I first saw Bo Widerberg’s Elvira Madigan when it was new in 1967, during a period when movies were becoming increasingly important to me. I was not particularly interested in filmmaking. I was interested in the world.

European films offered access to lives and ways of thinking far removed from my relatively narrow experience. Their assumptions about love, marriage, sexuality, obligation and personal freedom could be strikingly different from those I knew. I was trying, although I probably would not have described it this way at the time, to understand how other people understood the world.

Returning to those films nearly sixty years later has become an interesting test. Do I still respond to them as I did then? Have my judgments changed? And with a much greater understanding of filmmaking, can I now identify how directors produced those original responses?

When I first saw Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, I was captivated by the relationship and the beauty of Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant. I still am, but today I better understand how Lelouch created that response through photography, editing, music and extraordinary close-ups. I loved Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice then and still do, but now I can better appreciate the remarkable control with which Visconti constructed the experience.

Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur proved more surprising. As a younger viewer, I loved its beauty and was fascinated by a husband who seemed free to pursue happiness as he wished without lasting consequences. I largely missed the significance of its extraordinarily subtle conclusion. The reconstituted family walks through an autumn landscape with fallen leaves crackling beneath their feet. Domestic order has apparently been restored, but the flowers, summer light and fecundity that surrounded the earlier vision of happiness have disappeared. Seeing that now makes Le Bonheur a different and considerably more disturbing film.

That brings me to Elvira Madigan. I remembered an extraordinarily beautiful film that left me curiously unmoved by the tragedy at its center. Would I now discover, as I did with Le Bonheur, another film hidden inside the one I remembered?

Not really. I appreciate Widerberg’s filmmaking considerably more than I could have in 1967. I can see more clearly how carefully he creates the lovers’ pastoral paradise and then dismantles it. Yet my fundamental response remains remarkably similar: I am overwhelmed by the beauty of Elvira Madigan and surprisingly untouched by its tragedy.

Today I think I better understand why.

A Sensation

Elvira Madigan became Widerberg’s first major international commercial success. Pia Degermark won Best Actress at Cannes, and a film that began its American life in art houses became a considerable popular success during the 1967–68 season. Widerberg’s use of the Andante from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 became so closely associated with the movie that the concerto acquired the unofficial nickname “Elvira Madigan,” while Géza Anda’s recording became a classical bestseller.

The appeal is still obvious: forbidden love, extraordinarily attractive actors, magnificent natural photography and Mozart. It is an intoxicating combination, but intoxication is not necessarily drama.

When the Camera Falls in Love

Jörgen Persson’s cinematography is the film’s overwhelming achievement. Faces are filtered through leaves, grass glows, white clothing catches the sun, and the countryside appears almost impossibly fertile. Much of the film seems to have been photographed during those precious minutes when sunlight becomes golden and soft. At times I thought of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, made more than a decade later.

Pia Degermark is central to that beauty. The camera adores her, and Widerberg clearly understood what he had discovered. Yet being loved by a camera and creating a character are different accomplishments.

The contrast between the two central performances is less surprising when one considers the actors. Thommy Berggren was an experienced professional with an emerging film career, already established on the Stockholm stage and a regular Widerberg collaborator. Degermark was a 16-year-old schoolgirl whom Widerberg discovered after seeing her photograph in a newspaper. She had never acted before.

Widerberg apparently wanted that freshness and spontaneity, and the gamble paid off spectacularly in one respect: Degermark won at Cannes and remains endlessly photogenic. As acting, however, her inexperience shows. Berggren can remain silent while suggesting that Sixten is worrying, calculating or struggling with guilt. Degermark’s stillness too often registers simply as absence.

That becomes increasingly problematic because the film begins after perhaps the most important part of the relationship has already occurred. Elvira and Lieutenant Sixten Sparre are already together. We see essentially no courtship and learn little about how they reached the conclusion that their love justified abandoning their previous lives. Sixten is not merely running away with another woman. He is a Swedish army deserter, a husband and the father of two children.

As those realities intrude, Degermark is required to convey increasingly complicated emotions. When Sixten’s children are mentioned, Elvira says she does not know them. She later overhears the false report that his abandoned wife attempted suicide, leaving before learning that the report is untrue. Eventually Elvira and Sixten contemplate their own deaths. Yet even then her affect remains curiously flat.

The subject is suicide; the emotional temperature resembles a negotiation.

The Collapse of Paradise

Widerberg is much more successful at showing the destruction of the lovers’ fantasy. At first, even poverty looks wonderful. Elvira and Sixten lie in fields, drink wine, eat cheese and picnic on white cloth while Mozart floats above them. The world appears capable of sustaining them simply because they are young and in love.

Gradually that world contracts. Sixten counts their dwindling money. Possessions are sold. They are recognized and must flee. Catching a fish becomes cause for celebration. Elvira improvises a performance costume from available fabric. Sixten apparently resorts to robbery. They forage for mushrooms and berries, and the picnic basket that once represented romantic abundance eventually carries a gun.

These are intelligent visual transformations. Widerberg knows how to dismantle the paradise he created. The problem is that his lovers do not deteriorate as convincingly as their circumstances. For people approaching starvation, they remain remarkably robust. Even when Elvira becomes weak enough to stumble, she continues to look radiantly healthy. Widerberg will surrender their money, food and security, but he seems reluctant to surrender their beauty.

That reluctance reaches the conclusion. Berggren gives Sixten genuine anguish as he confronts what he is about to do, but Elvira remains remote even as she urges him toward death. The suicide should be the unbearable culmination of everything that has preceded it. Instead, I understand intellectually how these people arrived in that field without ever completely believing emotionally that they have reached the point at which death is preferable to every alternative.

Perhaps this is the central problem with Elvira Madigan: Widerberg values the look of tragedy more than the experience of tragedy.

The World’s Most Conspicuous Fugitive?

There is an almost comic contradiction in Elvira and Sixten’s attempt to disappear. Elvira is a famous tightrope walker whose disappearance has been reported in the newspapers, complete with a physical description. She is traveling with an army deserter who has equally good reasons not to attract attention.

So what does Elvira do? At the hotel where they are hiding, she takes down the clothesline, lashes it between two trees and walks across it in full view.

It is a beautiful sequence, and Widerberg clearly could not resist the image. As storytelling, however, it borders on the ridiculous. If one were searching for a celebrated missing tightrope walker, a beautiful young woman performing an impromptu tightrope act outside the local hotel would constitute a fairly substantial clue.

Later Elvira is recognized by musicians who know her as a performer. She may be fleeing the authorities, but she has been advertising her identity through the one activity most likely to identify her.

It is also a small example of the film’s larger problem: once again, Widerberg chooses the irresistible image over the logic of the story.

CONTEXT: Love and Beauty in the 1960s

Elvira Madigan appeared during a remarkable period of filmmaking. A Man and a Woman similarly combines beautiful people, striking photography and memorable music, but gives its lovers emotional histories that help explain their attraction and hesitation. Two for the Road allows Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney to be glamorous, exhausted, affectionate, irritated, funny and cruel. Their beauty never prevents them from becoming recognizably human.

Le Bonheur may offer the most revealing comparison. Varda surrounds her characters with gorgeous color, pastoral landscapes and Mozart, but uses that beauty to construct an increasingly disturbing moral argument. In these films, beauty serves the psychology or the argument. In Elvira Madigan, one sometimes suspects that the psychology has been sacrificed to preserve the beauty.

What Remains After Sixty Years

None of this makes Elvira Madigan insignificant. It remains one of the most visually distinctive films of the 1960s, and Persson’s cinematography alone makes it worth seeing. Its use of Mozart permanently altered the popular identity of one of the composer’s most famous concertos, while its international popularity demonstrated the enormous power of Widerberg’s romantic vision.

Revisiting it has also clarified my own response. Nearly sixty years ago, I could not have explained how Widerberg created those extraordinary images or how carefully he transformed pastoral abundance into desperation. Today I can appreciate the filmmaking far more fully.

Yet the emotional reservation I had then remains.

I remember the sunlight, the fields, the white clothes, the wine and cheese, the tightrope, the Mozart and Degermark’s beautiful face. What I cannot quite remember is Elvira.

Understanding a tragedy and feeling it are different things. Elvira Madigan remains an extraordinarily beautiful movie, but I still wish Widerberg had been as interested in what was happening inside his lovers as he was in how beautiful they looked while it happened.

The ideas, judgments, and conclusions in this article are my own. Luchino Discounti, AMC digital assistant helps organize material, refine language, and verify information.

It begins in Technicolor. It doesn’t stay that way. Why?

A beautiful woman is at the water’s edge with a child. Her hair is short, sculpted and unmistakably of its moment. So are the clothes. Coats, scarves, dark glasses, beautifully cut dresses. They don’t merely dress her. They help create her. She seems to belong to a sophisticated world in which elegance requires no explanation.

The camera likes her face. It will like it for the next hour and forty minutes.

A man enters the picture. He is extraordinarily handsome. Dark-haired, quiet, contained. He drives racing cars.

There is another man, Pierre, a husband remembered rather than present. He is boyishly handsome and works as a stuntman, darting through explosions on movie sets. He lives dangerously until danger kills him.

Perhaps the stylish woman is drawn to men who take risks. Perhaps that is reading too much into it. Or perhaps fate has simply played the same trick twice.

The new man belongs to a glamorous world. European motor racing still had glamour in the 1960s: Monte Carlo, fast cars, fashionable restaurants, danger and celebrity. In a nightclub, he stands and a waiter instantly rushes to pull out his chair. Nothing is said about his importance. Nothing needs to be said.

That is one of the pleasures of this film. It often lets behavior do the explaining.

The racing goes on too long. There is a lot of it, and occasionally the romantic film seems to have been interrupted by a motorsports documentary. Yet remove the racing and there isn’t much conventional story left. This is a film constructed less from incident than from faces, movement, music, clothes, memory and anticipation.

And two children who sometimes seem barely to be acting at all.

In a restaurant they interrupt, wander, and behave with the glorious unpredictability of actual children. The adults respond rather than perform around them. Whether improvised or merely allowed unusual freedom, the scene feels observed rather than written.

The same quality extends to the adults. Conversations hesitate. People look away. Silence is permitted to remain silent.

Then comes a telegram.

The racing driver thinks the woman must be strong to have sent it. He gets into his car and begins driving towards her.

And rehearsing.

That may be the most exquisite sequence in the film. The man who can manage physical danger at enormous speed cannot manage the uncertainty of seeing a woman he loves. So he practices. He imagines. He anticipates what she might say and what he might say in return. Anyone who has ever desperately wanted an encounter to go well will recognize the behavior.

He arrives at her apartment.

She isn’t there.

The landlady says she has gone to Deauville.

He drives to Deauville.

She isn’t at the children’s school either.

By now the question of whether he should pursue her has become irrelevant. His behavior has answered it.

Then they see one another.

They run.

That matters. Two sophisticated, beautifully dressed, emotionally controlled adults simply run toward each other and embrace. It doesn’t feel like love-story acting because the film has earned those few yards. The embrace grows organically from everything that came before it.

Soon they are in bed.

And the late husband appears.

Not literally, of course, although for the woman he might as well be there. At precisely the moment when the new relationship should achieve its romantic consummation, memory takes possession of it.

It is one of the most depressing lovemaking scenes imaginable.

Pierre has an enormous advantage over the living man. He died while she loved him. He can never become disappointing, irritating, ordinary or old. He remains forever the boyishly handsome stuntman darting through explosions.

The racing driver understands.

They dress.

His back is turned to her.

Ouch.

Again, behavior does what dialogue ordinarily would. There is no accusation worth making. She wanted him. He wanted her. Neither has behaved badly. The problem is that three people entered that bed: suddenly Pierre was there.

At the station he finally asks the question that explains what has happened:

Why did you say your husband was dead?

She boards the train.

Now the film has exactly what it needs: two magnificent faces.

Her face on the train.

His face in the car.

Her face.

His face.

The editing connects two people who have just discovered how profoundly separated they remain.

And then the racing driver does what he has been doing all along.

He drives.

When her train reaches Paris, he is waiting for it.

Of course he is.

By then the cars that sometimes seemed to occupy far too much of the film have acquired another purpose. This is a man who understands distance, speed and pursuit. He cannot compete with a memory. He cannot reason a woman out of grief. But he can decide to be there when her train arrives.

And he is.

The movie is Claude Lelouch’s 1966 A Man and a Woman, with Anouk Aimée, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Pierre Barouh accompanied by Francis Lai’s unforgettable score.

Its story is almost absurdly slight. Its racing sequences are overextended. Its psychology is never completely articulated and probably shouldn’t be.

Yet its images accumulate to make a love story.

A woman’s haircut. A waiter’s gesture. Two children talking over adults. A telegram. A man rehearsing a conversation while driving. An empty apartment. Two people running. A lost husband suddenly occupying another man’s bed. A man’s back as he dresses. Two faces traveling separately toward Paris. A man waiting at the end of a railway line.

Lelouch understood that sometimes those things are enough.

More than enough.

AFTER THE TRAIN ARRIVED

A Man and a Woman was made for roughly 470,000 francs, about $95,000 at the time. Financial limitations helped create its distinctive visual style: Lelouch’s limited budget contributed to the film’s mixture of color and black-and-white. Yet some of its most beautiful passages seem unimaginable any other way. Jean-Louis driving through the night, rehearsing a meeting that may never happen, would almost be diminished by color. What began as an economy became part of the film’s emotional language.

What emerged was an international phenomenon. The film ultimately sold about 4.27 million tickets in France and grossed approximately $14.1 million in the United States. Contemporary box-office figures are reported somewhat differently by different sources, but there is no question about the scale of its success.

Its critical reception was equally extraordinary. A Man and a Woman shared the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and the Cannes Film Festival says the film eventually received 42 awards around the world. At the Academy Awards it received four nominations, including Best Director for Lelouch and Best Actress for Anouk Aimée, and won Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay.

The success is all the more remarkable considering the production itself: a tiny crew, a three-week shoot, limited resources and a story with very little conventional plot. Some of the characteristics that can make the film seem almost casual today were products of necessity that Lelouch turned into style.

A small French film about two faces, a car and a train became one of the defining international romances of the 1960s.

The ideas, judgments, and conclusions in this article are my own. Luchino Discounti, AMC digital assistant helps organize material, refine language, and verify information.

There is a revealing moment in my conversation with violinist Ariana Kim when I asked whether four string players might begin with a phrase by Bach and then simply continue, collectively improvising what came next.

“I’ve never tried that,” Kim replied. “But I’d be curious to do that. I’d be happy to try.”

Her answer gets at one of the most interesting questions raised during our conversation: What does improvisation actually mean within classical music?

Kim, a Grammy-nominated violinist and associate professor at Cornell University, has spent much of her career moving among musical worlds. She has performed as a soloist, orchestral player and chamber musician, including membership in the Aizuri Quartet and work with The Knights. More unusually, she has immersed herself in Korean traditional music, South Indian Carnatic music, American folk traditions, historical performance and contemporary music.

Those experiences have led her toward an intriguing proposition. Classical musicians might gain something by recovering a degree of freedom that their own tradition once possessed.

The Musician and the Teacher

Kim’s career has developed along two parallel tracks, performing and teaching; that combination is surprisingly close to what she imagined when leaving Juilliard. At Cornell, teaching has become more than an activity conducted alongside performing. She describes the relationship between the two as a “deep symbiosis.”

Explaining a physical or musical idea to a student forces her to articulate things she may perform almost instinctively. She might remind a student to use the larger muscles of the arm or to breathe more deeply while playing, only to realize that she needs the same reminder herself.

The process also works in reverse. While practicing, Kim sometimes discovers what she calls the “pivot point or the unlock” for a problem and realizes that she has found a new way to explain it to a student. Teaching and performing become part of the same continuing investigation.

That willingness to investigate also explains much about the direction her career has taken.

Moving Beyond the Page

Kim traces some of her interest in improvisation to her graduate-school experience with Nextworks, a contemporary improvisation ensemble that worked with graphic scores, collective improvisation and composers such as John Cage and Earle Brown.

It “whetted my appetite,” she said, “for what’s possible beyond the classical tradition, what’s possible beyond the page.”

The appetite kept growing. Encounters with musicians through The Knights and the Aizuri Quartet led toward Asian traditions and eventually extended periods of study in Korea and South India. Earlier experiences at bluegrass camps provided another point of reference. Carnatic music proved particularly significant because improvisation is integral to its musical language.

Yet the idea of going “beyond the page” becomes more complicated when brought back into Western classical music.

Kim points out that improvisation once occupied a much larger place in that tradition. Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart and Beethoven were composers and improvisers. Performers embellished music, and soloists created their own cadenzas.

Kim asks her students to recover some of that practice. Anyone in her studio performing an 18th- or early 19th-century concerto writes a cadenza. She encourages students to begin with the composer’s vocabulary, taking a phrase and changing its direction, rhythm, ornamentation or shape.

“If you’re in the world of Mozart,” she explained, “you improvise in a Mozartian way. If you’re playing Bach, you improvise in a Bachian way.”

