“All of the schools across the district had been storing instruments in cupboards or basements, instruments that over time had been broken but the district had no money to fix,” says Robert Blackson, director of Temple Contemporary. “The teachers had all hoped that one day their ship would come in, the budget would be released, and they could start getting the money together to repair those instruments, but it just hadn’t come.”

Blackson first started thinking about the problem, and the performance, after Philadelphia closed 23 public schools in 2013. He got a tour of one school where administrators were consolidating all the leftover things being cleared out of the others, including a room filled with broken instruments—a heaping, almost sculptural pile of art potential. Blackson started working with Frank Machos, the arts director of the School District of Philadelphia, to compile a list of every neglected horn, woodwind, stringed instrument, and piece of percussion in the school system. Minus the ones that were utterly unsalvageable, the spreadsheet numbered more than 1,000 objects: trombones with bent slides, saxophones stripped of cork, violas missing tuning pegs.

“There’s very few things like flugelhorns or bassoons or oboes or bass clarinets,” Blackson says of his stockpile, which came under his stewardship in September 2016. “I think that’s just how kids’ heads work. There’s signature instruments we all recognize”—namely violins and clarinets. “The other ones, there aren’t as many of them.”

This fall, Temple Contemporary started an online effort to ask people to adopt a Philadelphia public-school instrument. Each instrument gets its own profile page, designed to tug at the heartstrings of any former band geek. (Flute #1027: “This flute comes from Moffet Elementary. It leaks and needs a new case before it can be played again.”) Donors can make contributions from $50 to $200 toward the rehabilitation of the misfit horn that calls to them (and see their names printed on tags for the instrument’s case). With charitable support and a grant from the Barra Foundation, Temple Contemporary will send the instruments to three music-repair shops around Pennsylvania. Another grant from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage will pay for the performance.

“I’m a musician because of the public school system in Los Angeles,” says David Lang, the Yale School of Music professor who composed the original piece for Symphony for a Broken Orchestra. “I’m completely a product of the public schools. So when [Blackson] told me he had access to these 1,000 instruments, my first thought was that each one of those instruments was an opportunity to change the life of a student that wasn’t going to happen.”