The Score | Factory Made

This October, a former machine shop in Johnstown, Pennsylvania provided an unusual site for a free concert (below) by the Johnstown Symphony Orchestra. Inside the long-closed 40,000-square-foot Cambria Iron Lower Works building, Music Director James Blachly led the concert before a standing-room-only crowd that included former steelworkers and their families as invited guests. The program included Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony—“representing that Johnstown’s greatness is unfinished,” Blachly noted—and Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915. Selections from Bernstein’s On the Waterfront were performed as the film was projected on the walls of the steel mill. Also shown during the Bernstein was additional footage, commissioned by Johnstown Area Heritage Association, shot in Johnstown two weeks before the steel mills closed in 1992. Blachly and Executive Director Michael Walther felt the mammoth machine shop offered the exact combination of acoustics, aesthetics, and historical significance they had been hoping to find.