Have you ever felt an orchestral performance? Been within arm’s length of the violinists, the flutist, the timpani’s thunderous drumming? I hadn’t, prior to a mid-March event at the Tenderloin Museum. The sound vibrated through me. The hair stood up on the back of my neck, goose bumps crawled along my forearm. As the volume swelled, I discovered a knot in my throat, and my eyes were watering. I’m no lover of classical music. But the experience grabbed me nonetheless and it has stayed with me.
I was among more than 50 people basking in a kind of oasis that day, as the heat wave outside cooked the neighborhood and the rest of the city. Families and other locals had come for the free performance, a rare kind of sensory experience.
“Many kids, they’ve never seen a clarinet up close, or a viola,” said clarinetist Sarah Bonomo, co-founder of the nonprofit orchestra One Found Sound. The group’s musicians were performing at the event, which was put on in partnership with local organizations La Voz Latina and Tenderloin Housing Clinic. The concert was the culmination of a 12-week event series designed to educate neighborhood kids and families about orchestral music, a genre that can feel exclusive and out of reach.
“Orchestral classical music is inaccessible in the way it’s been historically presented — as high art,” Bonomo said. But it was not always so, she added. Take Ludwig van Beethoven’s own performance of his Symphony No. 5, perhaps the most famous classical work of all time, more than 200 years ago. “People cheered and clapped. It was like going to a show at your favorite bar,” she said.
The Tenderloin concert wove narrative storytelling with an assortment of musical works. Claudia Mulet, a New York-based Broadway performer working with One Found Sound, read aloud a fantasy story about a battle between good and evil over an enchanted town. She told the story in a blend of English and Spanish, for attendees with varying degrees of English proficiency. After each scene, she stepped away from the mic to let the musicians bring the story to life with their instruments.
Yes, they played “Allegro con brio” from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, as the story’s battle escalated — and when they finished, the room erupted. But they also played music from lesser-known composers, as well as the song “Golden” from Netflix’s K-Pop Demon Hunters.
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People smiled as the music surged and jostled its way through the room. They bobbed their heads, sometimes laughed. Most of the children I spotted were attentive, caught in the moment. Some of the youngest napped, sprawled in their strollers or across their parents’ laps, perhaps a welcomed respite for mom or dad.
Mulet asked who in the audience had previously been to a live orchestra. Few hands rose, timidly.
When I nudged Andrew, age seven, for his opinion of the show, he smiled and flashed two thumbs up. He was there with his grandma, Rebecca Nichols, who was counting her lucky stars that she’d noticed an event flyer in the Tenderloin earlier that day. They live two blocks away.
The show was “what we’ve been looking for, for the last few years,” Nichols said. She nodded to Andrew. “He’s seen each instrument separately, but he’s never seen it all together.”
This video shared from Instagram, courtesy of One Found Sound.
Andrew is a gifted kid, and hungry for the arts, but outside of home he struggles to find spaces that nurture his talents and interests, Nichols said. He’s taken to the piano and guitar, and he recently got a sponsored two-week slot in a local summer music camp. The public school system, on the other hand, isn’t serving him, she said. His school lacks programs to nurture his creativity.
And the family can’t easily afford to seek out live classical music themselves. Nichols, 70, made a good living as a show designer for the Rolling Stones and other musical greats, she said, but now the cost of attending performances has to come from her retirement savings, and her monthly allotment is meager.
“He wants to go to plays. He sees [posters for] them every time we go to the bus. But $143 for a ticket? Oh my god!” Nichols said. So they generally scour television for programming on the arts.
Many low-income families in the Tenderloin face these and other barriers to the bounty of arts and culture that San Francisco is known for. The median annual household income in the Tenderloin is about $44,000, less than one-third the citywide median, according to 2023 U.S. Census data.
“We have all this amazing opera, orchestras, but a lot of Spanish-speaking children don’t go to this,” said Gloria Del Mar Lemus, program manager at La Voz Latina.
About one-quarter of the Tenderloin’s roughly 32,000 residents are Hispanic or Latino, Census data shows. Eighteen percent of the neighborhood’s residents speak Spanish at home, making it the next-most common language after English, at 47%.
Lemus worked with One Found Sound to create the event series that concluded that day. At the prior 11 events, musicians from the orchestra demonstrated and explained their instruments to small groups of neighborhood kids in a classroom-like setting. Next, she said, La Voz Latina will fundraise for them and other local families to attend live performances at other venues.
This work was standard fare for One Found Sound, which crafts community-based bilingual programs to teach people about music. In recent years, the organization has partnered with the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department to bring weekly musical workshops to children living in shelters, foster care, and public housing.
One Found Sound is the Bay Area’s only full-scale conductorless orchestra, said Development Director Lalita Pérez. Each show is shaped democratically by the musicians themselves. The group performs everything from reimagined classical masterworks to orchestral pop shows, alongside music by historically underrepresented composers. They play in intimate, unexpected spaces that bring audiences up close, without barriers.
For Alicia Noyola, a financial supporter of One Found Sound, the performance held layers of significance.
“I’m excited about the fact that they’re here, for heaven’s sake, at Leavenworth and Eddy,” she said, because it gave Tenderloin residents an experience that might usually be difficult to seek out.
But maybe the show also made classical music feel more familiar to people, as it has always been for her.
“When I was a kid, my parents liked it, my mom played the piano and we were all expected to play something or the other, and to listen to classical music,” she said.
“And that’s what I hope for other children: that it becomes natural and normal to them,” Noyola said. “That they don’t think of, you know, Beethoven as somebody else’s. He’s theirs too.”
I'm a journalist who has reported for years on San Francisco topics like homelessness, housing, and governance. I co-founded News Relay Network, publisher of the Tenderloin Voice, where I write and edit. Reach me at noah@tlvoice.org.