It is improvisation grounded in fluency. Freedom comes after learning the language.

How Free Is Improvisation?

Our discussion led me to wonder where improvisation ends and composition begins.

Kim sometimes records several spontaneous versions of a phrase on her phone, selects ideas she likes, and eventually writes them down. Even then, she may leave an instruction such as “improvised B-flat major arpeggio,” allowing the passage to change from one performance to another.

A jazz musician may take an established harmonic structure and create something substantially new in real time. Four experienced jazz musicians can enter a performance without knowing precisely where their musical conversation will lead. Much of the classical improvisation Kim describes operates within narrower boundaries: ornamenting a phrase, altering an arpeggio, constructing a cadenza, or making spontaneous choices within the language of a particular composer.

When I proposed the Bach experiment with a string quartet, Kim said she had never attempted it, although she found the idea intriguing. She has participated in circle improvisations in which musicians successively contribute to an evolving musical idea, but she distinguished that from taking a structured Bach phrase and collectively developing it.

That distinction also surfaced when we discussed Ravel and jazz. We frequently hear that Ravel incorporated jazz into his music. Yet jazz is as much a performance practice as a collection of harmonies and rhythms. Ravel could incorporate the sound and vocabulary of jazz without incorporating the spontaneous process that defines much of jazz performance.

Kim agreed, describing it as “the language and the flavor of” jazz while recognizing that the improvisational element is another matter.

The distinction matters because it clarifies what Kim is attempting. Her approach seeks greater freedom while maintaining a strong relationship with the musical language from which a work emerged.

Hearing Between the Notes

Her experiences with Korean and Carnatic music have also challenged something even more fundamental: the Western musician’s conception of a note.

We describe pitches falling between the familiar divisions of the Western scale as “microtones.” Kim points out that the term itself reveals our frame of reference. In Korean and Carnatic traditions, those pitches are simply part of the musical language.

“We think about stuff that’s in between the white and black keys of a piano as microtones,” she explained. “But for them, it’s just part of the language. It’s part of the expression.”

For a violinist, this opens fascinating possibilities. The violin has no frets dictating where a pitch must reside. Kim describes learning to become comfortable in this “gray space,” where Western notions of intonation no longer provide the only reference.

It may be one of the broader lessons emerging from her explorations. Musical systems teach us what to listen for. Moving temporarily into another system can make assumptions that once seemed natural suddenly become visible.

An (Un)common Thread

These ideas converge in Kim’s new recording, (un)common thread, a project roughly a decade in development.

The title contains its argument. Mozart, Beethoven, Carnatic music, Bulgarian and Macedonian folk traditions, original compositions and the music of percussionist Shane Shanahan may appear to have little in common. Kim sees improvisation as the thread connecting them.

The Mozart and Beethoven sonatas add another layer to the experiment. Kim performs on gut strings at a lower pitch with fortepiano rather than modern piano. Those physical changes affected musical decisions. She found herself taking more time, reconsidering tempos and changing the weight of her bow. Different instruments encouraged different possibilities for ornamentation and spontaneity.

The remainder of the recording travels much farther afield, incorporating Carnatic raga, Bulgarian and Macedonian music, Shanahan’s wide-ranging musical influences and Kim’s own compositions.

Perhaps her most interesting recommendation is how we should listen to it.

If your natural preference is Mozart and Beethoven, Kim suggests beginning with the unfamiliar half of the recording. If world and folk traditions attract you first, begin with the classical works. She even considered arranging the album as a musical “tasting menu,” alternating radically different traditions from track to track.

“Go to your less comfortable place first,” she advises, “and then go to your comfy place.”

Curiosity as a Musical Practice

That may ultimately be the common thread running through Kim’s career.

Her exploration of improvisation raises questions that remain productively unresolved. How far can a classical performer move from the written score while remaining within a composer’s language? At what point does an improvised idea become a composition? Can musicians trained to reproduce extraordinarily complex written music develop the spontaneous vocabulary necessary to create collectively in real time?

Kim’s answers tend to lead toward further exploration. Her musical travels, from Cornell to Korea and South India, suggest that encountering another tradition can make a musician reconsider assumptions embedded in her own.

Perhaps that is the larger value of the experiment. The score remains an extraordinary repository of musical thought, but it need not mark the boundary of musical curiosity. As Kim puts it, there are possibilities “beyond the page.”

The ideas, judgments, and conclusions in this article are my own. AMC digital assistant Luchino Discounti helps organize material, refine language, and verify information.

Take our survey about the fture of classical music:

An Iranian Composer’s Journey from Pharmacy to the Concert Hall

For some composers, music arrives gradually. For Iranian-born, UK-based composer Farhod Poupel, the turning point came in a single unexpected moment.

As a child in Isfahan, one of Iran’s most historic and architecturally stunning cities, Poupel was already experimenting with electronic music software when he encountered a MIDI recording of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 16. The performance itself was unremarkable, but the music left a profound impression.

“I listened to it and I couldn’t know what I should do,” he recalls. “Then I told my mom, ‘I want to learn piano.’”

That simple decision would eventually lead him from pharmacy school to an emerging international career as a composer whose works are performed in North America and Europe.

A Composer in the Making

Poupel’s path was anything but conventional.

While pursuing a doctorate in pharmacy, he found himself increasingly drawn toward composition. The turning point came when he discovered the music of Iranian composer Saeid Sharifian, whose blend of Persian identity and Western classical tradition demonstrated a path forward.

Determined to learn, Poupel undertook a remarkable routine. For more than five years, he traveled six hours from Isfahan to Tehran and six hours back again for composition lessons.

“Gradually, I realized that, okay, I’m a composer. That’s it. I’m a composer.”

The realization did not immediately change his professional circumstances, but it changed his sense of purpose. Composition became the center of his life, and he began searching for opportunities beyond Iran’s limited infrastructure for Western classical music.

Discovering an Audience

Like many emerging composers, Poupel faced a familiar challenge: finding performers willing to take a chance on new music.

Instead of waiting, he simply began sending scores abroad.

One of the first significant successes came with Zayandeh Rud (“Mother River”), a work for string orchestra inspired by the river that flows through Isfahan. The piece attracted performances in North America and helped convince him that his music could connect with audiences far from his homeland.

“I realized that maybe there is some potential here.”

Subsequent performances and collaborations reinforced that belief. As musicians and orchestras responded positively to his work, he began building relationships that ultimately led him toward the United Kingdom, where he found a receptive artistic environment and connections to both Europe and North America.

Beyond Musical Nationalism

Although Poupel’s music draws inspiration from Persian culture, literature, and history, he resists the notion that Middle Eastern music must sound “exotic.”

“I try not to sound exotic at all.”

For many listeners, Middle Eastern music evokes quarter-tones, improvisation, and distinctive instrumental colors. Poupel sees his artistic identity differently. His musical language is firmly rooted in the Western classical tradition, shaped by composers such as Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, and Mussorgsky, while also carrying the influence of Persian culture and storytelling.

“At the end, I always try to compose music that I want to listen to. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s Eastern, Western, Chinese, Arabic, English, French—whatever. If it appeals to me, I would do it.”

The result is music that often feels expansive, lyrical, and narrative-driven rather than overtly nationalistic.

The Power of Story

If there is one thread running through Poupel’s work, it is storytelling.

His imagination is deeply shaped by Persian literature, particularly the monumental epic Shahnameh (“Book of Kings”) by Ferdowsi. The work’s heroes, myths, and larger-than-life narratives continue to inspire him as both a reader and composer.

“It is very influential to me. Even to this day, when I’m reading that, it just gives me chills.”

That literary influence appears throughout his music. Rather than treating composition as an abstract exercise, Poupel often thinks in dramatic and narrative terms.

“My music has a sense of narrative to it.”

Whether writing for orchestra, solo piano, or concerto, he often begins with a destination already in mind. The journey toward that destination may change during the compositional process, but the sense of direction remains.

Composing Toward a Goal

Many composers speak of discovery during composition. Poupel certainly experiences that process, but he typically begins with a clear vision of where he wants the music to go.

“Mostly, yes. Mostly yes,” he says when asked whether he knows a piece’s destination before writing it.

For him, the challenge is rarely a lack of ideas.

“The difficulty arises, for me at least, not from lack of idea, but from so many ideas that you don’t know which one you should choose.”

Experience has taught him patience. When he believes a work is complete, he deliberately sets it aside for a period of time before revisiting it with fresh ears.

“Whenever I reach a point that I say, ‘Okay, this is done,’ I usually put it aside for one week.”

Distance often reveals refinements that might otherwise be missed.

A Voice Between Worlds

Poupel occupies a fascinating artistic space. His music is shaped by Persian history, literature, and culture, yet it speaks fluently in the language of Western classical music. His influences range from Sibelius and Vaughan Williams to cinema and film scores. The result is a voice that feels personal rather than programmatic.

Rather than emphasizing cultural difference, he seeks emotional connection, narrative clarity, and musical honesty.

“I always try to compose music that I want to listen to.”

It is a simple philosophy, but one that continues to guide a composer whose journey began with a childhood encounter with Beethoven and has evolved into a growing international career.

Highlights from the Interview

• A childhood encounter with Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 16 inspired him to begin studying piano.

• Traveled twelve hours round-trip for more than five years to study composition in Tehran.

• Credits Iranian composer Saeid Sharifian with helping him envision a professional path as a composer.

• Draws major inspiration from Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, Mussorgsky, cinema, and Persian literature.

• Rejects stereotypical notions of “exotic” Middle Eastern music in favor of an individual artistic voice.

• Considers storytelling one of the central elements of his music.

• Believes the greatest challenge in composition is not finding ideas but choosing among many possibilities.

• Uses time away from a score as an essential part of determining when a work is truly finished.

Follow Atlanta Music Critic

Website:

https://www.atlantamusiccritic.net

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AtlantaMusicCritic

Substack:

Atlanta Music Critic Conversations with....

Atlanta Music Critic explores the voices, ideas, and artistry shaping classical music today through in-depth interviews, thoughtful commentary, and cultural insight.

By William Ford

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/AtlantaMusicCritic

If you enjoy conversations with composers, conductors, and performers, please subscribe, share, and consider supporting Atlanta Music Critic through Patreon.

Joshua Logan’s Sayonara, released in 1957 and based on James Michener’s novel, is an unusual film to encounter nearly seventy years later. Set in Japan during the Korean War, it confronts the American military’s hostility toward relationships and marriages between American servicemen and Japanese women. Only a little more than a decade after the end of World War II, this was hardly an abstract subject. Memories of the Pacific war were recent, and the degree of anti-Japanese sentiment portrayed in the film surprised me.

Marlon Brando stars as Major Lloyd “Ace” Gruver, an Air Force officer who arrives in Japan carrying many of the assumptions of the military establishment around him. The principal cast also includes Patricia Owens, Red Buttons, Miyoshi Umeki, Martha Scott, Miiko Taka, James Garner and, in one of the film’s stranger casting decisions, Ricardo Montalban as a Japanese performer.

Brando’s attempt at a Southern accent has been criticized over the years, and with some justification. It wanders. At various points it seems to be searching for a permanent geographical home, and toward the end of the film Brando increasingly returns to his familiar, somewhat closed-mouth delivery.

Yet I liked his performance very much. In fact, I found him considerably more convincing than several of the actors surrounding him. Brando appears to be inhabiting Gruver rather than simply reciting dialogue. Some of the other performances have the opposite quality. You can almost hear the actors reading the lines rather than experiencing the characters.

More importantly, Brando is excellent at portraying Gruver as a genuinely conflicted man, caught between two cultures and two worldviews. On one side is the military culture that has shaped him, with its rules, expectations and assumptions about relationships between Americans and Japanese. On the other is what he actually experiences once those assumptions collide with his feelings for Hana-ogi, played by Miiko Taka.

Brando lets that conflict emerge gradually. Gruver does not suddenly discover that everything he has believed is wrong. He hesitates, retreats and struggles with the implications of his own feelings. At times he seems almost surprised by himself. That makes his transformation more convincing than some of the screenplay’s more overt declarations about prejudice. Gruver must eventually decide whether he will continue to live according to the worldview he inherited or according to what his own experience has taught him.

Japan as Character and Travelogue

One of the most interesting features of Sayonara is how much time it spends introducing its American audience to Japan.

The film explores Japanese theater, dance, customs, clothing, architecture and social conventions. The Japanese-inflected musical score reinforces this atmosphere almost continuously. At times Sayonara becomes less a conventional drama than a cultural travelogue.

That probably served an important purpose in 1957. The film was asking American audiences to reconsider people whom, only twelve years earlier, the United States had been fighting in a brutal war. Before asking viewers to accept romantic relationships between American servicemen and Japanese women, the filmmakers apparently believed they first had to make Japan and its people familiar.

The Technicolor photography helps enormously. Japan is frequently presented beautifully, sometimes almost luxuriantly. Less successful are some of the rather primitive rear-projection effects. They make it painfully obvious that scenes supposedly taking place in Japan were actually being photographed on a studio stage. What might once have passed unnoticed now occasionally gives the movie the appearance of an elaborate theatrical production.

Challenging Prejudice, Preserving Stereotypes

It would be easy to evaluate Sayonara entirely according to contemporary attitudes, but that would obscure what was provocative about the movie when it was made. Avoiding presentism, however, does not require pretending that its stereotypes are invisible.

The Japanese women, for example, are frequently presented as extraordinarily submissive, devoted and almost naturally inclined toward “taking care of their men.” They are treated sympathetically, but sympathy is not necessarily the same thing as fully developed characterization.

American characters receive their share of stereotyping as well. Martha Scott’s Mrs. Webster is such an overbearing and controlling family matriarch that she seems to have wandered in from one of several other movies of the period featuring essentially the same character. Rather than behaving like an individual, she often behaves like a familiar 1950s movie type.

And then there is Ricardo Montalban.

Casting the Mexican-born Montalban as Nakamura, a Japanese man, is startling today, but I suspect it must have raised a few eyebrows even in 1957. The problem is compounded by his performance, which produces a peculiar collision of accents. His Spanish-inflected English meets his English-inflected Japanese, with unfortunate results. Whatever illusion the film is attempting to create tends to collapse whenever he speaks.

Prejudice in the Shadow of War

The hostility toward Japanese people depicted in Sayonara is better understood as anti-Japanese sentiment than by placing it entirely within a racial framework. Race is certainly part of the story, particularly because the military restrictions at the center of the film concern interracial marriage. But nationality, wartime memory and military culture are also deeply involved.

Only twelve years separated Japan’s surrender in 1945 from the release of Sayonara. Many of the adults who saw the film during its original run would have personally remembered Pearl Harbor, wartime propaganda, the Pacific campaigns and the enormous American casualties of the war against Japan. Many veterans in the audience would have experienced that conflict directly.

From South Pacific to Sayonara

There is an intriguing precursor to Sayonara in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, which opened on Broadway in 1949 and was itself based on James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific. Lieutenant Cable falls in love with Liat, a Tonkinese woman, but cannot imagine marrying her and bringing her home to Philadelphia. Nellie Forbush similarly recoils upon discovering that Emile de Becque had been married to a Polynesian woman and has mixed-race children.

Rodgers and Hammerstein made their position explicit in “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” arguing that racial prejudice is learned rather than innate.

The connection to Sayonara is particularly interesting because Michener also wrote the 1954 novel on which that film was based. Once again, an American serviceman’s relationship with an Asian woman becomes the vehicle for examining prejudice and the barriers surrounding interracial marriage. But Sayonara adds another dimension: its Japanese women belong to the nation the United States had fought only a decade earlier. Race, culture, military convention and memories of war become intertwined.

Seen together, South Pacific and Sayonara suggest that Michener was repeatedly returning to the same fundamental question: What happens when Americans personally encounter people whom their culture has taught them to keep at a distance?

The Japanese characters in Sayonara, therefore, were not simply members of another racial or ethnic group. To much of the film’s original American audience, they belonged to a nation that had very recently been the enemy.

That historical proximity makes the film’s position more interesting. Sayonara asks its audience to move beyond inherited hostility and to judge the Japanese characters as individuals. Its argument is ultimately less theoretical than personal: what happens when direct human experience contradicts the categories and assumptions people have inherited?

That is precisely the conflict Brando makes convincing in Gruver.

An Oscar and a Tragedy

Red Buttons plays Airman Joe Kelly, an American serviceman determined to marry Katsumi, played by Miyoshi Umeki, despite military regulations and the consequences the marriage may have for his career.

Buttons received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the performance, although I confess that I am not entirely sure why. His performance is earnest and sympathetic, but I did not find it especially remarkable. Umeki is more affecting as Katsumi. Their relationship provides the movie with its most explicit demonstration of the cruelty that can result when institutional rules and social attitudes intrude into private relationships.

The film, however, apparently does not trust the injustice itself to carry sufficient emotional force. Joe and Katsumi must become tragic victims, culminating in their double suicide.

The scene is undeniably touching, but it is also dramatically excessive. We are not simply permitted to be shocked by the prejudice and institutional rigidity that have trapped them. We have to be emotionally bludgeoned by the consequences. The tragedy makes the point unmistakable, but subtlety is not among Sayonara’s virtues.

