Conductor Robert Boudreau can finally relax. For over 60 years, he and his wife, Kathleen, plied waterways around the world, much of that time aboard the Point Counterpoint II—an unusual boat, designed by Louis Kahn—to bring the joy of music to hundreds of thousands of people. Now, having narrowly escaped the scrapyard, this 195-foot-long double-hulled steel vessel will finally dock permanently in Philadelphia—coincidentally the city Kahn called home.
In the 1950s, Boudreau, a trumpeter who graduated from Juilliard, had an peculiar dream: to assemble an orchestra composed of just wind, brass, and percussion instruments that would travel by water on a floating stage. The American Wind Symphony Orchestra (initially called the American Wind Ensemble) played its first free concert on land in 1957; it only took another year before the orchestra set sail. The first boat to convey the musicians, a flat-deck barge that had been dredged from the Delaware River, the Point Counterpoint, had no means of propulsion and had to be towed to each destination, most often relying on the kindness of passing tugboat captains to hitch a ride.
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