This article was originally published in Maryland Today.
The packet of unfamiliar sheet music was a signal that I might be in over my head as a rookie guitar player. (And by unfamiliar, I mean the actual symbols on the page—is that a parenthesis on its side?)
I looked warily at my colleague, Ken Filler, who sat next me with an enormous plastic bowl of rice and mouthed, “What did we get ourselves into?”
We had just joined the most unconventional makeshift orchestra to hit the University of Maryland’s music scene. A merry band of over 50 students, faculty and staff from across campus, of greatly varying musical skills and wielding sometimes unorthodox instruments, had come together for a single rehearsal on Tuesday before a live performance—Regenerate! Sound in Place—in front of campus leadership, colleagues and friends the next evening.
Our group was not destined for a world-class concert hall, but that’s exactly the point. Presented by UMD’s Creative Placemaking minor in partnership with the Arts for All initiative, and funded by the J. Guy Lombardo, Jr. Memorial Fund, the event was a social and symphonic experiment intended to demonstrate that making music can be more fun than formal—and can also create community among strangers.
The event was led by Regenerate! Orchestra, the brainchild of cellist Wesley Hornpetrie D.M.A. ’24 and her longtime collaborator and composer, J. Clay Gonzalez; Hornpetrie’s dissertation explored breaking down the concert hall’s “fourth wall” separating audiences and performers by hosting concerts in unlikely spaces and encouraging participation.
“I discovered that it was a really easy buy-in,” she said. “It gave people who didn’t have a musical ability (the opportunity) to play percussion, or for musicians the chance to play outside their niche.”
After a performance at UMD’s Brendan Iribe Center during last fall’s NextNOW Fest, Hornpetrie connected with Professor Ronit Eisenbach, who directs the university’s Creative Placemaking minor. Eisenbach, who had recently watched the documentary “Join or Die” about the epidemic of loneliness in America, saw Regenerate! as an opportunity to create a healing experience for a society collectively carrying a lot of weight.
“Research has shown that when people are ‘joiners,’ not only does it improve their social capital, but it is also actually the root for building and growing strong societies,” said Eisenbach. “When you’re standing side by side with someone painting a mural or making music, it’s more than what you’re creating—it is the shared experience that can bridge differences.”
Despite owning what my spouse would call an unnecessary amount of guitar equipment, I had never played with a group and avoid playing for friends; every ounce of me wanted to crawl into my guitar case. Filler, who is an assistant clinical professor of architecture, hadn’t touched an instrument since parting ways with his trombone in elementary school. But Hornpetrie and Gonzalez assured us that this experiment would be low-stakes and fun.
“It can feel a little weird at first, particularly the first practice,” said Hornpetrie, as Gonzalez patiently walked me through the parts of the sheet music I could not decipher. “But I promise you’ll peak tomorrow!”
The one-and-done rehearsal in the Architecture Building’s library, said Gonzalez, was meant to stoke the magic of discovering how all the musical pieces fit, while leaving room for the spontaneity of something not fully baked. Filler and I marveled at how small additions—like rubbing sea glass together or plinking thumb tacks in a jar—added layers of sound and built a more complex, nuanced piece. And as my strumming locked in with the tempo, Gonzalez gave me a smile and a thumbs up.
On Wednesday night we commandeered the Great Space, a two-floor atrium in the heart of the building, even spilling into the corridors around it. As colleagues and families looked on, we all found our rhythm and delivered a cacophony of sound that poured through the building, drawing students from their classrooms.
In the first piece, “Magical Thinking,” the din of a dozen people reading a poem at the volume of a hushed phone call provided an undercurrent to the soft taps of a tom-tom, swell of violins and moans of cellos. After losing my pick in the first five minutes, I used my fingers* to strum my unamplified guitar among the crush of beans bouncing in a jar, the thwack of sticks and the clatter of cafeteria forks.
During one break in the action, musicians stowed their instruments and made sheet-music paper airplanes, which flitted across the Great Space to the delight of onlookers. Gonzalez and Hornpetrie soon pressed the audience into service with kazoos and crepe paper. The sound built, and so did the sense of connection.
I’ve never done anything like this before, it was so much fun,” said architecture student Seta Whitney ’26. “It was really amazing how so many different sounds and so many different people could come together to make something so beautiful.”
*The writer left feeling both a sense of accomplishment and a blister erupting on her thumb.