That tendency extends to some of the dialogue. There are moments when characters seem less like people talking to one another than representatives of opposing positions explaining the movie’s message to the audience.

Everyone Leaves Japan Changed

By the end, virtually everyone has been transformed through contact with Japanese men and women. American relationships collapse or are reconsidered. New relationships cross the cultural lines that seemed so formidable at the beginning. Even characters who initially represent conventional American expectations find themselves forced to reconsider what they believe.

It is all rather tidily arranged.

Yet beneath the melodrama is something that still has power. What struck me most was not simply that anti-Japanese sentiment existed. Given the ferocity of the Pacific war and the short period separating it from the events depicted here, that should hardly be surprising. What surprised me was the degree to which the movie was willing to put that hostility on screen, challenge it and portray its consequences as destructive.

A Major Awards Film

Whatever reservations a contemporary viewer might have about Sayonara, they should not obscure how seriously the film was regarded when it appeared. It was one of the major prestige pictures of 1957, receiving ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director for Joshua Logan and Best Actor for Marlon Brando.

It won four Oscars. Red Buttons received Best Supporting Actor and Miyoshi Umeki won Best Supporting Actress, while the film also received awards for Art Direction and Sound Recording. Umeki’s victory was particularly significant: she became the first Asian actress to win an Academy Award.

The awards produce an interesting disconnect for me as a contemporary viewer. Buttons’ performance does not strike me as particularly exceptional, while Brando, who did not win, provides what I think is the most natural and convincing performance in the film. It is Brando who makes the central transformation believable because he gives us a man struggling with it rather than merely announcing it.

Sayonara also received substantial recognition at the Golden Globes. Buttons again won for his supporting performance, while James Garner received the award for New Star of the Year – Actor. Brando, Umeki, Logan and the film itself were among the nominees. Brando also received international recognition, sharing Italy’s David di Donatello for Best Foreign Actor with Charles Laughton.

That awards history is worth remembering because Sayonara was not a movie that acquired importance only when viewed retrospectively. Its contemporaries regarded it as a significant film.

Looking Back at Sayonara

Sayonara is caught in a fascinating contradiction. It argues passionately against anti-Japanese prejudice while carrying some of the cultural stereotypes of its own era. It wants Americans to see Japanese people as individuals while sometimes presenting “the Japanese” as an exotic cultural category. It condemns restrictions on relationships between American servicemen and Japanese women while depicting those women according to an idealized model of feminine devotion. And it attempts authenticity while casting Ricardo Montalban as a Japanese man. Those contradictions make it revealing.

I liked Sayonara, despite its wooden performances, questionable casting, wandering accents, dated effects and occasionally dreadful dialogue. Brando gives the film its human center. His Gruver is convincing precisely because the change in him is not effortless. We watch inherited assumptions collide with experience, military expectations collide with individual desire, and ultimately institutional loyalty collide with the heart.

The beautiful Technicolor photography gives the movie a visual appeal that survives the limitations of its studio production, while its extensive presentation of Japanese culture gives it an almost travelogue-like quality that probably had far greater significance for an American audience in 1957 than it does today.

Most importantly, Sayonara can now be viewed as an historical artifact of an America trying to redefine its relationship with a country that had been its bitter enemy only twelve years earlier. The film records that transition even as it participates in it. Its cultural travelogue, its melodrama and even some of its stereotypes belong to that effort. It’s also important to remember that appeared at a peculiar historical moment when America was trying to accomplish several things simultaneously: reconcile with a former enemy, absorb Japanese war brides into American society, reconsider older racial barriers, and redefine Japan as a major American ally.

Sayonara was trying to move its audience somewhere. From the perspective of 2026, we can see how far it still had to go. From the perspective of 1957, however, it is worth recognizing just how far it was asking its audience to travel.

The ideas, judgments, and conclusions in this article are my own. Luchino Discounti, AMC digital assistant helps organize material, refine language, and verify information.

Pianist Inna Faliks has the kind of résumé that can easily take over an interview. She is an internationally active concert pianist, professor at UCLA, author, composer, advocate for contemporary music, and collaborator with composers and poets. Yet in conversation, the résumé quickly gives way to the person.

Faliks speaks with unusual candor and considerable charm. She is comfortable with her accomplishments and makes no attempt to disguise her pride in them. At the same time, there is little sense that she is presenting a carefully constructed public persona. She follows ideas where they lead, tells stories, corrects herself, laughs at unexpected turns in her career, and speaks about her past with remarkable specificity.

That past begins in Odessa.

“The Smells, the Sights, the People, the Voices”

Faliks began playing piano at five and composing soon afterward. Her memories of Odessa remain extraordinarily vivid. When she wrote her memoir, Weight in the Fingertips: A Musical Odyssey from Soviet Ukraine to the World Stage, she found the childhood chapters among the easiest to write.

She remembers “the smells, the sights, the people, the voices, the colors, everything,” and describes Odessa as a vibrant international port city filled with languages, salt air and the ever-present sound of seagulls. Those memories coexist with the realities of Soviet life: crowded living conditions, empty store shelves, long lines and antisemitism.

Music was already central to her life. She studied composition as well as piano and even wrote an opera that was performed when she was nine. Two pieces from those childhood years have now resurfaced on her new recording, Stranger Things.

Their reappearance has awakened something in Faliks.

“In a way, this is kind of a compositional coming out for me, this album.”

She continued writing into her teens, but piano eventually became what she calls an “all-encompassing passion.” Looking backward, however, she now sees composition as a thread running through much of what she subsequently became: performer, writer, improviser and collaborator. “It just feels inevitable that I would come back to it at some point,” she says.

A Piano in Rome

One of the most memorable stories in our conversation comes from the family’s months in Rome while awaiting refugee status.

Faliks had no piano. She remembers practicing on a table on a balcony while the life of Rome unfolded below her, complete with children, carts of peaches, street noise and a nearby garbage dumpster. She wanted to join the activity but continued practicing to maintain her technique.

Then her family met a Roman Jewish family named Cinzano, who invited them to a Shabbat dinner. Faliks gravitated immediately toward their piano. The family allowed her to practice there and eventually arranged a recital for her.

It became her first solo recital. She played Chopin, Mozart and Moszkowski.

From Rome she came to Chicago, which she considers her American hometown, and eventually continued her education at the Peabody Conservatory and elsewhere. Her teachers included Emilio del Rosario, Ann Schein, Leon Fleisher, Boris Petrushansky and Gilbert Kalish.

Faliks speaks warmly about the concept of musical lineage, particularly the traditions that passed through these teachers. Yet she ultimately arrives at a declaration that seems central to understanding her career:

“I’m my own person, and I have my own voice and my own strong opinions, as any artist.”

When Words Become Music

That independent streak can be seen in Music/Words, the series Faliks created while living in New York.

Faliks had long loved poetry and carried books of poetry with her, sometimes reading before concerts to see which words might inspire her. In New York, she became interested in bringing together artistic communities that often occupied separate worlds.

Her first Music/Words collaboration was with writer Jesse Ball. Faliks played music while Ball read his prose poems between pieces. Together they chose combinations that created what she describes as an emotional arc.

“It was really just like volleying back poems and music.”

The idea developed into an ongoing project involving numerous poets, performances and broadcasts. Faliks has now revived it as Music/Words LA, combining living poets with solo and chamber music ranging from Schumann to contemporary composers. She describes her preference simply: “I prefer this to be a living thing.”

From Beethoven to a Minimoog

Faliks’s interest in living composers has also taken her into some unexpected territory.

She has an ongoing relationship with Richard Danielpour, including a premiere recording of three of his piano suites, and has premiered Clarice Assad’s Lilith Concerto, which Assad wrote for her. Faliks says these relationships tend to develop organically rather than through some predetermined career strategy.

Perhaps the most unusual example is her collaboration with Gabriel Prokofiev on his Concerto for Minimoog Synthesizer and Orchestra.

When Prokofiev approached her about performing it, Faliks barely knew what a Minimoog was.

She learned.

The instrument is monophonic, producing one musical line at a time. While one hand plays the keyboard, the other manipulates oscillators and other controls to shape the sound in real time. Faliks offered an wonderfully down-to-earth description of the process:

“Your left hand is always busy mixing the sound, just like a bartender mixes a drink.”

The resulting sounds can resemble a saxophone, piano, flute, video game or horror-film soundtrack, with one timbre gradually transforming into another. Faliks spent three or four months preparing the concerto and performed it standing at the instrument, which led to another unexpected image.

“I looked like a DJ,” she recalls.

Learning it, however, was serious business.

“I felt like I was learning how to fly a plane.”

There is something wonderfully characteristic about a pianist who speaks of Schumann as one of her great loves and says, “I can’t live without Beethoven,” while simultaneously learning to manipulate oscillators on a Minimoog. Faliks seems quite comfortable allowing all of those musical worlds to coexist.

“I’m a Wanderer by Nature”

Faliks performs internationally and clearly enjoys the movement itself. Asked about differences among audiences around the world, she quickly broadened the question to differences among people and places.

“I absolutely love to be on the road. I’m a wanderer by nature.”

That observation connects directly to Wandering Stranger, one of the childhood compositions on Stranger Things.

“Sometimes I think of myself as the Wandering Stranger,” she says.

Italy and France remain favorite destinations, while a recent visit to Prague made a particularly strong impression. She describes being drawn to its people, architecture, art and language, along with a combination of groundedness and joy she found there.

Her musical listening is similarly wide-ranging. Depending upon her mood, Faliks might listen to jazz, heavy metal, musical theater, opera or string quartets. Led Zeppelin comes up, as do Beyoncé and Lady Gaga. What seems to matter most is individuality.

“I like artists who have something to say from themselves,” she explains.

Stranger Things

All these strands converge in Faliks’s new recording, Stranger Things.

The album begins with two pieces she composed as a child and moves through Wagner and Schoenberg before culminating in Brahms. Faliks describes the repertoire as “deeply personal,” music that has remained with her and changed meaning over time.

The connections are sometimes striking. Faliks remembers encountering Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet and being overwhelmed by the moment when a voice enters with Stefan George’s words about the “air of another planet.” Years earlier, the young Faliks had created both music and a painting involving another world. A fragment of that childhood painting appears on the album cover.

Another childhood image became the source of Old Belltower. Faliks remembers passing the ruins of a church on the way to music school in Odessa. Growing up in an officially atheistic Soviet society, she did not understand what the mysterious ruined building represented. Yet the image remained.

Wandering Stranger carries another memory. Faliks knew that her family would soon be leaving. She hears footsteps in its opening, perhaps also rain, a sound she loved then and continues to love today.

Those childhood impressions have survived across decades, countries and an international career. Faliks can now hear aspects of the mature musician in music written by the child she once was.

“Certain things are still with me, and it’s still who I am, and I recognize that. And I think that’s my way of telling the world my story.”

That may be the most revealing description of Stranger Things. Faliks has spent much of her life moving forward, from Odessa to Rome, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, and from the traditional piano repertoire to poetry, contemporary composition and even the Minimoog. With this recording, the wandering stranger has found a way to look backward and recognize that the child composer she left behind has been traveling with her all along.

Respond to our survey about the future of classical music:

The ideas, judgments, and conclusions in this article are my own. Luchino Discounti, AMC digital assistant helps organize material, refine language, and verify information.

Then came contract negotiations.

The musicians acquired perhaps their greatest source of leverage: the possibility of a strike. Management faced the prospect of labor disruption at one of America’s most prestigious orchestras.

A settlement was reached. Nelsons is still leaving. The musicians received substantial raises, improved pension benefits, and a greater role in selecting the next music director.

That sequence raises an uncomfortable question extending well beyond Boston:

How non-negotiable is artistic quality when defending it carries an economic price?

“The Greatest Squandering of Artistic Capital”

The musicians’ reaction to the Nelsons decision was extraordinary in its intensity.

Principal flute Lorna McGhee described it as “the greatest squandering of artistic capital I have ever witnessed.”

Principal oboe John Ferrillo made the dispute intensely personal: “This is OUR house, my family’s house, that has been violated.”

Another musician described being “devastated, heartbroken, angry, and incredulous,” characterized working with Nelsons as being “at the pinnacle of our profession,” and called the relationship “the artistic highlight of my life.”

The BSO Players Committee moved the argument from individual reaction to institutional indictment. Nelsons’s departure, it maintained, left the orchestra “without Artistic leadership or continuity” and threatened the BSO’s local and international reputation. The committee declared that President and CEO Chad Smith no longer possessed the musicians’ “trust or buy-in.”

Following a meeting with management, the musicians reported receiving “no reassurance that there is a path to rebuilding trust.” They criticized management’s “inability to articulate any artistic vision.”

These were not mild objections to a personnel decision. The musicians portrayed Nelsons’s departure as a potentially profound artistic and institutional loss.

That matters when considering what happened next.

A Note on “Artistic Quality”

Readers should understand a bias I bring to this discussion. I am skeptical whenever “artistic quality” is invoked without defining what the term means or explaining how we would know whether it has increased or decreased. Our own study of Grammy wins noted “…quality in orchestral performance is multi-dimensional and cannot be captured by a single metric. Peer recognition, critical reviews, audience engagement, and community impact all contribute to a fuller understanding of an orchestra’s stature.” (AtlantaMusicCritic.net)

We have examined this problem before, including our look at rankings of supposedly “great” orchestras. What exactly is being measured? Technical precision? Ensemble cohesion? Sound? Interpretive choices? Audience response? Critical consensus? Reputation? Ticket sales? The judgments of musicians themselves? Different measures can produce different answers, and some may tell us more about reputation and expectation than about what happened in a particular performance.

My background in psychology makes me especially cautious about self-perception and introspective reports as evidence. They are not useless. They can provide valuable information about someone’s experience and add important color to an analysis. But a musician’s conviction that an artistic relationship is extraordinary is evidence of that musician’s experience. It does not automatically establish a measurable and replicable difference in the quality of the orchestra’s performance.

That distinction is important in the Nelsons controversy. When Lorna McGhee describes his departure as “the greatest squandering of artistic capital I have ever witnessed,” I have no reason to doubt the sincerity or intensity of her judgment. What I cannot determine from the statement is what “artistic capital” consists of, how much of it the BSO possessed because of Nelsons, or how we would measure its loss after he leaves.

Musicians may experience artistic quality very differently from patrons sitting in Symphony Hall. Critics may define it differently still. None possesses an automatically privileged measurement simply by virtue of experiencing the performance from a particular vantage point.

Consequently, I tend to discount arguments based principally on assertions of “artistic quality” unless the person making the claim defines what is meant and provides some way of evaluating it. That is a methodological bias readers should keep in mind throughout this analysis.

Artistic quality may be real. The harder question is how we know it when we hear it.

When Principle Reached the Bargaining Table

The musicians subsequently authorized a strike, giving them substantial leverage as negotiations over a new collective bargaining agreement approached their conclusion.

The resulting agreement is financially impressive.

Musicians will receive salary increases of 4 percent in the first year, another 4 percent in the second, and 4.5 percent in the third. Compounded, that represents an increase of approximately 13.1 percent over three years. Guaranteed base compensation will reach $230,000, while the guaranteed pension will rise to $94,000.

The contract was ratified by 94 percent of the musicians.

The musicians also obtained greater influence over artistic matters. Most significantly, six musicians will sit on the 12-member committee charged with identifying the next music director. A candidate cannot advance without the support of two-thirds of those musician representatives. In practical terms, at least four of the six musicians must agree.

That is meaningful power. But it is important to understand what it is not. It is power over selection.

The musicians described Nelsons’s dismissal in extraordinarily strong artistic and institutional terms. To date, however, we have found no public report of a BSO musician leaving the orchestra as a direct result of the decision. Nor should anyone expect musicians to abandon secure, highly compensated positions as a demonstration of loyalty to a fired music director. The observation is relevant for a narrower reason: despite predictions of serious artistic consequences, the orchestra’s personnel appears thus far to have remained intact. Ninety-four percent of the musicians subsequently ratified a contract under which Nelsons will depart while they receive substantial improvements in compensation and a greater role in selecting his successor.

It does not appear to give musicians comparable authority over the subsequent dismissal or nonrenewal of the person they help select. The musicians therefore gained an important voice in choosing Nelsons’s successor without obtaining an apparent contractual mechanism that would prevent management from eventually doing to that successor essentially what it did to Nelsons.

One element of the original dispute remained unchanged: Nelsons will still leave the BSO.

From Public Protest to Collective Bargaining

This does not establish that the musicians traded Nelsons for money. And it would be irresponsible to make such an inference. Collective bargaining is more complicated than that, and a union has responsibilities to its members involving compensation, pensions, working conditions, and job security. Nelsons is not a member of their bargaining unit.

Management also may simply have made his reinstatement non-negotiable. If so, the musicians faced a rational choice: continue a potentially damaging confrontation over a decision they could not reverse or use their leverage to obtain benefits for orchestra members and greater influence over the future.

But rationality does not make the earlier rhetoric irrelevant.

