Gem City Style with Bobby Pape
An interview with the executive director of the Erie Philharmonic
The night before Bobby Pape interviewed for the biggest job of his life, he bought a ticket to a hockey game. An Erie Otters versus London Knights playoff game, a beer in one hand and a Smith's hot dog in the other. He knew no one. Erie got smacked. He wasn't watching the score anyway – he was auditioning the city before it auditioned him. And then he saw someone climbing the stands in an Erie Philharmonic hoodie.
"I thought to myself, if this is the kind of community where people are showing their pride at the hockey game with their Phil gear, it's the kind of place I want to live. I didn't know I was going to take this job when I got here for the interviews," he told me. "I knew when I left, I was going to take this job."
Here's what he signed up for, exactly: an orchestra that has been playing since 1913, making it one of the oldest professional orchestras in the country – now heading into a season stacked with anniversaries. Daniel Meyer's 20th as music director, the Junior Philharmonic's 80th, the Warner's 95th, and on the final symphonic program in May, a piece the Erie Phil commissioned and premiered 75 years ago, coming home. All of it was handed to a guy who unpacked his boxes last summer.
"The biggest nerve-wracking thing for me as a relatively new manager, having been here just over a year, is to not mess it up," he told me, and he wasn't entirely joking. So that's the question I spent an hour circling: what do you do when a city hands you something this old, this loved – and this many candles on the cake at once?
To understand why he wanted the job at all, you have to start on another Great Lake. He grew up outside Rochester, basically right on Lake Ontario, in the town of Webster – near Xerox's production campus, with Kodak's Rochester plant down the road. "I grew up in a community where everybody's parents took a turn working for one of those factories," he said. "And then in the '90s, when I was young, they started getting laid off from those jobs, and I lived through a community learning where to find its post-industrial footing." Then he went to school in Buffalo and watched the same story play out again, this time with steel.
His career took a detour before bringing him back to it: the Buffalo Philharmonic, then years in Boston managing a contemporary music ensemble – "smaller and scrappier and experimental, and a lot of fun" – then the Albany Symphony, another post-industrial city on another waterway. Life pulled him back to Boston, and he realized something. "I want a community orchestra."
When COVID rearranged everyone's sense of what mattered, he and his wife went looking for a place to be part of instead of adjacent to. Which is how he ended up at that Otters game watching for a sign.
One of Pape's most frequently fielded questions is "what instrument do you play?"
"I played the viola for two months in fourth grade," he said. "Before the first concert, the orchestra teacher and I mutually agreed I should go back to the chorus." He grew up singing in church, and he still has the hymnal, full of his own marginalia. His friends were all in bands, and he was the one working the cash box, selling posters. "When I got to college, I realized there was a place for someone who wanted to help make music happen, but not necessarily on stage," he said.
There's no origin-story symphony here. What he loves is the assembly — the whole thing coming together. Which is how we got to what Pape describes as the 7:35 feeling.
"It's that moment when the concert is just about to start, and I've gone on stage to make my announcements. The orchestra is tuning. The house is full. The lights are down. I'm usually standing in the back or just off stage, and I've done everything I can do." He paused. "The moment that everybody else starts working is the moment I stop working."
The Phil is the largest performing arts ensemble in northwest Pennsylvania and, as he put it, "an army of educators." The subscription series at the Warner is the visible tip of the iceberg. Underneath are 150 kids in the Junior Philharmonic and nearly 100 more in its choruses, a 150-member community adult chorus, long-term residencies in Erie elementary schools, and a program that sends the concertmaster and soloists into high schools the week of a concert so those students can watch them play it in the hall.
I asked him: how does the Philharmonic reach the people who never buy a ticket? Is it the schools, the Junior Phil, the free outdoor shows? "The answer is yes," he said, smiling. "It's all of those. If I had one goal, it would be that the Erie Philharmonic is sort of everywhere all the time." That ethos was here before he was, he's careful to note, "I'm just here to amplify it." In September alone, the brass quintet plays the Perry Monument rededication, a 9/11 ceremony, the Spirit of Erie dinner, and the Hagen History Center's gala.
"There's a lot of kids who will play their instruments for life," he said, "but there's also a lot of kids like me who will play viola for two months, but fall in love for a lifetime."
Then there's the season itself - the first he's had a hand in shaping, and the one Meyer's two decades here have been building toward. Pape gives Meyer the credit for the programming. "There are pieces that other cities our size, their orchestras could not do, because they don't have the level of talent and skill that we have," he said. "And we like to show that off."
The end of the season is where he gets animated on the pops side, a Best of Broadway revue in April built almost entirely out of local singers – dozens of audition tapes have come in from the Playhouse, PACA, the Phil's own chorus. "How could you go wrong with that?"
Then May 1, the one he really wants you to know about. Tchaikovsky's Fourth featuring cellist Sterling Elliott – a Sphinx Organization award winner Pape has wanted to work with for years – playing the Saint-Saëns First. They're working on getting Elliott into schools while he's here, so it isn't only a Saturday night. The program opens with a piece called Moby Dick, by composer Peter Mennin, who was born in Erie and went on to run the Juilliard School. The Erie Philharmonic commissioned it and premiered it in October of 1952. Seventy-five years later, they're playing it again, in the same city, for the grandchildren of those who heard it first.
"Anytime we can celebrate the artistic skill and diversity and breadth of our community and some history, all at the same time," he said, "who could ask for anything more than that?"
The room it all happens in is celebrating, too. The Warner Theatre turns 95 this year: "Quite simply, the Warner Theatre is our cathedral to the arts."
He's worked in cities where a hall that age was left to fall apart, and he's specific about what the restoration got right – Erie Events built an orchestra shell where the musicians can actually hear each other across the stage, which is not a given. "The respect for the history and the build for the future were maintained hand in hand," he said. Then, grinning, "I'm also delighted that we're not the ones who have to maintain it." He likes that the Phil shares a landlord with the Otters and the SeaWolves. This is, after all, a man who decided to move here at a hockey game.
He told me the funniest thing about his first year has been how many people pulled him aside to say: "Let me know if you need anything. Erie's a hard town to crack." But, "more people have said that than anyone who has made it hard," he said.
"You see businesses choosing to be in Erie instead of leaving, because they know that this is a place they want to grow." He wants to be shoulder to shoulder with that – as somebody who bought a house in the city of Erie, and as somebody doing his work here. Which might be the real answer to the not-messing-it-up question: the anniversaries take care of themselves when the new guy is the one wearing the hoodie now.
The Erie Philharmonic's 2026-27 season opens Sept. 26 and 27 with The Music of Elton John Starring Michael Cavanaugh, at the Warner Theatre (811 State St.). Individual tickets, full season passes, and information about the Junior Philharmonic and community chorus are available at eriephil.org
Gem City Style is a monthly column featuring an intimate profile of someone making a creative impact in Erie. If you or someone you know would make a good fit for a future Gem City Style, email jessica@eriereader.com
