Company orchestras are German tradition

Associated Press

FRANKFURT, Germany

Can performing Beethoven symphonies together help employees team up on projects at work, too? Some companies – above all in Germany and Asia – seem to think so.

A conspicuous number of big German corporate names – along with a handful in Japan and Korea – have their own company-linked symphony orchestra. That means 60 or so accountants, engineers, sales reps and computer specialists who bring violins, cellos, oboes and trombones and gather in their spare time to rehearse and perform lengthy, complex pieces of classical music.

The orchestras serve as public relations tools, playing charity concerts and livening up corporate events.

But there’s more to it than that.

It’s hard to quantify, but the engineer and accountant musicians – and some business experts – argue that a symphony orchestra is an excellent model for the creative teamwork companies need to compete.

“There’s no activity in the world where you have to react so quickly to each other and work together so well as in an orchestra,” says Johanna Weitkamp, conductor of the symphony orchestra at the enterprise software company SAP.

“Down to the hundredth of a second, you have to listen to the other person, respond to the other person, pass the ball to each other – it’s a prime example of good cooperation among people.”

Other companies with employee orchestras include engineering firm Siemens, maker of trains and medical scanners; carmakers Daimler, BMW and Ford; auto components and electronics maker Robert Bosch GmbH; airline Lufthansa, and chemical firm BASF.

At a recent rehearsal, Weitkamp and the SAP musicians filled the cavernous, 2,300-seat Rosengarten auditorium in the southwestern German town of Mannheim with rich, warm string sound, practicing first a bouncy pop mix of Mozart’s Prague Symphony and Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus.” Then the brass blared out the stirring opening notes of John Williams’ theme music for the Olympics, as the orchestra prepared to play at a graduation ceremony for the local college.

Most of the orchestras seemed to have started from the bottom up, from employee initiatives. The SAP orchestra started after Weitkamp joined the company in 1997 and noticed that there were a lot of skilled amateur musicians among her colleagues. “I asked, who wants to join in?” she said.

Weitkamp herself is no mere amateur; she studied conducting at the University of Music and Theater in Leipzig in her native East Germany. Her teachers included the renowned conductor Kurt Masur, a future music director of the New York Philharmonic. But after the Berlin Wall fell, she got another degree, this time in information technology, and moved into the computer field.

She said it’s no surprise that people with math or technology backgrounds are often musical: “You need a high degree of abstract thinking to understand how music functions, and I think there’s a connection that exactly in this field you find so many people who can play violin, oboe, bassoon, clarinet, flute or horn.

Anna Medina, who manages translation projects at SAP and plays in the violin section, said music “gives you skills that you can then apply to basically any job.”