The eventual settlement provides another perspective from which to consider those earlier concerns. It does not tell us how individual musicians weighed Nelsons’s departure against compensation, pensions, working conditions, or greater participation in artistic decisions, nor can a collective bargaining agreement reveal individual motives.

What it does tell us is what the negotiations ultimately produced. Nelsons remained out. Compensation increased substantially. Pension benefits improved. Musicians acquired greater influence over selecting his successor. And 94 percent of the musicians approved the agreement.

The contrast between the intensity of the earlier public statements and the terms of the eventual settlement is worth noting, even if the settlement itself cannot tell us how the musicians reconciled the two.

The Familiar Defense of “Artistic Quality”

There is a larger issue here than Nelsons.

Across American orchestras, musicians frequently respond to proposed institutional changes by invoking artistic quality. Changes in personnel, complement, scheduling, programming, rehearsal practices, touring, or working conditions are often resisted partly on the grounds that they threaten the artistic standards audiences expect.

Sometimes that argument is unquestionably legitimate. Great orchestras do not become great accidentally. Their quality depends upon exceptional musicians, adequate rehearsal, stable personnel, accomplished artistic leadership, and working conditions that permit extraordinarily demanding performances.

And “artistic quality” also has enormous rhetorical power.

Who wants to argue against it?

A board member can advocate financial sustainability. An executive can propose organizational restructuring. A consultant can recommend changes in programming. Once musicians respond that the proposal threatens artistic quality, however, the argument has moved onto very favorable terrain. Once a proposal is characterized as threatening artistic quality, financial and organizational arguments can become considerably more difficult to advance.

Boston therefore offers an unusually useful test case. The musicians’ public statements presented artistic considerations in near-absolute terms. Once those concerns entered collective bargaining, they became part of a negotiation involving salary, pensions, governance, and influence.

Artistic quality had not disappeared from the discussion. It had become one consideration within a negotiation involving several competing interests.

Management Has Its Own Contradiction

The musicians are not the only participants whose actions deserve comparison with their rhetoric.

BSO management has emphasized declining ticket revenue and the need to respond to changing institutional circumstances. That concern is supported by the orchestra’s own historical financial and attendance data.

Our earlier examination (AtlantaMusicCritic.net) of more than two decades of BSO financial records found a substantial deterioration in attendance from earlier levels. Attendance was 182,696 in 2004–05 and reached 213,790 in 2018–19. After the pandemic disruption, it stood at 142,521 in 2022–23 and recovered to 159,787 in 2023–24, still well below the pre-pandemic figure.

That decline does not prove financial distress. The BSO has an enormous endowment and multiple revenue sources beyond ticket sales. Nor does declining ticket revenue mean management should hold musician compensation flat. Maintaining an elite orchestra requires elite musicians, and elite musicians command competitive compensation.

Nevertheless, a three-year compounded salary increase of approximately 13 percent, together with enhanced pension obligations, costs real money. It has to come from somewhere.

If weakening ticket revenue helped establish the urgency for institutional change, management’s willingness to assume substantially greater labor costs deserves scrutiny as well.

The same question therefore applies to both sides:

How much of the language surrounding this dispute represented deeply held institutional principle, and how much represented negotiating posture?

Absolutes in Public, Trade-Offs in Private

That may ultimately be the most revealing lesson of the Nelsons affair.

The musicians spoke in the language of artistic principle. Management spoke in the language of institutional direction, governance, and economic reality.

Then they negotiated.

The musicians accepted Nelsons’s departure and obtained considerably more money and greater future influence. Management retained its fundamental authority over the music director while agreeing to considerably higher musician compensation and greater musician participation in artistic governance.

Both sides surrendered something. Both sides obtained something. That is what negotiations normally accomplish.

What makes Boston fascinating is the distance between the absolutism of the public dispute and the pragmatism of its resolution. The musicians’ defense of Nelsons may have been entirely sincere. Management’s concerns about ticket revenue and institutional direction may be entirely genuine. Sincerity, however, does not make a priority absolute. The settlement tells us something that months of statements, interviews, accusations, and counteraccusations could not. It tells us what each side was willing to trade.

The Price of Principle- the Difficult Questions

There is nothing inherently disreputable about musicians seeking higher compensation. These are extraordinarily skilled professionals with short audition windows, demanding careers, and specialized abilities acquired over decades. Nor is there anything inherently inconsistent about management acknowledging declining ticket revenue while concluding that competitive salaries remain essential to preserving the orchestra.

The analytical difficulty arises when institutional interests are expressed in the language of non-negotiable principle. “Artistic quality” carries particular weight because it goes directly to the purpose of an orchestra, yet the term itself is rarely defined with enough precision to determine what would constitute its preservation or decline. Boston exposes the limits of that argument unusually clearly. When the Nelsons controversy began, artistic quality appeared paramount. His departure was described as a catastrophic loss of artistic capital and a threat to the orchestra’s leadership and reputation.

When bargaining ended, Nelsons was still departing. The musicians had secured substantially improved compensation and greater participation in selecting his successor, while management retained its fundamental authority over the institution’s artistic leadership. Perhaps nobody abandoned a principle. Perhaps both sides simply discovered what their principles cost.

But the Boston settlement leaves American orchestras with a question worth remembering the next time “artistic quality” is invoked as the first line of defense against institutional change:

Artistic quality is routinely presented as the non-negotiable value of the American orchestra. How non-negotiable is it when the people defending it are finally asked to pay a price for their principle?

Postnote: In the few days following ratification, we have found no public statement from an identifiable current BSO musician renewing the earlier calls for Nelsons’s reinstatement or publicly denouncing his dismissal. The most explicit post-settlement insistence that the Nelsons controversy remains unresolved has instead come from a patrons’ organization.

Take our survey which attempts to assess some of the issues discussed in this essay:

The ideas, judgments, and conclusions in this article are my own. Luchino Discounti, AMC digital assistant helps organize material, refine language, and verify information.

Perhaps the whole mystery has a simple explanation. Chad Smith told Andris Nelsons that it was time to get an alignment. Nelsons thought his car was driving perfectly well and refused. Things deteriorated from there.

Probably not.

In What Did “Alignment” Mean at the Boston Symphony? (www.weford.substack.com), I took a deliberately restrained approach to the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s decision to end Nelsons’s tenure following the 2027 Tanglewood season. That analysis separated what could be documented from what could reasonably be inferred. After examining 24 years of BSO financial records, reported conflicts between Nelsons and executive leadership, their differing professional backgrounds, and the BSO’s repeated recruitment of executives from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, we still arrived at an unsatisfying conclusion: we know considerably more about the circumstances surrounding the decision, but we do not know precisely why Nelsons was fired.

“We’re writing to share an important update with you that Andris Nelsons will conclude his tenure as Music Director of the BSO at the end of the 2027 Tanglewood season. The decision to not renew his contract was made by the BSO’s Board of Trustees because, beyond our shared desire to ensure our orchestra continues to perform at the highest levels, the BSO and Andris Nelsons were not aligned on future vision.”

— The Trustees of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Chad Smith, President and CEO, March 6, 2026

This essay begins where that one stopped. Here I want to consider possibilities that the evidence cannot establish but makes interesting to contemplate. These are scenarios, not allegations, and they are not mutually exclusive. Some may be wrong. There may also be something important happening inside Symphony Hall that none of us outside the organization knows.

With that warning firmly attached, speculation allows us to ask the question the earlier analysis deliberately avoided: What might the BSO board and Chad Smith actually be trying to accomplish?

The BSO has said Nelsons and the institution were no longer aligned on their future vision. Nelsons did not want to leave. The musicians strongly opposed the decision. Reporting documents disagreements involving artistic planning and executive authority. Everything beyond those facts—including the scenarios explored in this essay—remains interpretation or speculation.

1. Maybe This Was Never Primarily About Nelsons

The easiest way to understand a firing is to look for something wrong with the person who was fired. That explanation becomes difficult in Nelsons’s case. The BSO did not say the orchestra was performing poorly. The musicians emphatically supported him. His tenure produced recordings, tours, awards and considerable artistic distinction.

Suppose, then, that the board’s decision was less about Nelsons than about Boston. A board looking ten or twenty years ahead might see an extraordinary institution with a huge endowment and internationally respected orchestra, but also an operating model in which expenses have risen fairly steadily while annual revenues have been much more volatile. Ticket sales have become a particular concern for Smith.

From that perspective, artistic excellence may be necessary but no longer sufficient. The question becomes whether the institution surrounding the orchestra needs to change even when the orchestra itself is performing superbly. Nelsons could then become an obstacle without having done anything particularly wrong. The issue would be whether the music director the BSO had was compatible with the institution its board wanted to build.

If so, “alignment” might have been an accurate word, even if it was an infuriatingly incomplete explanation. And that leads directly to the person the board chose to run the institution.

2. Maybe the Board Hired Smith to Change the Place

Chad Smith is an interesting choice if what you want is merely competent administration. He spent more than two decades at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, much of it involved with artistic planning, before eventually becoming its chief executive. When Boston hired him, Deborah Borda described him as a “visionary of what programming for an orchestra in the 21st century can mean.”

Smith also followed Gail Samuel, another longtime LA Philharmonic executive. There is no evidence that the BSO board decided to import the Los Angeles model, but perhaps it decided that Boston’s traditional model needed to evolve and wanted a chief executive who regarded programming, audience development, facilities, fundraising and earned revenue as interconnected parts of a single strategy.

If so, Smith may not be freelancing at all. He may be doing precisely what the board hired him to do. What looks from outside like an ambitious CEO encroaching on a music director’s territory could look from inside the boardroom like an executive carrying out his mandate.

And there is an obvious reason Los Angeles might have caught Boston’s attention.

3. Maybe Los Angeles Is Attractive for a Very Simple Reason

In FY2024, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association reported approximately $216.7 million in revenue against $210.3 million in expenses. Boston reported approximately $117.1 million in revenue against $123.7 million in expenses. These are single-year figures, but they illustrate very different operating circumstances.

A recurring surplus creates choices. Money can be retained, reinvested, placed into reserves or used for new programming. A recurring operating deficit requires something to fill the gap.

Los Angeles offers an attractive proposition to any orchestra board: a major artistic institution whose multiple venues and programming streams also generate substantial earned revenue. But Boston is not Los Angeles. The transferable lesson may be less about copying the LA Phil than about asking how Boston can make better use of Symphony Hall, Tanglewood, the Pops and the BSO brand

Los Angeles has developed an enormous revenue-producing ecosystem around its orchestra. Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Hollywood Bowl and The Ford support multiple kinds of programming and audiences extending far beyond traditional symphonic concerts. A Boston trustee looking at that operation might reasonably ask whether the BSO’s own assets could work harder.

That question does not require anyone to dislike Beethoven. It does, however, lead to a much harder question.

4. But Why Would Boston Want to Become Los Angeles?

Los Angeles can support an operation of extraordinary scale partly because Los Angeles is an extraordinary market. Its population, entertainment industry, tourism, climate and multiple venues create possibilities that simply do not exist in most American cities. Boston cannot manufacture another Southern California around Symphony Hall.

Perhaps the useful lesson from Los Angeles is therefore not what it presents but how it thinks about institutional assets. Could Symphony Hall be used more often? Could it host a broader range of musical performances? Could people be encouraged to arrive earlier, remain afterward, eat, drink and socialize? Could the building produce more revenue when the BSO is not performing?

None of this requires Mahler to compete with a laser show. It requires thinking of Symphony Hall not only as the room where the Boston Symphony performs, but as an asset capable of helping support the orchestra that performs there.

That broader conception of the institution may also help explain why artistic authority became such a sensitive issue.

5. Maybe the Real Conflict Was Over What a Music Director Is

Nelsons comes from the European conducting tradition and remains deeply embedded in it through Leipzig. Smith comes from American arts administration and, particularly, an LA environment in which artistic planning and institutional strategy became closely intertwined. Perhaps they developed fundamentally different ideas about the job.

A traditional conception of the music director gives the conductor enormous authority over repertoire, interpretation and artistic development. An entrepreneurial American model raises a more complicated question: what happens when artistic choices affect ticket sales, fundraising, audience development and institutional identity?

If the CEO is accountable to the board for the health of the entire institution, how much influence should that CEO have over programming? If the music director is responsible for the orchestra’s artistic identity, where should executive authority stop?

There is no obvious answer. Perhaps Smith and Nelsons eventually discovered that their answers were incompatible.

6. Maybe Nelsons Had Never Encountered a Chad Smith

This takes us considerably further into speculation. Nelsons has maintained successful orchestral relationships outside Boston, and there is no documented pattern of his being unable to work with management. Within Boston itself, the record is also more complicated than the conflicts with Gail Samuel and Chad Smith might suggest. During the roughly seven years in which Nelsons and former BSO president Mark Volpe worked together, contemporary and subsequent reporting describes a productive relationship among Nelsons, Volpe and artistic administrator Anthony Fogg; the Boston Globe reports that the three developed a strong working relationship and functioned as a leadership “triumvirate.” None of this establishes that Nelsons was easy to work with, or tells us what happened privately. It does, however, caution against turning the documented conflicts with Samuel and Smith into evidence of a general Nelsons-management problem. That leaves open the more speculative possibility considered here: Smith may represent a different kind of executive, one whose extensive artistic-planning background and strong ideas about institutional strategy brought him into territory Nelsons regarded as belonging primarily to the music director.

TWO ACCOMPLISHED LEADERS

ANDRIS NELSONS

“Andris Nelsons is one of the great conductors I’ve worked with by far... I have never seen the esprit de corps in the orchestra so high as it has been under Andris Nelsons’ tenure.”

— Edwin Barker, former BSO principal bass, who spent nearly five decades with the orchestra, quoted in The Boston Globe, March 13, 2026.

CHAD SMITH

“Visionary, willing to take risks, but very cognizant of various musical, political, social, and emotional issues.”

— Deborah Borda, Smith’s longtime mentor and former Los Angeles Philharmonic CEO, describing his leadership style to The Boston Globe, May 5, 2024.

The dispute does not require a villain. Both Nelsons and Smith came to Boston with substantial records of accomplishment and the respect of people who had worked closely with them. Two highly accomplished leaders can nevertheless disagree profoundly about how an institution should be led and where it should go.

7. Maybe Smith Is Right About the Problem

The BSO can be artistically excellent, enormously wealthy and still have a business-model problem. A large endowment provides extraordinary security, but it does not eliminate the need for recurring operating revenue. If expenses continue rising while earned revenue becomes less dependable, trustees cannot simply admire the size of the endowment and assume everything will work itself out.

Perhaps Smith is correct that the BSO needs to think differently about programming, audiences and Symphony Hall. That does not mean every proposed solution is correct. Identifying a problem and choosing the right response are two different accomplishments.

But defenders of the status quo face a legitimate question: If not now, when? Waiting until an institution with enormous resources actually enters financial crisis would be an extraordinarily expensive way to establish that change had been necessary.

Of course, correctly diagnosing the problem provides no guarantee that Smith can solve it.

8. Maybe Smith Is Right and Still Crashes and Burns

Transformational leadership consumes political capital. Musicians, donors, audiences, staff and trustees all matter, and tradition matters enormously at an institution such as the BSO. There is only so much controversy any board will tolerate.

Management can correctly identify a problem and choose the wrong solution. Musicians can correctly recognize an exceptional artistic partnership and still misjudge what the larger institution needs. Neither artistic excellence nor financial concern settles the argument.

The Nelsons dismissal has already created a serious communications problem. Management offered “alignment,” while Nelsons said he did not want to leave and the musicians publicly rallied around him. That leaves the BSO explaining why removing a successful music director is necessary for a future it has not yet explained particularly well.

Smith therefore has to do more than implement change. He has to persuade people that the change is worth its cost. If attendance grows, earned revenue improves, Symphony Hall becomes more active and audiences broaden, the board may eventually regard the Nelsons controversy as part of a difficult but successful transformation. If those things do not happen, the calculation changes. Trustees could eventually conclude that they chose the wrong change agent even if they still believe change itself was necessary.

And executing change may be especially difficult because of the institution and city in which Smith is attempting it.

9. Maybe Boston Is the Hardest Part of the Problem

The BSO is one of the great legacy institutions of a city unusually conscious of its legacy. Symphony Hall itself embodies continuity. The institution’s history, donors and traditions can encourage the belief that stewardship means protecting what previous generations built. That conservatism helped preserve something extraordinary, but preservation and resistance to change can become difficult to distinguish.

Smith and the board may therefore have to convince a deeply traditional constituency that changing the institution surrounding the orchestra is a means of preserving the orchestra itself. That requires much better communication than we have seen so far.

It also means that becoming “LA Phil East” may be exactly the wrong objective.

10. Maybe “LA Phil East” Is the Wrong Question

I am sympathetic to much of the direction Smith appears to be advocating. I am considerably less convinced that Boston should aspire to become another Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Other orchestras demonstrate smaller ways of rethinking the concert experience. At Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh, for example, I was struck by the number of bars and cocktail tables distributed through the building. The message was simple: stay here. Have a drink. Sit down. Talk. Make the concert part of an evening rather than treating the lobby merely as a passageway to the seats.

