And 2023, the Louisville Orchestra began its End Harmony Tour, a statewide journey to bring free concerts to every corner of the Commonwealth.

In February, they start their final leg of the tour.

The music is the focus of the tour, but music director Teddy Abrams says connecting to the community is just as important.

Our In Harmony tour is a collaboration with the state of Kentucky, actually with the Kentucky state legislature, which so generously provided us the opportunity to tour every single part of Kentucky.

The idea was that we would take the orchestra and visit every single part of our great commonwealth, use the language of music, which is common to all Kentuckians, and something that Kentucky does extremely well, where we're known around the world for our music.

So we have this language that connects all of us as Kentuckians, and we're using it to build bridges in our state.

We have visited every single part of our state, as we promised we would do within this two year span.

And the visits are a lot more than just one concert.

We show up and we're a part of the community for several days at a time.

Our musicians fan out and visit libraries, schools, community centers, hospitals, and then we get to know the community.

So by the time we have a concert, everybody in town has already met the orchestra and it feels like a real kind of family gathering.

And the concerts are incredibly exciting and moving and powerful.

So we're gearing up for our final rung of the tour, which is going to take us to a lot of areas that we wanted to visit but haven't quite been able to get to yet.

One, two, three.

Hey, so every place that we go, we try and represent the kind of music that we're making right now at this time in this place.

And that's one of the most moving things that we found about these tours that when we present musicians from the various areas that we're visiting, performing with the orchestra, people go crazy.

And that's a big part of what we're trying to do to show that the orchestra is a way of building these bridges, that everybody feels like it's their home.

The kind of people that that come to these concerts represent the entirety of the communities we're visiting.

There are so many different demographics and backgrounds and ages of the kind of people that show up to our performances that you get this sense that we really are forging relationships and building family between the orchestra and these communities throughout Kentucky, where there's so many more communities that we need to visit.

We want to visit every single county in Kentucky.

And the whole point of this is that we're performing in towns that may just have a few hundred people or cities that might have over 100,000 people.

We're visiting every kind of place.

This is not the kind of tour where we just want to go and play in places that are comfortable for us.

So that's one of the reasons we have to keep the tour going, because there are so many communities and wonderful counties in different parts of the state to visit, and that's going to be ongoing.

The Louisville Orchestra is not just for Louisville now, it's for everybody in our great commonwealth.

And the idea that we would be touring and sharing our music forever is a really important part of our strategy for making sure that the orchestra is a connective force in our state.

And that's what we're going to do.

We're doing everything we can to make sure that touring is something that we do.

Not only this year, not only next year, but forever.

Bravo.

A.D. Abrams is a force himself.

The final leg of the Harmony Tour includes five dates in February and March, starting in Corbin and ending in Fort Knox.