Just about every week, conductor Sandra Dackow hops in her car and drives three hours to central Pennsylvania, where she presides over a rehearsal with members of the Hershey Symphony Orchestra.
Or perhaps it’s a concert week, as this one is. Or maybe she’s overseeing an all-day rehearsal for the Festival Strings, a string ensemble comprised of middle school students, as she did on Martin Luther King Day at Eagle View Middle School in Silver Spring Township.
View full sizeHershey Symphony conductor Sandra Dackow conducts middle school students who are part of the Hershey Symphony Festival Strings as they rehearse at Eagle View Middle School in Silver Spring Township. Regardless of the reason for the trip, Dackow almost always drives the 170 miles back to her home in Ridgewood, N.J., the same evening. Only a major storm will keep her planted.
“My schedule does not allow me to do otherwise,” she explained. She is a faculty member at William Paterson University near her home and also conducts the university’s symphony orchestra.
She’s been making these weekly trips for 20 years. Hundreds of hours staring at long gray ribbons of highway.
Do not try to sympathize.
“All conductors are always looking for positions,” Dackow said. “We don’t choose where we work. We don’t have that luxury, ever. I wish I could give you a more romantic answer that says, ‘Oh, I love Hershey, and that’s why I came here.’ The truth is I applied for the job and went through a two-year search process.”
If the answer sounds curt, don’t be fooled.
Dackow simply doesn’t indulge in self-pity. But as a conductor, she’s patient and understanding with the musicians she is leading, whether they are highly skilled professionals or seventh-graders still learning to bow a violin.
“She doesn’t downgrade a musician if he plays something wrong,” said bassoonist Ruth Barley, a retired nurse who joined the Hershey Symphony in 1970 and served on the search committee that chose Dackow. “She’s always done it in a very neutral way that made someone want to improve. She pulls the talent from everybody.”
And her decision to stay with Hershey for two decades is more than a matter of just having a job.
“I’m lucky,” she said after finishing rehearsal with the Festival Strings youngsters. “I’ve invested heavily in the relationship, and the orchestra itself has invested, has become entangled with the community, such as what you see today. That’s investing in the future. And we’ll harvest a few of them. Every year there are members of this group who go on to be members of the symphony. You see the fire in their eyes.”
Dackow, whose father was a professional violinist, received her formal musical training at the renowned Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., where she studied violin and received a doctorate.
Her informal training came when, as a youngster, she went with her father to summer orchestra rehearsals near her hometown of East Paterson, N.J.
“I would just watch,” she recalled. “I couldn’t think of any place I wanted to be more than in that environment.”
She began conducting almost immediately after leaving college, when she taught in a public high school and led the student orchestra.
Learning to conduct well, Dackow has learned, is a humbling process.
“You make mistakes, and you learn from those mistakes,” the 60-year-old conductor said. “Maybe you are using your voice too much or your hands not enough, so you learn to say less and express much more with your hands. You learn that this is not about you. You are there to enable everyone else to find their best music within themselves.”
Dackow has learned those lessons, according to violinist Karen Paris, who has been a member of the Hershey Symphony since 1976.
“She’s just pulled us all together and made us so much stronger,” Paris said. “I’m hoping we don’t ever lose her. It would be really nice if a major orchestra would pick her up — and she’s certainly good enough — but we would miss her terribly.”
The orchestra of 80 to 90 musicians is all-volunteer, although Dackow is paid. The players mostly live in the four counties around Hershey, and range in age from talented middle schoolers to retirees.
Membership in the Hershey Symphony is pretty stable, with a core of players who predate Dackow. The orchestra formally began playing in 1969, but before that it was a loose chamber ensemble of doctors from the Hershey Medical Center.
The conductor flares if anyone suggests her orchestra is “amateur.”
“They are not paid to play for us, but many are musical professionals,” Dackow said. “Many of them have advanced degrees in music and are working in the music profession. Many are compensated for playing in other orchestras.”
Some even play in that “other” HSO, the professional Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra in the nearby state capital.
“There are volunteer orchestras at a high level,” Dackow said. “I like to think we are one of those.”
When she’s not working in Hershey or New Jersey, Dackow is an author and globe-trotter who has conducted and taught from Hong Kong to Ireland.
She’s still always going where the work is.
Paris said the Hershey Symphony has been lucky to keep Dackow so long.
“We’ve had a wonderful honeymoon,” she said. “Twenty years is a long time for a conductor to stay with one orchestra.”
If you go
What: "Love is in the Air," with Hershey Symphony Orchestra and conductor Sandra Dackow
When: 8 p.m. tonight
Where: Hershey Theatre, 15 E. Caracas Ave., Derry Township.
Program: Overture to "La Belle Helene" by Jacques Offenbach; Variations on a Theme by Paganini by Sergei Rachmaninoff; and Symphony No. 2 ("Romantic") by Howard Hanson.
Tickets: $18 adults, $15 senior citizens, $10 students 12 and over.
Info: www.hersheysymphony.org
Sandra Dackow
Born: East Paterson, N.J.
Current residence: Ridgewood, N.J.
Education: Bachelor's degree, master's degree and doctorate from Eastman School of Music, Rochester, N.Y.
Current posts: Music director, Hershey Symphony Orchestra; conductor, William Patterson University Symphony Orchestra, where she serves on the strings faculty; president-elect, the international Conductors Guild.
Previous experience: Conducted bands and orchestras in the schools of Glen Rock and East Brunswick, N.J.; supervisor of music for the Ridgewood, N.J., public schools: former chair of string department and orchestra director at Slippery Rock University; teacher or conductor at Brandeis University, Eastman School of Music, Temple University, Montclair State College, Wichita State University and University of Alaska at Fairbanks
International experience: Conducting, adjudicating or teaching in Canada, England, Hong Kong, Singapore, Ukraine, South Africa, Australia and Ireland.