There is nothing artistically radical about a cocktail table. Yet it reflects a different way of thinking about an orchestra’s relationship with its audience. Innovation does not always mean changing the music; sometimes it means changing the environment surrounding it.

Boston already possesses assets Los Angeles cannot reproduce: Symphony Hall, Tanglewood, the Pops, an extraordinary orchestra, a remarkable history and a brand built over generations. The better question may not be how Boston can become more like Los Angeles, but how Boston can make more imaginative use of being Boston.

11. Maybe Everybody Is Wrong

There is a more unsettling possibility: management, the board and the musicians may all be wrong, although perhaps in different ways.

Management may be overestimating how much Boston’s traditional model needs to change. Declining ticket sales and volatile operating revenue are real problems, but they do not prove that programming, artistic leadership or institutional identity requires fundamental transformation. The board may be placing too much confidence in a particular vision of the successful 21st-century orchestra. Boards are no more immune to fashionable management ideas, groupthink or strategic mistakes than anyone else.

The musicians may have their own blind spot. Their overwhelming support for Nelsons is powerful evidence about their experience of his artistic leadership. It does not necessarily give them the best vantage point from which to judge the BSO’s long-term business model. Boston’s experience with Seiji Ozawa provides a useful caution: substantial musician support can coexist with significant outside criticism of a music director’s leadership.

Perhaps three groups are looking at the same institution through different windows. Management sees an operating model that needs to change. The board sees a future it has a fiduciary responsibility to secure. The musicians see a highly successful artistic partnership being unnecessarily destroyed. Each may be seeing something real without seeing the whole.

The darkest possibility is that Boston damages a successful artistic relationship, alienates musicians and traditional patrons, fails to attract enough new audiences, and eventually discovers that its new operating model does not work. It could weaken the old model without successfully constructing its replacement.

There is no evidence that this is happening. But a speculative analysis that entertains the possibility that Smith is right must also entertain the possibility that the institution is embarking upon a serious strategic mistake.

Which brings me back to something running through almost every scenario: greatness.

Final Editorial Thoughts: Greatness Is Not a Business Plan

After considering all of these scenarios, I am left with a broader question. How much should the BSO’s current artistic success influence decisions about institutional change? The orchestra is performing at an extraordinarily high level, its musicians strongly support Nelsons, and his tenure has produced recordings, tours, awards and considerable critical recognition. Those are substantial achievements, and management would be foolish to discount them.

But artistic success does not necessarily establish that the institutional arrangements surrounding it should remain unchanged. That distinction is important because some of the reaction to Nelsons’s dismissal seems to assume that disrupting a highly successful artistic partnership necessarily places the orchestra’s quality at risk.

Nelsons is an outstanding conductor, but he is not the only outstanding conductor capable of leading the Boston Symphony. The BSO was a great orchestra before Nelsons arrived, and there is no reason to assume it cannot remain a great orchestra after he leaves. Great orchestras survive changes of music director. Indeed, if the artistic quality of an institution as old, accomplished and deeply staffed as the BSO depends upon one individual standing on its podium, Boston has a much larger institutional problem than the departure of Andris Nelsons.

The musicians’ support for Nelsons nevertheless deserves considerable weight. They know what happens in rehearsal and performance in ways trustees and administrators cannot. But artistic expertise does not automatically confer expertise in institutional strategy. Musicians do not bear the same responsibilities for fundraising, facilities, audience development, operating revenue and long-term sustainability. Conversely, management and trustees should not imagine that financial and strategic expertise gives them equivalent understanding of the artistic culture they may be disrupting.

This is where I think both sides risk overstating their cases. Preserving Nelsons is not synonymous with preserving greatness, and changing the BSO is not synonymous with securing its future. Smith may have correctly identified problems and still choose the wrong solutions. Nelsons’s supporters may correctly recognize an exceptional artistic partnership and still exaggerate the consequences of its ending.

The real task is harder. Boston must determine what genuinely needs to be preserved, what genuinely needs to change, and which traditions are essential to its identity rather than merely familiar. ““The orchestra is artistically successful, so don’t change it” is not a strategy. Neither is “the traditional model is failing, so transformation must be the answer.”

Whatever the BSO’s strategy may be, its public communication has not kept pace with the magnitude of the decisions being made. “Alignment” did not adequately explain the termination of a successful music director strongly supported by his musicians. If Boston is embarking on significant institutional change, management and the board need to explain the problems they believe they are solving and the direction in which they intend to go.

And if there is one lesson the BSO should already have learned from this affair, it is that management and the board need to communicate far more clearly about what they are trying to accomplish. “Alignment” may be an appropriate word inside a boardroom, but it was inadequate as a public explanation for ending the tenure of a successful music director strongly supported by his musicians. That vacuum has invited precisely the speculation contained in this essay, along with considerably less restrained speculation elsewhere.

If the BSO is embarking upon significant institutional change, it owes its musicians, donors, audiences and community a clearer account of the problems it believes need solving and the broad direction in which it intends to move. That does not require disclosing confidential personnel matters. It requires explaining the institutional vision.

Perhaps the greatest danger to Boston is not that Chad Smith will change too much or that the musicians will resist too much. It is that everyone becomes so certain of what makes the Boston Symphony great that nobody remains sufficiently curious about what will keep it great. Until the BSO explains more clearly what it believes needs to change and where it intends to go, those of us outside Symphony Hall are left doing exactly what this essay has done: speculating.

WHEN THE FIRING BECOMES PART OF THE STORY

Whatever the merits of the BSO board’s decision, the dismissal of Andris Nelsons was handled with remarkably little public explanation. “Not aligned on future vision” announced the conclusion without explaining the disagreement that produced it. Nelsons then said the decision was neither expected nor wanted, while the musicians responded with an extraordinary public demonstration of support.

The result was almost inevitable. The BSO created an information vacuum while simultaneously positioning Nelsons as the involuntary party in the breakup. He became a natural rallying point for musicians and supporters, while management was left defending a decision whose underlying rationale it had chosen not to explain.

That does not mean the decision itself was wrong. The board may have had substantial reasons that could not appropriately be made public. But as communication strategy, it surrendered much of the narrative to Nelsons’s supporters and invited outsiders to supply their own explanations.

The irony is that much of the speculation surrounding the Nelsons affair, including the scenarios explored in this essay, was not generated merely by the decision itself. It was generated by how little the BSO chose to tell us about it.

Much has been written since the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) announced that Andris Nelsons would leave as music director following the 2027 Tanglewood season. Much of it has been an attempt to answer the question the BSO itself left largely unanswered: Why?

The orchestra said only that Nelsons and the BSO were no longer “aligned on future vision.” Into that informational vacuum have come competing explanations involving finances, declining attendance, artistic authority, Nelsons’s relationship with CEO Chad Smith, the role of the board, and the future direction of the institution. Some commentary has moved beyond analysis into judgments about the personalities and motives of the people involved. Other accounts have concentrated heavily on whether management’s description of the BSO’s financial condition can withstand scrutiny.

The financial questions are important, and Atlanta Music Critic has examined them independently through 24 years of the BSO’s Form 990 filings. But financial analysis alone cannot explain why a board decided to end the tenure of a successful music director, nor can it tell us what the institution should become in response to the pressures it faces. A balance sheet can identify financial strengths and vulnerabilities. It cannot explain a breakdown in institutional leadership.

Rather than begin with a theory about why Nelsons was dismissed and assemble evidence around it, we begin with what can actually be documented. We distinguish public statements and independently reported facts from interpretation, and interpretation from speculation. Where the evidence permits a reasonable inference, we will make one. Where it does not, we will say so.

That distinction is especially important in a controversy that has become increasingly personalized. Whether one admires Nelsons or CEO Smith, distrusts management, questions the board, or believes the BSO requires fundamental change tells us very little about what actually happened. The purpose of this analysis is not to decide who deserves our sympathy. It is to determine how much substance can reasonably be put behind that remarkably opaque word “alignment.”

We will begin with the BSO’s financial condition—not because finances necessarily explain Nelsons’s dismissal, but because they establish context, the institutional pressures against which the decision was made. From there, we will examine what is documented about the disagreement between Nelsons and Smith, what can reasonably be inferred about artistic and executive authority, the very different American and European orchestral environments in which the two men developed, and evidence that Nelsons’s difficulties with BSO executive leadership predated Smith. Finally, we will identify what the available evidence still cannot tell us.

The BSO’s finances.

Atlanta Music Critic.net examined 24 consecutive BSO Form 990 filings, covering fiscal years 2001 through 2024. The pattern is not one of impending insolvency. It is a wealthy institution facing a persistent operating challenge: expenses have risen comparatively steadily while annual revenue has been much more variable. In FY2024, for example, the BSO reported $117.1 million in revenue against $123.7 million in expenses, while ending the year with $618.4 million in net assets. These data are summarized in Figure 1.

Much has been made of the size of the BSO’s endowment, sometimes as evidence that concerns about the orchestra’s finances are overstated. But the size of an endowment and the health of an organization’s annual operating model are not the same thing. An institution can be extraordinarily wealthy on its balance sheet while still having difficulty generating enough recurring revenue to meet steadily increasing annual expenses. Understanding why requires a brief explanation of what an endowment actually represents.

The BSO Endowment

The size of the BSO’s endowment can make this operating problem easy to misunderstand. An endowment is not simply a large bank account available to cover whatever deficit arises. Much of it consists of donor-restricted or board-designated funds, and institutions normally spend only a limited annual distribution so that the underlying capital can continue supporting the organization over time. A symphony can therefore be very wealthy on its balance sheet while still have difficulty balancing its annual operating budget. Ticket revenue, gifts, investment returns and other operating support must still meet payroll, production, touring, maintenance and other current expenses each year. Drawing more heavily on the endowment can close a gap temporarily, but doing so repeatedly transfers the cost of today’s operations to the institution’s future. A large endowment can sustain artistic ambition through difficult years, but it can also make deterioration in the annual operating model less visible. Investment performance, gifts, asset sales and endowment support can fill gaps that ticket and other earned income do not. The BSO itself describes income from its pooled endowment as providing vital annual support for programs central to its mission. An endowment therefore buys resilience and time. It does not eliminate the question of whether the recurring operation is becoming more expensive faster than its dependable operating revenues can support.

Taken together, the revenue and expense data and the implications of the BSO’s large endowment establish the financial setting for what followed: a remarkably wealthy institution nonetheless facing genuine operating pressures. They do not, however, tell us why Nelsons was dismissed. Nor does a financial problem dictate a particular business solution. Rising expenses and volatile revenue might be addressed through fundraising, expense control, changes in programming strategy, increased utilization of Symphony Hall, new sources of earned income, or some combination of them. Choosing among those alternatives—and determining the broader direction the institution should take—is ultimately the responsibility of the BSO’s board, working through the executive leadership it appoints. Each choice carries different financial, artistic, and institutional consequences. The financial record therefore tells us that management had a problem to address. It does not tell us what the BSO should become in response to it. The next question is narrower: What do we actually know about the disagreement between Nelsons and the people responsible for making those choices?

1. What We Know

In announcing that Nelsons’s tenure would end, the BSO did not suggest that artistic performance was the problem. Instead, it reaffirmed its commitment to performing “at the highest levels” while explaining the decision in terms of a lack of alignment over the institution’s future vision. Nelsons said the termination was not something he anticipated or wanted. The musicians reacted with unusually strong public opposition; nearly the entire orchestra gathered outside Symphony Hall to greet him on his return, and the Players Committee said it strongly opposed the board’s action.

We also know that the decision represented a dramatic reversal from the BSO’s position only two years earlier. In January 2024—after Smith had become CEO—the BSO moved Nelsons to an evergreen rolling contract and named him Head of Conducting at Tanglewood. Those announcements came as part of a broader package that included the appointment of Carlos Simon as the BSO’s first Composer Chair and the creation of a new Humanities Institute. At the time, Smith and Nelsons publicly presented themselves as partners in shaping the orchestra’s future. Smith said the new contract expressed the BSO’s “deep confidence” in Nelsons’s artistic leadership. Whatever “misalignment” ultimately developed, the public record indicates that the BSO did not believe it existed in January 2024—or, at minimum, did not regard it then as incompatible with a long-term Nelsons–Smith partnership.

Within just two years, however, that publicly expressed confidence had given way to a documented deterioration in the relationship between Smith and Nelsons. The Boston Globe and Boston Magazine have reported conflict over artistic planning and, more fundamentally, over the CEO’s proper role in it. The contrast is striking: in 2024, Smith and Nelsons were publicly presented as partners in shaping the BSO’s artistic future; by 2026, disagreement over who should participate in shaping that future had apparently become part of the problem.

At the same time, Smith was publicly describing a broader strategic direction for the BSO, one that included reconsidering programming and finding ways to attract more people to its performances. He has explicitly connected that effort to low ticket sales. There is no evidence, however, that declining ticket sales themselves caused the conflict between Smith and Nelsons. They do help explain why disagreements about artistic planning could have implications extending well beyond the choice of repertoire.

These facts give us considerably more context for understanding the BSO’s reference to “alignment” than the original announcement provided. They still do not identify a specific reason for the board’s decision to end Nelsons’s tenure. They do, however, allow us to move from what is documented to what might reasonably be inferred about the disagreements that made continued collaboration increasingly difficult..

2. What We Can Reasonably Infer

The documented record does not tell us precisely what Smith and Nelsons meant by their disagreement over artistic planning. It does, however, give us several reasons to think the disagreement involved more than particular composers, works, or programs.

Smith was not approaching artistic planning solely as a financial administrator. Programming had been part of his professional responsibilities long before he became a chief executive. Nelsons, meanwhile, was the BSO’s music director and therefore its principal artistic leader. A disagreement between these two men over whether, and to what extent, the CEO should participate in artistic planning could therefore have become a disagreement over their respective roles.

If the disagreement did involve the boundary between artistic and executive authority, the institutional circumstances would have made that boundary consequential. Smith was responsible to the board for the financial and strategic direction of an organization facing rising expenses, volatile revenues, and weakened ticket sales. At the same time, he was publicly describing a broader strategy that included reconsidering programming and finding ways to attract more people to BSO performances. Decisions about programming therefore had implications for matters for which the CEO was accountable, even though programming remained fundamentally an artistic activity.

Taken together, these circumstances support a defensible inference: the dispute may have involved not simply what the BSO should perform, but where artistic authority ended and executive authority began.

A music director plainly possesses expertise and authority over conducting, interpretation, rehearsal priorities and the development of orchestral sound. A CEO is accountable to the board for budgets, fundraising, facilities, marketing, staffing and institutional sustainability. Season programming sits uneasily between those domains: it is an artistic activity whose choices also affect costs, ticket sales, scheduling, fundraising opportunities and institutional identity.

If Nelsons believed the CEO should not participate meaningfully in artistic planning, Smith could reasonably have regarded that as a problem of authority and accountability. Conversely, executive accountability does not make a CEO the music director. The difficulty is not solved by declaring either “art” or “business” sovereign. A major American orchestra requires a negotiated area in which artistic ambition and institutional consequences are considered together.

The question, then, is why Smith and Nelsons may have drawn that boundary differently. Their professional backgrounds provide one possible context.

3. Different Institutional Backgrounds, Different Expectations?

Another possible source of tension lies not in the personalities of Smith and Nelsons but in the very different institutional environments in which their careers developed. Nelsons has spent his professional life in the European orchestral world and remains Gewandhauskapellmeister in Leipzig. Smith’s career developed within American arts administration and artistic planning. Those backgrounds do not establish that the two men held different philosophies about orchestral leadership. They do, however, make it reasonable to ask whether they brought different assumptions to the respective roles of music director and chief executive.

Two Different Funding models

European and American orchestras operate under markedly different funding structures. European systems vary considerably by country, but public support generally plays a much larger and more predictable role than it does in the United States. The contrast is summarized in the accompanying box.

German publicly financed orchestras operate within a system in which government support is a large and comparatively institutionalized part of the revenue base. For the 38 independent orchestras included in the German Theatre Association’s 2023–24 statistics, public allocations supplied 65.2 percent of total income, while operating income covered 12.8 percent of expenses. Nelsons’s earlier orchestra in Birmingham also belongs to a British tradition of recurring public arts support, although the UK model is less heavily subsidized and has itself become financially stressed.

The American model places a different burden on management. The League of American Orchestras describes U.S. orchestra revenues as a mixture of earned income, contributed income and investment income. Its pre-pandemic 2019 national snapshot showed ticket sales at 30 percent of operating revenue, private support at 46 percent, endowment draws and transfers at 10 percent, other earned revenue at 8 percent, and government support at only 6 percent.

The significance of this distinction should not be overstated. Nelsons has worked in Boston for more than a decade and clearly understands that an American orchestra operates differently from one in Germany. There is also no evidence that he regarded financial sustainability as someone else’s responsibility.

The funding comparison instead illustrates something broader. Smith developed professionally in an American orchestral environment in which artistic planning, audience development, fundraising and financial sustainability can be closely interconnected.. Nelsons remains simultaneously embedded in a European orchestral tradition operating within a substantially different institutional structure. It is defensible to ask whether those different professional environments contributed to different expectations about where artistic leadership ends and executive responsibility begins. It is not defensible, on the evidence presently available, to say that they did.

