Every summer in Madison you can enjoy six free concerts in the city's iconic capitol square. The concert series is put on by the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra. They say the series attracts tens-of-thousands of people, many of whom set out picinic blankets and lawn chairs and gather for what Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra CEO, Joe Loehnis calls, "one big picinic."
How it started
Concerts on the Square was thought up by American Girl Doll founder, Pleasant Rowland.
"She had an office on the square in downtown Madison and apparently looked over at the Capitol at 5:00 on some week night and said, 'You know, there should be people down there listening to music. I think I want to start a concert series,'" Loehnis explains.
The first concert was put on in June 1983 by Rowland. She followed it up that summer with five more — attracting thousads to listen to classical music together in the captiol square.
"Forty-two years later, her tradition of concerts on the square is still alive and strong here in Madison," Loehnis says.
How it's going
What hasn't changed in the concert series' history is the number of concerts. There is still one concert a week for six weeks starting at the end of June and they're still free to attend.
What has changed is the crowd size and the types of music you'll hear. Loehnis says sometimes more than 60,000 people will attend just one concert.
As for the music, the concert on June 25 features Motown hits. There will be an opera singer one week, a flutist and a harpist another week and in another week Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album will be performed by a group that blends rock and orchestra.
"Our music director Andrew Sewell is celebrating 26 years with us this summer and when he started the concert series was pretty traditional, like Sousa marches, classical music, fast kind of pomp and circumstance, and he's really evolved the program to include a little bit of everything for everybody," Loehnis says.
Loehnis says there is a tradition of turning the concerts into a big community picnic. Starting in the afternoons on the day of a concert the capitol square begins to fill up with a patchwork of picnic blankets as people save their seats for the concert to come.
"It's definitely a Midwestern vibe thing, and there's just this sense of community that I think really speaks to music at its core, like the point of music is to bring people together to have these shared experiences. And that's what's great about Concerts on the Square," Loehnis remarks.
