As the last days of school approach and the sounds of “school’s out!” ring out near the exits of New York City’s schools, music-lovers are giving a hurrah of their own. Yes, it’s summer—or nearly so—and the sounds of music increasingly can be heard outdoors in parks and bandshells and plazas throughout the city. And for the cheapskate that exists in all of us (yes, all of us: how do you think the upper classes got to be “upper” in the first place?), it’s always a welcome season for finding ways to sample as much music as possible, for as little money as possible.

This year is bittersweet, however, with arts organizations throwing one-time or annual free events for  financially strapped concertgoers that crowd into Central Park and Prospect Park and Lincoln Center Plaza to hear the sounds made by performers from the city’s top music organizations—even as some of those ensembles struggle to come up with funds to keep doing what they do. Case in point: the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Good news: on June 13 on Pier 17 at the South Street Seaport, the Phil will perform Mozart’s Symphony No. 5 (“Haffner”) and Copland’s Music for the Theatre synched to the summer’s only major fireworks display bursting above lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. Bad news: for financial reasons, the Brooklyn Phil had to cancel its May 9 concert, as well as the following season.

The news is pretty much all good when it comes to the Lincoln Center HD festival, a free ten-day festival of opera broadcasts that you can watch outdoors on the Lincoln Center Plaza. The only possible bad news is that it doesn’t start until August 29—sort of a long wait for us impatient types who wish to relive favorite moments the Metropolitan Opera’s 2008-09 season (Madama Butterfly with Patricia Racette, Orfeo ed Euridice with Stephanie Blythe and Danielle de Niese, and La Fille du Regiment with Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Florez are just three of the selections). The Met’s clockwise neighbor, the New York Philharmonic, is doing its annual outdoor free parks concerts from July 14 to 17, only slightly curtailed (it cancelled its July date for Heckscher State Park in Long Island, where it has played free since 1977); its Staten Island and Queens concerts are free, but this year will be held indoors. Up in Boston, the Boston Early Music Festival, known for adventurous repertoire choices, ended up replacing Graupner’s 1708 opera Antiochus and Stratonica, which required large performing forces and elaborate costumes, with the worthy but not exactly rare L’Incoronazione di Poppea by Monteverdi.

Personally, I’m looking forward to an event on the Celebrate Brooklyn! calendar: that’s the June 20 screening at Prospect Park bandshell of a 1959 Mexican sci-fi movie called La Nave de los Monstruos (The Monsters’ Ship), with new music by the string quartet Ethel and the art-rock group Gutbucket, who will perform live as the movie is shown. As in previous summers, there’s Shakespeare in the Park, with this year’s incarnation being Twelfth Night directed by Daniel Sullivan with a cast featuring people like Raul Esparza, Anne Hathaway, Slate Holmgren, Audra McDonald, and David Pittu. (That’s not a music event, but in August you can catch JoAnn Akalaitis’s The Bacchae,with music by Philip Glass.) You can take the day off to wait outside in the Park for your free tickets, or check the Public Theater website starting around June 10, when they expect to have information on how to get free online tickets by lottery, as was done last year.

The Lincoln Center Out of Doors 2009 events from August 5 to 23 include something called Asphalt Orchestra performing world-premiere commissions by Goran Bregovic, Tyondai Braxton, Stew and Heidi Rodewald, plus first-time-ever arrangements of pieces by Bjork, Meshuggah, Charles Mingus, Conlon Nancarrow, and Frank Zappa. And LC Out of Doors has decided to try again to stage Rhys Chatham’s Crimson Grail for 200 Electric Guitars—last year’s severe-thunderstorm alert put a stop to the first attempt at an outdoor performance of the piece (electric guitarists please note, there’s an application at the Lincoln Center site if you want to perform). LC Out of Doors will also host an important tribute concert on August 23 to four women: Odetta, Miriam Makeba, Abbey Lincoln, and Eartha Kitt.

For the immediate future, I’m eagerly anticipating June 21, which is when “Make Music New York,” is held. This is a one-day free event with something like 800 events going on all around the city. It’s impossible to list everything happening, but worth a mention is Henry Brant’s Orbit, to be performed by 80 trombones (76 plus 4) on the ramps at the Guggenheim Museum. And “Mass Appeal” should bring musicians from all five boroughs out of the woodwork: these are 22 massed events for groups of musicians who play a particular instrument—say, cello or accordion or “waterphone” (look it up). You can sign up for one of these if your instrument is one of the ones selected for the event. Very cool. I definitely don’t remember waterphone being offered when they handed out the instruments back in elementary school.