Throughout their residencies, the Creators compose new works to be performed by the orchestra, participate in educational and community engagement activities, and become active, engaged citizens of Louisville.

The Creators Corps program has been funded by a three-year, $750,000 grant from The Mellon Foundation and from the generous support of additional individual donors locally and nationally.