Nelsons has worked in Boston for more than a decade and clearly understands that an American orchestra operates differently from one in Germany. There is also no evidence that he regarded financial sustainability as someone else’s responsibility.

4. A Conflict That Predated Smith

The chronology becomes more complicated when former BSO president and CEO Gail Samuel is included.

Independent reporting by The Boston Globe has documented serious friction between Samuel and Nelsons during Samuel’s brief tenure. In March 2026 the Globe reported that current and former employees described Samuel as becoming isolated and said tensions flared with Nelsons. A more extensive July investigation reported that their relationship was uneasy and quoted former BSO production executive Lynn Larsen as saying Nelsons did not want to be in the same room with Samuel.

Contemporaneous reporting at the time of Samuel’s December 2022 resignation was much less specific. The BSO gave no reason for her departure after only 18 months, while the Globe described an abrupt exit and reported broader organizational strain following the pandemic. The later reporting therefore matters: it establishes that serious executive–music director friction did not begin with Chad Smith.

From these reports, it appears that Nelsons experienced a seriously strained relationship with a BSO chief executive before Smith arrived. At the same time, that fact should not be inflated into a claim that Nelsons had a uniformly troubled relationship with management; his long tenure alongside former CEO Mark Volpe points in the opposite direction. Nor does the available record suggest a broader pattern across Nelsons’s other music directorships. Contemporary reporting from Birmingham describes a successful relationship with the CBSO’s musicians, management and board, while no comparable management dispute appears in the public record of his continuing tenure at Leipzig’s Gewandhaus.

The Samuel episode therefore complicates rather than solves the mystery. It raises the possibility that the Smith–Nelsons conflict belongs to a longer history of difficulty between Nelsons and BSO executive leadership, although the available reporting does not establish that the Samuel and Smith conflicts arose from the same issues.

There is, however, another connection between Samuel and Smith that is useful background to that history.

THE LOS ANGELES CONNECTION

Chad Smith and his predecessor, Gail Samuel, were both products of the Los Angeles Philharmonic during the transformative Deborah Borda era. Samuel spent roughly 25 years with the LA Phil, eventually serving as chief operating officer and president of the Hollywood Bowl. Smith spent more than two decades there, moving from artistic planning through senior management to chief operating officer and ultimately chief executive.

Smith’s background is particularly relevant to the question of artistic authority. He was not simply a financial administrator who later developed an interest in programming. Artistic planning was a substantial part of his professional career. He served as the LA Phil’s Vice President of Artistic Planning and later, as COO, had responsibility that included artistic programming. Participation in artistic planning was therefore part of Smith’s professional identity long before he became the BSO’s chief executive.

The institution in which Samuel and Smith developed was itself unusual. Under Borda, the LA Philharmonic evolved into a large, diversified performing-arts enterprise encompassing Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Hollywood Bowl and the Ford, alongside festivals, contemporary and interdisciplinary programming, education and community initiatives. Its latest Form 990 gives some sense of the scale. In FY2024 the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association reported $216.7 million in total revenue and $210.3 million in expenses, with $149.5 million—69 percent of total revenue—coming from program services. The organization ended the year with $603.3 million in assets and $536.2 million in net assets.

Those figures describe something considerably broader than a conventional orchestra supported principally by philanthropy. The LA Phil’s own tax filing describes the orchestra as the foundation of an organization presenting artists from a wide variety of genres across multiple venues.

When Boston hired Smith, the BSO emphasized his experience expanding audiences, generating revenue and developing ambitious artistic programming. Deborah Borda described him as a “visionary of what programming for an orchestra in the 21st century can mean.”

There is no evidence that the BSO board explicitly decided to import the Los Angeles model to Boston. But twice in succession it selected chief executives whose professional identities had been formed within that model. That does not explain Nelsons’s dismissal. It does provide useful context for understanding why a CEO with Smith’s background might regard participation in artistic planning as an essential part of his job rather than an intrusion into the music director’s territory.

The Los Angeles connection is intriguing, but it also illustrates the danger of moving too quickly from documented background to causal explanation. We know where Samuel and Smith came from and what kind of institution shaped their careers. We do not know that the BSO board hired either of them with instructions to reproduce that institution in Boston.

And that brings us to the limits of the evidence.

5. What We Still Don’t Know

The financial evidence tells us why BSO management has reason to worry about the operating model. It does not prove that declining ticket sales caused Nelsons’s dismissal. Smith has publicly linked the strategic plan to attracting audiences, but no primary source has established a direct chain from ticket performance to the board’s decision.

Nor do we know that Nelsons opposed broader use of Symphony Hall, popular programming, rentals or other efforts to generate revenue. Those activities do not inherently require the music director’s approval. If management wants the building used more intensively on nights when the BSO is not performing, that is primarily a management decision. The relevant conflict would arise only when the strategy changes what the orchestra itself performs or how its artistic identity is defined.

We do not know whether the earlier Samuel conflict played any role in the 2026 decision. We do not know whether Nelsons’s continuing European commitments or limited physical presence in Boston were decisive. And we do not know whether the successive appointments of two executives from the LA Philharmonic reflected a deliberate BSO strategy to pursue some version of that institution’s broader operating model.

Indeed, Nelsons’s management has said that leadership never explained to him how he was misaligned with the strategic vision and that his representatives believed a renewed contract had been agreed in principle. The BSO disputes aspects of that account. That disagreement itself demonstrates how incomplete the public record remains.

After eliminating what the evidence cannot establish, however, we are left with a somewhat clearer understanding of what the BSO’s carefully chosen word might actually encompass.

So What Does “Alignment” Mean?

We can now put more flesh on the word than the BSO did in its original announcement.

Perhaps “alignment” was the BSO’s shorthand for an accumulation of disagreements that eventually made continued collaboration untenable. Or perhaps an important part of the story has not yet become public.

The European–American funding distinction may add another layer. It offers a structural reason why two sophisticated professionals could approach the boundary between artistic and executive responsibility differently. But it remains an inference about context, not evidence about Nelsons’s motives.

The Samuel history adds something firmer. Independent reporting establishes that Nelsons’s friction with executive leadership predated Smith. The Los Angeles connection adds context of a different kind: both executives came from an institution in which artistic programming, audience development, venue utilization and institutional strategy were unusually interconnected. Neither fact establishes why Nelsons was dismissed.

What remains unexplained is the crucial transition: in January 2024, Smith’s BSO extended Nelsons on an evergreen basis and expanded his Tanglewood role; by early 2026, the board had concluded that the relationship should end. Perhaps there was no single trigger. Perhaps “alignment” accurately describes the cumulative breakdown of a relationship in which the parties increasingly disagreed about authority and direction. Or perhaps an important part of the story has not yet become public.

The finances help explain the pressures facing the institution, but they cannot tell us what response the BSO should choose. The public record provides evidence of serious tension between Smith and Nelsons, while the Samuel history shows that friction with executive leadership predated Smith. The Los Angeles connection, and the very different institutional backgrounds of Smith and Nelsons, provide additional context for understanding how differing expectations about leadership might have developed.

None of these facts, separately or together, establishes exactly why Andris Nelsons was fired.

For now, that may be the most important conclusion we can draw from “alignment.” We understand considerably more about the circumstances surrounding the decision than the BSO’s original statement revealed. But we still do not know which of them—if any—ultimately led the board to end Nelsons’s tenure. “Alignment” gives us a framework for understanding the decision. It does not yet give us its cause.

Sources and Documentation (click on most titles for link)

Boston Symphony Orchestra and Financial Records

Boston Symphony Orchestra. “BSO Announces Andris Nelsons Contract Extension, Carlos Simon as Composer Chair, and Establishment of Humanities Institute.” January 25, 2024.

Boston Symphony Orchestra. Statement announcing the decision not to renew Andris Nelsons, reproduced in Boston Classical Review, March 6, 2026.

Ford, William. “Understanding Long-Term Financial Sustainability: A Twenty-Four-Year Case Study of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.” Atlanta Music Critic, June 30, 2026. Analysis based on consecutive BSO Forms 990, FY2001–FY2024; source of the long-term revenue and expense analysis and Figure 1.

Boston Symphony Orchestra, Inc. IRS Form 990, FY2024. Available through ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer.

Boston Symphony Orchestra. “Chad Smith.” Executive biography.

Reporting on Nelsons, Smith, and BSO Leadership

Madonna, A.Z. “Inside the BSO power struggle that led to Andris Nelsons’s ouster.” The Boston Globe, March 13, 2026.

Madonna, A.Z. “Nearly 100 musicians greet outgoing BSO conductor at Symphony Hall.” The Boston Globe, March 17, 2026.

Madonna, A.Z. “Why Symphony Hall is a house divided and the BSO is in crisis.” The Boston Globe, July 16, 2026.

McGrath, Tom. “The Bitter Fight for Boston’s Symphony Hall.” Boston Magazine, July 16, 2026.

Schairer, Marilyn. “Exclusive: BSO President Chad Smith defends decision to oust Andris Nelsons.” GBH, June 30, 2026.

Gay, Malcolm. “Boston Symphony Orchestra head Gail Samuel stepping down.” The Boston Globe, December 16, 2022.

Boston Symphony Orchestra. “Gail Samuel Resigns as BSO President and CEO.” December 16, 2022.

European and American Orchestra Funding

German Music Information Centre (miz), using Deutscher Bühnenverein data. “Expenditure and income of publicly financed orchestras.” Updated May 2026.

League of American Orchestras. “Orchestras at a Glance.” 2019 revenue distribution.

UK Charity Commission. City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, financial year ending March 31, 2025. Government grants £2.53 million on total income of £8.60 million.

Los Angeles Philharmonic and Executive Backgrounds

Los Angeles Philharmonic Association. IRS Form 990, FY2024.

Boston Symphony Orchestra. “Boston Symphony Orchestra Appoints Accomplished Classical Music Executive Gail Samuel as President and CEO.” February 18, 2021. BSO press release, reproduced by Berkshire Fine Arts.

Boston Symphony Orchestra. “Chad Smith to Lead Boston Symphony Orchestra as Next President and CEO.” 2023. The BSO’s appointment announcement documents Smith’s LA Philharmonic career, including his work in artistic planning, his appointment as Vice President of Artistic Planning, and subsequent service as Chief Operating Officer.

The ideas, judgments, and conclusions in this article are my own. AMC digital assistant Luchino Discounti helps organize material, refine language, and verify information.

For many listeners, the guitar exists within familiar boundaries: six strings, twelve notes to the octave, and a repertory shaped largely by European classical traditions and popular song. Guitarist John Schneider has spent much of his career challenging those assumptions. A Grammy winner and longtime advocate for contemporary and microtonal music, Schneider approaches music not only as a performer, but also as a composer, researcher, radio host, and explorer of sound itself.

His artistic path moves easily between folk music, acoustical physics, Bach, Harry Partch, radio broadcasting, and the hidden assumptions embedded within Western tuning systems. What emerges is the portrait of a musician driven less by stylistic allegiance than by curiosity itself.

From Ukulele to Guitar

Schneider’s first encounter with music came through fascination rather than formal training. Sitting on a beach as a child, he watched an older boy strumming a ukulele.

“I couldn’t believe it, that he would just change his fingers and something changed. I now know it’s called harmony, right? But the fact that a feeling could change just by something you did with strings and fingers, I thought, ‘Ooh, I want to get into that.’”

The ukulele soon gave way to banjo during the folk revival era, and eventually to guitar. Schneider formed groups with friends as a pre-teen and immersed himself in the musical culture of Southern California during the 1960s and early 1970s. The Kingston Trio, Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and The Beatles all became part of his musical vocabulary.

Like many musicians of his generation, he learned largely by ear. Formal classical study arrived later, after encouragement from guitarist Andy Summers, who connected Schneider with a classical guitar teacher.

Discovering Structure Through Wendy Carlos

One of the most significant turning points in Schneider’s musical development came through the synthesized Bach recordings of Wendy Carlos.

The electronic timbres unexpectedly clarified the structure of Bach’s writing.

“I was listening to the music of Bach that was synthesized. And all of a sudden the lack of depth of the electronic sounds actually allowed me to hear the logic of the music in a way I couldn’t on standard musical instruments. And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s what’s going on.’”

That experience altered Schneider’s relationship to classical music. Around the same period, hearing Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring opened another creative door.

“I looked at my guitar and I considered Rite of Spring. And I said, ‘You know, that’s more interesting.’ That’s when I decided to become a composer.”

The combination of electronic music, twentieth-century modernism, and classical structure pushed Schneider toward a broader understanding of what music could become.

Music and Physics

Schneider’s academic work reflected that expanding curiosity. After studying composition in California, he pursued graduate work in Europe focused on electronic music and later completed doctoral work combining music and physics.

His research centered on a deceptively simple question: why does the guitar sound the way it does?

“Why is it that when we change where we pluck the string, the color changes? What’s going on there? There has to be a physical reason.”

That research deepened his understanding of the guitar as an acoustical instrument capable of remarkable tonal variety. Every guitar possesses its own sonic personality because each piece of wood is unique, yet the physical principles governing tone production remain universal.

Rather than leading him toward instrument engineering alone, however, the research ultimately opened the door to an even larger question: tuning itself.

Beyond Twelve Notes

A transformative moment occurred when Schneider encountered a guitar with frets placed in unconventional positions.

“The whole concept that the notes we were handed on those 12 frets to the octave, it’s totally arbitrary. It’s historically determined.”

That realization launched Schneider into the world of microtonality and alternative tuning systems. He began exploring traditions ranging from Indian and Persian music to the work of composers such as Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, and La Monte Young.

Schneider argues that Western audiences often think of microtonality as unusual only because modern equal temperament has become normalized. From an acoustical standpoint, however, equal temperament itself represents a compromise rather than an absolute truth.

“The human ear is capable of hearing more than 500 notes to the octave. And we’re only using 12 of them.”

This perspective reshaped not only Schneider’s performance practice, but also his understanding of historical music.

Reimagining Bach and Historical Tuning

Schneider became increasingly interested in how composers such as Bach actually heard tuning during their own eras. Rather than treating historical repertory as fixed museum pieces, he sought to recreate aspects of the tuning environments for which the music was originally conceived.

“I thought, wait a minute, that suite that’s in the style of Bach, what would it sound like if you tuned it the same way Bach’s harpsichord would have been tuned?”

His recent recording projects explore those possibilities through guitars refretted for historical and alternative tuning systems. The visual appearance of those instruments immediately signals that listeners are entering a different sonic world.

The result is not an attempt at novelty for its own sake. Schneider views these tuning systems as a way of recovering colors, tensions, and resonances often flattened by modern equal temperament.

Listeners frequently perceive such tunings as “out of tune” because their ears have been conditioned by modern scales. Schneider sees that reaction as part of the experience itself.

“People’s ears have gotten in those grooves. They can’t get out of the rut.”

Curiosity as a Musical Philosophy

Alongside his performing career, Schneider has spent decades in radio broadcasting, inspired in part by the content-rich, non-commercial model of the BBC.

That broad exposure to composers, performers, and musical traditions reinforced a philosophy centered on exploration rather than limitation. Schneider consistently encourages listeners to seek unfamiliar experiences rather than allowing algorithms or conventions to determine their listening habits.

“Taste everything if you can. And don’t let the algorithms tell you what to do.”

For Schneider, music is not simply entertainment or repertory preservation. It is a continuing expansion of perception itself. His work asks listeners to hear beyond habit, beyond convention, and sometimes beyond the twelve notes most of us assume define music.

Highlights from the Article

• John Schneider’s musical journey began with ukulele and folk music before evolving into classical guitar and contemporary music.

• Hearing synthesized Bach recordings by Wendy Carlos helped him understand musical structure in a new way.

• Schneider combined studies in music and physics to explore why guitars produce different tonal colors.

• Discovering guitars with alternative fret systems led him into microtonality and historical tuning systems.

• His recent projects explore how Bach and other composers may have sounded within historical tuning environments.

• Schneider views musical curiosity as essential and encourages listeners to explore beyond familiar repertory and algorithm-driven recommendations.

Watch Atlanta Music Critic interviews and features:
Atlanta Music Critic YouTube Channel

Visit Atlanta Music Critic:
Atlanta Music Critic

Support Atlanta Music Critic on Patreon:
Patreon - Atlanta Music Critic

Alan Parker’s Shoot the Moon is a movie about a marriage coming apart, but it gives us surprisingly little understanding of how that marriage got to where we find it. George Dunlap (Albert Finney), a successful writer, and his wife Faith (Diane Keaton) are separating after years of marriage and four daughters. George has become involved with Sandy (Karen Allen), while Faith begins a relationship with Frank (Peter Weller). From there, what might have been an ordinary story of adultery and divorce becomes something much darker: a portrait of a family in which the boundaries between husband and wife, parents and children, love and rage have almost completely disappeared.

Watching it again more than forty years after its release, I found Shoot the Moon both more psychologically interesting and considerably more overwrought than I remembered. It is often powerful, sometimes devastating, but also manipulative—a film determined to give its audience a high-powered emotional experience and sometimes willing to sacrifice psychological breathing room to achieve it.

