The Orchestra of Music Makers: Lee Guan Wei at TEDxNUS
i run this orchestra of about 100 members okay so when i talk about orchestra all right okay so when i talk about orchestra you might think about you know white people with white hair or no hair you know or well it's for old people or maybe it's just you know boring but this is us we are on average 21 years of age and come from different backgrounds okay and we just come together to perform basically because we love music we love classical music for what it is for the way it's the epitome of artistic development in sound and we just try and coordinate all our 100 schedules just to come together and perform music okay so this is a time to talk about our name orchestra the music maker okay some people say it's redundant you might as well call it library of the book reader highway of the drivers but i think one question to ask is you know do the book readers own their own library i mean do drivers on the highway in our case our musicians own our own orchestra and then our name also extends from this poem by arthur o'shaughnessy ode which is displayed here for you it essentially tells you that we as musicians we perform to affect you and if we can't find an avenue to affect you we will just form one to just affect you so what had happened okay people graduate from their school ensembles and traditionally you would go to music school and you would then go on to a full-time professional orchestra but what about all these other people who have had musical training but maybe decided for themselves hey i don't want to pursue a full-time musical career so this is what happened we got ourselves small and somehow we are so appealing that some people actually from music schools actually kind of participated in our activities as well okay so with this orchestra formed what we seek to do we seek to do two things one being very singaporean we want to be good at what we do so we gone for musical excellence okay the other thing we do is we want to use music to contribute back to society it may be tangibly true fundraising efforts for charity or i mean the very fact that we are producing culture and music helps society as well in order to bond society okay so this little project of ours we plan to do well two concerts here but somehow i got a little bit out of control with it um i think 13 concerts in this 2.5 years okay um in 2009 hsbc was kind enough to drop us a award which is the user excellence award which we're very thankful for we've launched two cds we raised 1.7 million for charity we've appeared in international newspapers and locally as well and just last month we went on concert tour to malaysia as part of a exchange with penang musicians okay so what's the first takeaway point is that well we all have our passions and our ideas but i mean it's one thing to think about them but thinking doesn't get you anywhere you know you're not telepathic you can't make things move with your mind so i would encourage all of you to put your actions put your thinking into actions the second thing i want to talk about is how do you harness the power of people how do you bring like 100 people together to really put something together that is greater than the sum of its parts first is you have you have to know what drives people daniel h pink talks about three factors the first being autonomy people want the freedom to have the ideas expressed second is mastery people want to be able to improve themselves improve their skills that is purpose people want meaning in their work so how how do we harness all these things okay in traditional orchestras most people the management would well decide all the programs okay here's your here's your program um well you have no choice just kind of participate in it but the way we do it is we harness the ideas from the musicians what they want to program and do for the next two years three years we program out the entire musical program and we consult with each other and technically the management are also the performers so in that way it's really a bottom-up approach that allows the drive and passion to really take the organization forward at a more macro level i mean this being singapore you've gotta get a lot of this and sometimes people will participate in it sometimes they don't but the power comes here in civic society which almost part of in the arts and culture segment we harness the combined passions of people to really take singapore's artistic development in its own direction okay the last point i want to make is about the power of music music has the power to be used for philanthropy building relationships education music therapy medicine and maybe things that we haven't even thought about yet okay as i've said we have used music for philanthropy we've also used music to connect people from malaysia australia bangkok in some of our past events and some of you might be familiar with um ted prize winner jose bray who runs a music system in venezuela well we don't do that but we would like to but obviously we don't have the resources too because this is a government-run program he basically uses music to really educate the children of venezuela and really develop their character and discipline which has really helped to bond the venezuelan society together okay what are the grand plans for om hopefully that we can connect throughout the asia-pacific region help musicians in other countries to form their own organizations with goals such as such as ours so with that i will kind of leave you with what it feels like to bring together these four things people passion the power of music and the purpose to serve the community this uh i'll show show you a clip of our concert that we did last year in aid of the straight science pocket money fan and business times running artist fund and we also brought together um choirs from all over singapore and from australia to put together mahler's second symphony the resurrection so i hope you will ponder about the things i have shared as i play the video so so thank you very much you