After longtime friend and organist Dan McKinley plays the final notes of Camille Saint-Saens’ Symphony No. 3 Saturday, artistic director David Bowden will not turn and bow as a representative for the orchestra as many conductors worldwide do.
Instead, at the end of this, his final ticketed concert for the Columbus Indiana Philharmonic, Bowden will do as he always has done over his 35 years with the ensemble. He will participate in what is known as a company bow along with his musicians at First Christian Church.
“I am the facilitator,” Bowden said. “But the orchestra members are the ones making the music.
“I want to have everyone who participates to be able to respond to the audience. The closing bow is a courtesy that says to the audience ‘You are important’ as the crowd gives us their applause.
“And the bow says to them, ‘We all did this together.’”
Bowden views his tenure with the organization as just that: a togetherness effort with the musicians, board members, donors, supporters, volunteers and the community.
A search committee hired him, full of charisma and optimism, in July 1987 to launch the then-Columbus Pro Musica orchestra that had no musicians yet at the time. He auditioned and assembled a 65-member orchestra in roughly 60 days.
“We thought we’d be lucky to keep him for five years,” said original and current Philharmonic principal flutist Kathy Dell, a member of the search committee. “He had such a dynamic personality. And we thought we could really prosper from someone with his kind of vision and energy.”
