Imagine a warm spring Vermont evening: supper is over and everyone is sitting on the front porch watching the sun set. Someone picks up a fiddle and begins to play; another family member starts to sing a tune her mother taught her. Everyone relaxes into their porch chairs.
Such an experience is what the Vermont Symphony Orchestra (VSO) hopes to recreate with their latest Jukebox series program, “Porch Songs: Americana Roots,” which explores the deep and diverse roots of American music. Curating and hosting this chamber music series is Matt LaRocca ’02, who serves as the VSO artistic advisor and project conductor. When people think about a VSO concert, they often envision a stage full of talented musicians playing beautiful, evocative classical pieces. LaRocca’s job is to build upon that experience and come up with other unique ways of providing meaningful musical performances from the VSO.
One avenue for LaRocca’s ingenuity has been through the Jukebox series, which has been around about 10 years. “It’s our chamber series and it has a real vibe to it. By design, it’s more laid-back, more intimate.” For “Porch Songs,” the quartet, playing violins, viola, and cello, will be seated in a tight circle with the audience ringed around them in chairs. One of the four performances is in the Paramount Theater in Rutland, where everyone will be seated on the stage with the rest of the theater empty. “It’s like we’re all having a conversation on stage, a back-and-forth between musicians and the audience. There’s a different type of connection you get with a smaller ensemble, and I really wanted to lean into that. So much of Americana and fiddle music comes from people getting together and making music.”
As LaRocca developed his program, Elise Brunelle, executive director of the VSO, thought it would be great to add another element to augment the “Porch Songs” experience for the audience. She wanted to create a physical display about Vermont folk music to have on stage for audience members to interact with. “It was Matt who told me about the Helen Hartness Flanders Collection some years ago, and that was sitting in my memory when he devised this particular Jukebox concert series with a theme of American folk music.”
The Helen Hartness Flanders Ballad Collection, part of Middlebury’s Special Collections, is one of the most important assemblages of New England folk song and balladry in the country. It all began in the early 20th century when the Committee on Traditions and Ideals of the Vermont Commission on Country Life felt a responsibility to seek out old songs that had been passed down orally through the years in New England and make them available to Vermonters. They asked committee member Helen Flanders if she’d record them, which she began to do in 1930. For a decade she housed her archive of recordings in her home in Springfield, Vermont, but in 1940 the trove became known as the Flanders Ballad Collection and came to live at Middlebury College.
Joseph Watson, interim assistant director of Special Collections, discusses its importance. “It’s a time capsule. It illustrates what people in the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s remembered about their ancestors and what their ancestors taught them. In a small town in rural Vermont, entertainment would have been sitting around and singing familiar songs that had been passed down for generations. Helen was capturing that. If she hadn’t, it would all be gone now. We wouldn’t have a reference to look back on.”
Brunelle wanted to tap into that legacy as part of the “Porch Songs” program. She asked Lyn Lauffer, a former VSO board member with ties to Middlebury, to research the collection for recordings and their stories. The idea was to have panels on easels with titles of songs on the board and a QR code linking to the songs in the Flanders Collection so people could listen to them. There would also be photos and copies of lyrics of the songs to see. “Possibly even some related physical, historical items that people could touch to make for a great preconcert experience,” says Brunelle. She wanted to have a fiddle on hand that people could pick up and play.
Lauffer’s job wasn’t easy. There are 4,800 field recordings in the Flanders Collection, collected from the 1930s to the 1960s. With the help of Watson and Mikaela Taylor, Special Collections public services and outreach specialist, Lauffer was able to sample a variety of recordings as she looked for different themes such as ballads about lost loves, hard lives, or humorous tales. In the end she came up with iconic songs the VSO could use for the “Porch Songs” exhibit, such as “The Farmer’s Curst Wife” and “The Milking Maid.”
The Vermont songs fit in well with LaRocca’s idea about Americana as a vibrant tapestry of cultures, styles, and stories that continue to evolve. “‘Porch Songs’ is about tracing the roots of American music and celebrating the many voices that shaped it,” he says. The program involves songs that move from Appalachian fiddle tunes and Southern harmonies to sounds shaped by Indigenous traditions and immigrant communities.
Creating unique musical performances for the VSO is only a portion of what LaRocca does; he is also a conductor, composer, and professor of composition theory and music tech at UVM. While conducting the VSO’s recent Disney shows, he participated in the program Student Insiders, where he and others went into schools and taught students about film music. He also mentors young composers in partnership with the statewide Music-COMP. He loves the creativity of it all, and that’s one of the things he enjoys about working with the VSO. “There are a lot of things within this job where I feel like I just get to play. And being able to play with different ideas is meaningful and engaging. I love creating really clear experiences built around this amazing music we have.”
Porch Songs: Americana Roots will take place April 16–19, 2026, in four venues, Rutland, South Pomfret, Burlington, and Barre. See vso.org for more information.
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