How Did These People Get Here?

One of the film’s fundamental problems is that George and Faith are already in full emotional combat when we meet them. We know the marriage is collapsing, but we don’t know enough about what it was like when it worked.

That matters. In Two for the Road, another Albert Finney film about a troubled marriage, we understand why the couple fell in love. They are flawed, sometimes selfish and occasionally cruel, but also funny, sexy and likable. Their history gives their deterioration poignancy.

Shoot the Moon doesn’t give George and Faith that foundation. We enter after the emotional capital has largely been spent.

Curiously, the first time we see George, he is tearful. We have little idea why. It is an intriguing introduction because sadness, rather than anger, is our first glimpse of him. But the film does surprisingly little with that sadness. It quickly transmutes into resentment, jealousy and rage. Had Parker occasionally allowed us to see that original grief beneath George’s anger, his eventual deterioration might have been even more tragic.

Keaton is excellent, but at times Faith feels like Annie Hall dropped into a collapsing marriage—the familiar Keaton mannerisms, nervous energy and emotional spontaneity are all there, except the circumstances have become profoundly unfunny. Faith can be charming one moment and bewilderingly contradictory the next.

Her mixed messages to George are extraordinary. The marriage is supposedly over, yet the emotional attachment clearly isn’t. Most strikingly, after they have separated, Faith sleeps with George and then continues moving toward a relationship with Frank. George is simultaneously being told go away and come back.

That doesn’t excuse George’s behavior, but it certainly helps explain the emotional chaos.

Finney Looks as Battered as George Feels

Finney was only in his mid-forties when Shoot the Moon was made, but he looks considerably older. He is puffy, heavy around the eyes and physically rough. In some scenes—particularly at the hospital—he looks almost ravaged.

Whatever the reasons for Finney’s appearance, it works for George. His physical condition becomes part of the characterization. This is a man who appears to be consuming himself from within.

The contrast with Peter Weller is striking. Weller was a remarkably handsome man at this point, helped considerably by the longer hair that softened his angular features. Frank is lean, attractive and comparatively composed—the visual opposite of the battered George.

Frank also seems, initially, like the one adult who might have enough sense to get out of there, but he doesn’t.

And Then There Is Karen Allen

Karen Allen is luminous as Sandy, George’s younger girlfriend. Fresh from Raiders of the Lost Ark, she has the natural, unaffected beauty that distinguished her from many more carefully manufactured screen presences of the period.

But Sandy seems to understand something George apparently doesn’t: this is a fling.

George appears surprised to discover that she doesn’t necessarily imagine their relationship as the beginning of some grand new life together. Sandy’s relative emotional independence exposes another of George’s problems. He has destroyed one relationship without actually establishing another.

There is also a wonderfully period-specific scene in which George’s daughters interrogate Sandy about whether she is having sex with their father—and Sandy answers them.

Today the obvious response would seem to be: That is an adult matter and not something I am going to discuss with you.

But this is 1982 California, where disclosure can sometimes seem to substitute for boundaries.

Adults Acting Like Children, Children Acting Like Adults

That lack of boundaries eventually becomes the organizing psychology of the entire film.

The eldest daughter, Sherry, initially comes across as a particularly mouthy adolescent. Gradually, however, something more troubling becomes apparent. The adults have placed her in the role of an adult while they increasingly behave like children.

Sherry knows far too much about her parents’ sexual and emotional lives. She questions the adults about them. The adults answer her. She becomes confidante, interrogator, combatant and judge in a marriage in which she should simply have been allowed to remain a daughter.

Even the physical boundaries barely exist. In one remarkable little moment, Sherry simply walks into her parents’ bedroom without knocking to announce that her sister is sick. Nobody seems particularly surprised. It is a small detail, but by then it seems emblematic of the entire household.

There are no doors in this family, psychologically or sometimes literally.

When the Film Stops Shouting

Parker’s direction can be painfully excessive.

The restaurant confrontation is over the top. At another point, putting the Rolling Stones’ Play with Fire on the stereo virtually clobbers the viewer with the metaphor. We understand that these people are playing with fire. The movie doesn’t need Mick Jagger to explain it.

Again and again, Parker seems reluctant to trust material that is already powerful. Another confrontation, another humiliation, another emotional crescendo arrives to make certain we’ve understood.

Yet the film’s most horrifying sequence demonstrates how powerful Shoot the Moon can be when Parker lets the situation and his actors do the work.

George Beats Sherry.

It is genuinely painful to watch, and it changes the movie.

George’s assault on Sherry is shocking in a way that goes beyond the violence itself. Movies have traditionally been reluctant to show realistic, sustained physical violence by a parent against a child, particularly in an ordinary domestic setting. Parker offers us very little protective distance. This is not a monster attacking a child in a horror film; it is a father beating his daughter.

The scene also abruptly destroys an illusion the film itself has helped create. Sherry has been treated as an adult—allowed into her parents’ sexual lives, encouraged to question their lovers and permitted to participate in their marital warfare. Her precociousness can even make her irritating. But when George attacks her, all of that disappears. She isn’t George’s equal in an argument. She is his daughter, and she is a child. The disparity in power becomes horrifyingly clear.

That is why the scene remains perhaps the most powerful in the movie. Parker, who so often overstates his emotional points, doesn’t need metaphor or musical commentary here. The violation itself is enough.

George’s violence is terrible precisely because he isn’t portrayed as a conventional monster. He is a furious, humiliated and increasingly dysregulated man doing something appalling to someone he loves.

And in beating his daughter, George is also destroying himself. He is destroying his identity as father at precisely the moment he is already losing his identity as husband. His desperate attempt to regain control ensures that he will lose even more.

It is the film’s turning point.

A Family Without a Pressure Valve

This leads to a larger problem with Shoot the Moon: the movie is manipulative.

Parker is determined to give the audience a high-powered emotional experience, and he constructs the family almost as a sealed pressure vessel in order to achieve it. Every possible relief valve seems to have been removed.

There is no therapist. There is no sensible friend who remains outside the conflict. There is no effective institutional intervention. Even Frank, initially the comparatively sane outsider, gets drawn into the emotional system.

The result is a family that seems capable of combusting at almost any moment. And that is precisely what Parker wants us to anticipate.

Certainly real families can become catastrophically dysfunctional. But real life also contains interruptions—friends, relatives, therapists, lawyers, judges, police, schools and simply periods when exhaustion temporarily brings the temperature down. Shoot the Moon allows remarkably few of them.

That is why the manipulation becomes visible. Parker keeps adding pressure because releasing it would interfere with the experience he has designed for us. Occasionally allowing these characters—and the audience—to breathe might actually have made the eventual explosions more powerful.

Where Are the Other Adults?

That also makes some apparent plot holes more interesting.

Why does nobody suggest therapy? Individual therapy? Couples therapy? Family therapy? This is an affluent California family in 1982, not an isolated household without access to psychological services. Why doesn’t the judge probe more deeply into what is happening with these children? And where are the police?

George enters the family home after the separation and, at one point, locks Faith out. His behavior repeatedly crosses boundaries that today would likely produce considerably more concern about domestic violence, custody and the safety of the children.

Perhaps these omissions aren’t entirely accidental. The movie needs George and Faith trapped together emotionally. A therapist might insist upon boundaries. A judge might impose them. Police involvement might establish them by force of law. Any of those interventions could release pressure from Parker’s carefully sealed vessel. The film cannot really afford to let that happen.

It Was 1982

Some of this simply belongs to its time.

Everybody seems to smoke. Adults speak to children about matters that would now raise eyebrows. Divorce, sexual liberation and therapeutic openness were represented differently in popular culture. Some behavior that the film appears to present as refreshingly candid now looks astonishingly boundaryless.

Yet that dated quality also makes Shoot the Moon fascinating. It has become an inadvertent cultural document of a particular moment in American upper-middle-class life.

It also belongs to a period when American movies were intensely interested in the intersection of family and marital discord with psychological deterioration. Robert Redford’s Ordinary People appeared only two years earlier. The later The Ice Storm (1997), although set in the 1970s, would revisit strikingly similar territory: adults consumed by their own emotional and sexual needs while their children absorb the consequences.

This dissection of the supposedly secure middle-class family was part of the cultural zeitgeist surrounding Shoot the Moon. The family remained intact as an ideal even as filmmakers became increasingly interested in what might be happening behind its closed doors.

Except, in Shoot the Moon, there hardly seem to be any closed doors.

The Final Descent

Without revealing the ending, Parker takes George’s rage to a devastating extreme in the final sequences.

George appears to cross into something approaching insanity in the legal rather than colloquial sense: for those moments, the distinction between right and wrong seems to disappear for him. Rage overwhelms judgment. He acts without meaningful regard for the harm his actions may cause other people—or himself.

That is perhaps the logical destination of the George we have been watching. He has progressively lost his marriage, his authority, his emotional control and finally his ability to restrain his anger according to its consequences.

Such catastrophic rage is not merely a cinematic invention. In real life, domestic violence can escalate to the point of homicide and murder-suicide, when destruction of others and destruction of oneself become horrifyingly intertwined. Parker takes us uncomfortably close to that territory.

And then, in the midst of the devastation, George reaches toward Faith and weakly calls her name.

It is a striking callback to the tearful man we met at the beginning. Suddenly the rage falls away and Parker asks us once again to see George’s vulnerability and pain.

It works.

And it is also manipulative.

After taking George to a place where we may find his behavior almost impossible to forgive, Parker reaches for our sympathy one final time. The gesture is powerful precisely because Finney can make it powerful. But once again, we can almost feel the director making certain that we experience the emotion he wants us to experience.

That may be Shoot the Moon in miniature: enormously powerful, psychologically perceptive and superbly acted, but never quite willing to trust us to feel enough on our own.

A Tragedy of Boundaries

Beneath the cigarettes, fashions and early-’80s assumptions is something that hasn’t dated at all. George and Faith cannot establish boundaries.

They cannot quite remain together and cannot quite separate. Faith sends George powerful messages of rejection and attachment simultaneously. George responds to loss by attempting to reassert control. Frank enters a family that has not remotely finished dismantling its previous structure. Sandy sensibly understands that an affair need not become a new marriage. And Sherry is pulled into adult emotional territory until she becomes one of the principal participants in a drama she never created.

That is ultimately why Shoot the Moon remains a tragedy.

Not because a marriage fails. Marriages fail.

It is tragic because the adults cannot contain their failure within the adult relationship. Their rage, sexuality, jealousy, loneliness and confusion spill outward until the children are living inside them.

Shoot the Moon is sometimes much too much. Parker hammers home points his actors have already made perfectly well. There are scenes that verge on melodrama, narrative questions the film conveniently avoids, and moments when the machinery being used to manipulate our emotions becomes plainly visible.

But when it works, it hurts.

Recommendation: See it. But understand what you’re agreeing to. Shoot the Moon is designed to manipulate your emotions, and it does so very effectively. Keep in mind, too, that you are watching an artifact of the early 1980s, a period fascinated by marital breakdown, psychological deterioration and the instability lurking beneath apparently comfortable family life.

More than forty years later, I no longer find it the uniformly powerful film I remembered. I find something messier and ultimately more interesting: an uneven, excessive and sometimes devastating portrait of a family in which everyone wants intimacy and nobody seems capable of establishing the boundaries that make intimacy safe.

Parker doesn’t merely show us a family approaching combustion. He seals the exits, turns up the pressure—and makes certain we’re close enough to feel the explosion.

Addendum: Interestingly, Shoot the Moon was well recognized but apparently won none of the major awards for which it was nominated. It accumulated seven significant nominations.

Cannes Film Festival (1982): Alan Parker — Palme d’Or nominee; the film played in the official competition.

Golden Globes (1983): Albert Finney — Best Actor, Drama; Diane Keaton — Best Actress, Drama.

BAFTA (1983): Albert Finney — Best Actor.

National Society of Film Critics: Diane Keaton — Best Actress.

New York Film Critics Circle: Diane Keaton — Best Actress.

Writers Guild of America: Bo Goldman — Best Drama Written Directly for the Screen.

It received no Academy Award nominations, which is rather striking given Finney and Keaton’s recognition elsewhere.

Dana Hill’s performance as Sherry received surprisingly little awards recognition, despite the fact that she holds her own opposite Albert Finney and Diane Keaton and is central to the film’s most devastating scenes. Hill went on to work in film, television, and voice acting, including playing Audrey Griswold in National Lampoon’s European Vacation. Her career and life were tragically short: after living with type 1 diabetes from childhood, she died in 1996 at just 32, following complications that included a diabetic coma and stroke. Her performance in Shoot the Moon remains a striking reminder of how much talent was lost.

Click here to watch the advertisement!

Most orchestra advertisements invite audiences to hear a concert. A recent Pittsburgh Symphony advertisement does something different. It barely talks about the music. Instead, it shows people moving through Heinz Hall, talking, gathering, smiling, and sharing an evening together. It concludes with a simple line:

“Maybe it all starts right here at Heinz Hall with the PSO.”

At first glance, this may seem like an ordinary promotional video. I think it is much more than that.

The advertisement isn’t primarily selling Beethoven, Mahler, or Danny Elfman. It is selling community.

That is an important distinction.

For decades, orchestras largely marketed concerts. The implicit message was, “Come hear this great music.” This advertisement suggests something broader.

It asks whether people are really searching for a place to belong. Heinz Hall becomes not simply a concert venue, but a gathering place where relationships begin and shared experiences are created.

During my recent visit to Pittsburgh, I was struck by Heinz Hall’s architecture. Unlike many concert halls, it invites patrons to linger. Its grand public spaces, multiple bars, and elegant gathering areas encourage conversation before the concert, during intermission, and afterward.

The Pittsburgh Symphony appears to understand that those spaces are not incidental. They are part of the experience.The orchestra remains the artistic centerpiece. But the evening extends beyond the performance itself.

This approach reflects a broader trend in arts marketing. Increasingly, successful organizations are not simply selling tickets. They are selling experiences, identity, and community.

The music still matters profoundly.

But perhaps the first invitation isn’t “Come hear Beethoven.”

For more about the changes happening in the symphony orchestra space, go here:

https://substack.com/@williamfordamc/p-199314309

Few percussionists working today have done more to expand the possibilities of chamber percussion than Ian Rosenbaum. Known internationally as a soloist, chamber musician, recording artist, educator, and member of the Grammy-nominated ensemble Sandbox Percussion, Rosenbaum has become one of the leading advocates for contemporary percussion music and collaborative composition. Alongside an active performing career, he has also emerged as an important pedagogue, mentoring younger musicians while helping shape the next generation of percussion performance practice.

In recent seasons, Rosenbaum joined the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music, adding another dimension to a career already defined by artistic versatility. His work moves fluidly between performance, commissioning, recording production, and teaching, all connected by a larger belief that contemporary music thrives through collaboration rather than hierarchy.

Across several conversations with Atlanta Music Critic, Rosenbaum discussed the artistic philosophy behind Sandbox Percussion, the creative process surrounding the ensemble’s Grammy-nominated collaboration with composer Andy Akiho, the changing role of recording technology in classical music, and the deeper emotional and psychological questions raised by contemporary composition. What emerged was not simply a portrait of a percussionist, but of an artist deeply invested in how music is built, communicated, and experienced.

Discovering Chamber Music and Artistic Identity

Rosenbaum’s artistic direction became clearer during his studies with legendary percussion teacher Robert Van Sise, whose influence extended well beyond technical training. Under Van Sise’s guidance, Rosenbaum developed a deep interest in chamber music and the highly personal forms of communication it demands.

“I really loved playing chamber music in small groups… I love the intimacy of those sorts of experiences.”

That intimacy became central to his musical identity. While orchestral performance offers scale and sonic power, chamber music created something different: direct human interaction between musicians and audiences.

“There’s nothing in between you and the audience. There’s no conductor, there’s no huge orchestra… it feels a lot easier to communicate what you’re trying to say.”

That emphasis on communication would later become foundational to Sandbox Percussion itself. Rosenbaum explained that long-term chamber music success depends as much on emotional compatibility and trust as on technical skill.

“It really doesn’t matter if someone is the best percussionist in the world or the fifth best percussionist in the world. If the best percussionist in the world is really not fun to work with… the fifth best percussionist is better in every situation.”

The comment helps explain why Sandbox Percussion has developed into one of the most respected percussion ensembles working today. The group’s identity is built not only around virtuosity, but around collective artistic problem solving and unusually close collaboration with composers.

Sandbox Percussion and the Rise of Seven Pillars

Those collaborative instincts reached a new level through Sandbox Percussion’s work with composer Andy Akiho on Seven Pillars, the large-scale percussion work that became a Grammy-nominated recording and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music. Rosenbaum openly acknowledged the project’s transformative effect on the ensemble’s career.

“One of the reasons for all of the success that we found in the past few years is this big project with Andy Akiho called Seven Pillars.”

That success culminated in Sandbox Percussion receiving the Avery Fisher Career Grant, one of classical music’s most prestigious recognitions for emerging artists and ensembles. Rosenbaum recalled learning about the award almost accidentally after organizers struggled to reach him because of an incorrect phone number.

“You don’t apply and you don’t even know that you’re under consideration.”

Rather than folding the unrestricted grant into the ensemble’s normal operating budget, Sandbox chose to direct much of the funding toward future artistic development. A major portion will support a new evening-length percussion quintet by Akiho, written for the four members of Sandbox plus Akiho himself performing alongside them.

The project grew naturally from Akiho’s own frustrations while watching performances of Seven Pillars from the audience.

“Every time he comes and watches us play Seven Pillars, he wishes that he was on stage playing with us.”

That anecdote captures something essential about Rosenbaum’s artistic world. The boundary between composer and performer has become increasingly fluid. Contemporary percussion music often develops through shared experimentation, rehearsal discoveries, and evolving sonic ideas rather than through a rigid top-down model.

Reinventing Instruments and Expanding Sound

Rosenbaum spoke enthusiastically about the ways contemporary composers continue to reinvent traditional instruments. For him, Akiho represents one of the most original voices in that movement.

“He specializes in inventing new ways to play his instruments.”

The examples Rosenbaum described sound almost theatrical: cellists attaching clothespins to strings to create gong-like sonorities, pianists swiping credit cards across strings, percussionists constructing entirely new instruments for specific works. Yet Rosenbaum emphasized that these techniques are not gimmicks. They emerge from a search for sounds capable of expressing ideas unavailable through traditional orchestration alone.

Percussionists, he noted with amusement, have become especially comfortable navigating that experimental world.

“We’re the guys that the composers always feel like they can throw anything at us if it doesn’t exist yet.”

That openness has helped percussion music evolve rapidly over the last two decades. Rosenbaum credited ensembles like So Percussion with helping legitimize percussion chamber music as a serious professional field.

Before that shift, percussion ensembles often relied heavily on arrangements or educational repertoire. Today, leading composers actively write ambitious original works for percussion groups, dramatically expanding the repertoire and raising the artistic profile of the medium.

Recording as Creative Construction

The conversation eventually turned toward recording technology, an area where Rosenbaum’s thinking becomes especially revealing. For Sandbox Percussion, recordings are not merely archival documents of performances. They are carefully constructed artistic objects.

The recording process behind Seven Pillars illustrates that philosophy. The album was assembled over roughly a year in multiple states and acoustic environments during the pandemic.

“If you listen to what the recordings of Seven Pillars actually sound like… they sound nothing like what the album sounds like.”

Working closely with producer and engineer Sean Dixon, the ensemble manipulated sounds extensively during post-production.

“We would take the sound of a percussion instrument like a woodblock and turn it into a shotgun blast or something.”

Rosenbaum clearly views studio production as its own form of composition. The recording becomes a distinct artistic medium rather than a substitute for live performance.

At the same time, he remains acutely aware of the importance of acoustic space in live music making. During one exchange about overly dampened concert halls, Rosenbaum agreed that excessive sound absorption can destroy ensemble blend and rob music of vitality.

“The sounds can’t blend together. You’re not getting any feedback from the space.”

Those observations reveal an artist constantly balancing two worlds: the immediacy of live performance and the limitless sculptural possibilities of recorded sound.

Reich, Glass, and the Psychology of Listening

Rosenbaum’s reflections on minimalist composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass opened another dimension of the discussion: the psychology of musical perception.

Of Reich, Rosenbaum spoke with particular admiration.

“He completely invented, completely created a new genre of writing.”

What fascinates Rosenbaum most is Reich’s extraordinary control over gradual change and listener expectation.

“Those tiny changes… happen right when you are done listening to the last thing.”

Glass, however, creates a very different experience for performers.

“Glass is so much more difficult… staggeringly difficult compared to Reich.”

Rosenbaum described performing Glass almost as a trance state, requiring complete concentration over long spans of subtle rhythmic transformation. His comments suggest that minimalist music is less about repetition than about heightened perception, forcing both performer and listener to become acutely aware of tiny shifts in texture, pulse, and harmony.

Emotion, Meaning, and Contemporary Music

Underlying the entire conversation was Rosenbaum’s resistance to simplistic interpretations of music. He does not believe emotional meaning exists in fixed or objective ways.

“I don’t think that a certain piece has objectively the emotion of love in it.”

Yet he equally rejects the idea that contemporary music is emotionally detached. Instead, he views musical meaning as a dynamic interaction between composer, performer, and listener.

“That is what is so special about it and why it’s such a universal language.”

That perspective also shapes his defense of contemporary music against critics who dismiss it too quickly.

“They haven’t seen a good new music concert.”

For Rosenbaum, the contemporary music world is not an isolated avant-garde niche. It is an enormous, rapidly expanding ecosystem filled with composers, performers, and ensembles exploring entirely new approaches to sound and collaboration. His own career sits near the center of that movement, bridging performance, education, recording, and artistic experimentation in ways that increasingly define what classical music looks like in the twenty-first century.

Highlights from the Interview

• Ian Rosenbaum discussed his dual career as performer and educator, including his teaching role at the Manhattan School of Music.

• Chamber music became central to his artistic identity through studies with Robert Van Sise.

• Sandbox Percussion received the Avery Fisher Career Grant following the success of Seven Pillars.

• The ensemble plans to use part of the grant to commission a new evening-length work from Andy Akiho.

• Rosenbaum described contemporary percussion as a field built around experimentation and collaboration.

• Seven Pillars required extensive recording manipulation and nearly a year of post-production work.

• Rosenbaum views recording and live performance as distinct artistic mediums.

• He praised Steve Reich for redefining musical structure through gradual transformation.

• He described performing Philip Glass as an immersive and highly demanding experience.

• Rosenbaum argued that many listeners misunderstand contemporary music because they have not encountered its strongest performances.

Video interviews and more thoughtful essays on classical music can be found at:

Atlanta Music Critic
Atlanta Music Critic on YouTube
William Ford Substack
Atlanta Music Critic Patreon

Conductor Gemma New has built an international career through a combination of technical command, intellectual curiosity, and a striking ability to adapt to the unique personality of every orchestra she encounters. As artistic advisor and principal conductor of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and the first female principal guest conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, New has emerged as one of the most visible conductors of her generation.

Yet despite the scale of her career, New speaks about music-making in deeply practical and collaborative terms. During our conversation, she repeatedly returned to ideas of preparation, communication, and responsiveness rather than personal mystique.

Growing up in New Zealand, music was woven naturally into daily life. “There was music on all the time,” she recalled, noting that her mother still performs violin in community orchestras.

New began violin at five and piano at seven, eventually joining youth orchestras that proved transformative. One experience in particular crystallized her future.

“At the age of 12, we were playing Pictures at an Exhibition,” she said. “At ‘The Great Gate of Kiev,’ with 200 young people playing at the top of their lungs, I thought that I want to be involved with this for the rest of my life.”

Conducting entered the picture a few years later. At fifteen, after leading an ensemble performance for the first time, she immediately recognized the fit.

“I told my best friend, ‘I want to be a conductor. This is it. This is where I belong.’”

What attracted her was not simply the sound of the orchestra, but the structure behind it. She described score study as both analytical and logical, an approach informed partly by her interest in mathematics.

“Looking at the score, seeing everyone’s parts, fascinating,” she said. “I love the analysis because I also love mathematics.”

Learning the Language of the Orchestra

New’s formative years included extensive orchestral experience as both player and assistant conductor. A pivotal moment came during her time with the National Youth Orchestra of New Zealand, when conductor Jacques Lacombe unexpectedly invited her to conduct during sound checks on tour. That experience eventually led to her acceptance at the Peabody Institute.

At Peabody, she studied with conductors Gustav Meier and Markand Thakar, whose approaches differed dramatically.

“They both taught completely opposite ways of conducting,” New explained. “So you are creating a toolbox of tools that you can take out at different points, either gesturally or philosophically.”

That idea of flexibility has remained central to her philosophy. Conducting, in her view, is not about imposing a single interpretive identity onto every ensemble. Instead, it involves understanding the culture, traditions, and communication style of the orchestra in front of you.

“No, I don’t think so,” she said when asked whether orchestras have become homogenized. “There are very different styles depending on where you are. And it even doesn’t have to be geographical. It can just be the ethos of the orchestra that you’re at.”

She described hearing striking differences between orchestras in France, Italy, and Canada, particularly in matters of sustain, phrasing, and transparency. In Italy, she noted, “there’s this fiery nature. Things explode.”

By contrast, she found French orchestras often favor lighter textures and more transparency, especially in repertoire such as Maurice Ravel.

The Practical Side of Sound

New also spoke in unusually concrete terms about orchestral sound and balance. Even something as seemingly mundane as string count becomes, in her hands, a matter of artistic architecture.

“Every single week I’m asked, ‘For this future program, what do you want for the string count?’” she said. “I need to know what do you usually do, how big is your hall, what are the acoustics, what is tradition in the orchestra.”

During her nine years as music director of the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra, she adjusted ensemble sizes substantially depending on repertoire and practical realities. She even expressed strong preferences regarding orchestral seating.

“I don’t like uneven desks,” she explained. “I think that there should always be pairs, like Noah’s Ark.”

Her discussion of Mahler revealed another side of her artistic temperament. Rather than framing the composer primarily in terms of technical challenge, she emphasized the emotional investment musicians bring to the music.

“If an orchestra is doing Mahler just once a year, they can’t wait and they prepare for months,” she said. “They come with the most genuinely beautiful spirit.”

Conducting as Conversation

One of the most revealing parts of the discussion centered on what conductors actually do during performance.

New strongly rejected the common notion that conducting is largely choreographic theater.

“I get quite upset when people say that it’s choreography because I don’t think it’s that at all,” she said. “Every time that we go through the same section of music, you’ll find that my gestures are very different because I’m reacting differently to what we’ve done before.”

For her, conducting remains an active, constantly evolving exchange between podium and orchestra. Gestures shift in response to what players need in the moment, whether anticipatory support for an entrance or subtle adjustments to pacing and energy.

“It’s always really a conversation back and forth,” she explained.

That responsiveness extends to rehearsal strategy as well. In an ideal week, she said, the conductor gradually moves from broad observation toward greater specificity before ultimately backing away again during performance.

“In the concert, actually, you can then back off again,” she noted. “Things are more subtle because you have this trust.”

Influences and Musical Life

Over the course of a decade assisting major orchestras, New absorbed lessons from a wide range of conductors, including Gustavo Dudamel, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Leonard Slatkin, David Robertson, and Andris Nelsons.

Of Dudamel, she admired the sheer communicative range of his technique.

“Some conductors just show the vowels,” she said. “But I thought he had the whole alphabet in his hands.”

Despite spending much of her professional life immersed in classical repertoire, New admitted that listening habits outside work can be surprisingly simple.

“When I’m relaxing, I actually just listen to Taylor Swift,” she said with a laugh.

Programming for the Audience

Toward the end of the conversation, New reflected on programming philosophy, emphasizing trust between conductor, orchestra administration, and audience.

“When you program a concert, I don’t think as a conductor you should go in and say, ‘I want to do this piece,’ especially if you don’t know the orchestra,” she said.

Instead, she believes artistic planning succeeds when repertoire choices emerge from a broader understanding of the orchestra’s culture, audience, and season design.

“It has to be what’s right for the audience and the musicians and the time,” she explained.

That collaborative instinct may ultimately explain why New has connected so successfully with orchestras across multiple continents. Beneath the technical command and international résumé lies a conductor deeply interested in listening, adapting, and building trust, one rehearsal at a time.

Highlights from the Interview

• Gemma New traces her decision to pursue music professionally to performing Pictures at an Exhibition as a child in youth orchestra.

• She believes orchestras retain highly individual sonic identities shaped by tradition, geography, and institutional culture.

• New strongly rejects the idea that conducting is “choreography,” emphasizing that gestures constantly evolve in response to the orchestra.

• She views score study as both artistic and analytical, comparing aspects of conducting preparation to mathematics.

• Her programming philosophy prioritizes audience, orchestra culture, and collaboration with artistic administrators.

For more interviews, essays, and commentary on classical music, visit Atlanta Music Critic.net.

Support the channel at Patreon/ Atlanta Music Critic

YouTube channel: Atlanta Music Critic YouTube Channel

When violinist Domenic Salerni first appeared on Atlanta Music Critic about a decade ago, few could have predicted the trajectory that would follow. Salerni was the very first interviewee featured by AMC, beginning a long-running dialogue that has traced his evolution from emerging artist to internationally recognized chamber musician, teacher, composer, and Grammy Award winner.

As second violinist of the Attacca Quartet, Salerni helped earn the Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for the ensemble’s recording of Caroline Shaw’s Evergreen. Yet the Grammy itself represents only one thread in a broader artistic identity. Salerni emerges as a musician deeply interested in structure, interpretation, pedagogy, artistic honesty, and the evolving place of classical music in modern culture.

One of the striking qualities of Salerni’s thinking is that he rarely discusses music in isolation. Again and again, he situates musical life within larger systems: conservatories that shape artistic priorities, institutions that determine prestige, audiences that reinforce programming traditions, competitions that establish professional hierarchies, and broader cultural movements involving race, gender, celebrity, and power. Music, in his view, is never merely sound detached from context. It exists inside networks of history, economics, ideology, and institutional culture.

That systems-level perspective gradually expands outward from the practical realities of quartet life into larger questions about artistic purpose, institutional authority, canon formation, and identity. Beethoven, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, composition, pedagogy, awards culture, and even films like Tár become interconnected parts of the same inquiry: how musicians construct meaningful artistic lives within the structures surrounding classical music.

Rather than pursuing the mythology of the virtuoso soloist, Salerni has built a career around collaboration, curiosity, and sustained artistic reflection.

Chamber Music as Identity

For Salerni, chamber music is not merely a specialization. It is the center of how he understands music-making itself.

Quartet life becomes an ongoing process of refinement, experimentation, and collective decision-making. Much of the work is surprisingly granular: bowings, articulation, phrasing, pacing, and subtle disagreements over interpretation. Yet those details are precisely what fascinate him.

“What’s wonderful about having a rather narrow repertoire in a season is that you have the opportunity to perform it more than once. We can do it this way, and hey, let’s try it this other way and see if it works.”

That openness to revision defines much of Salerni’s artistic outlook. Even established masterpieces remain fluid objects capable of revealing new possibilities over time.

His perspective also separates him somewhat from the traditional conservatory hierarchy that places solo careers at the top of the profession. Conservatories, he notes, are often structured to produce soloists first, while chamber music, teaching, and orchestral careers are treated as secondary outcomes.

“I just prefer chamber music. It’s a wonderful mode of expression that you have compatriots on stage, you’re making music together, you have a certain amount of artistic freedom.”

That collaborative orientation has only deepened through his work with the Attacca Quartet. Over time, the ensemble evolved from four ambitious young musicians into something more durable and human as marriages, children, and long-term artistic commitments reshaped the group’s identity. Salerni jokingly refers to himself as “Uncle Dom” to the children of his quartet colleagues, but beneath the humor lies a serious recognition that sustaining a chamber ensemble requires emotional durability as much as musical excellence.

That same collaborative philosophy also shapes the way Salerni thinks about recognition and success within classical music culture.

The Grammy and the Machinery of Recognition

Salerni’s recollections of the Grammy Awards are filled with humor, amazement, and a certain anthropological detachment. What struck him most was not simply the award itself, but the scale of the machinery surrounding it.

Stylists, press junkets, backstage coordinators, shuttle systems, red carpets, and carefully orchestrated logistics created what he describes as an almost surreal environment.

“We just try to make beautiful music. And if the big machine wants to honor us, that’s really great, but that’s sort of not the point.”

Salerni readily acknowledges that awards alter perception. Audiences, presenters, critics, and institutions listen differently once artists acquire visible markers of prestige. Yet he consistently resists equating recognition with artistic value.

“There are so many people who haven’t won this particular award who are making beautiful music and being artists with integrity.”

Here again, Salerni’s thinking moves beyond personal achievement toward systems. Awards become part of the larger institutional apparatus through which authority and legitimacy are constructed inside classical music. Recognition affects opportunity, programming, publicity, and credibility regardless of whether it necessarily reflects artistic depth.

The Grammy becomes, in his telling, less a culmination than an amplifier. It creates visibility and opportunity, but it does not fundamentally change the artistic work itself.

Not long after that visibility accelerated, however, the larger structure of musical life itself abruptly stopped during the pandemic.

The Pandemic and Artistic Reflection

Like many musicians, Salerni experienced the pandemic as both interruption and revelation.

The structure that had governed his professional life suddenly disappeared. Concerts vanished. Travel stopped. Practice routines lost urgency. What remained was silence and an unfamiliar amount of time.

“When all of a sudden you’re looking at all of this unstructured time, yeah, it’s a huge gear shift.”

What makes his reflections especially compelling is that he does not describe the experience purely negatively. While acknowledging the devastation surrounding the crisis, he also recognizes that the sudden pause exposed how deeply professional musicians can become trapped inside systems of constant productivity established by institutions, touring schedules, and professional expectations.

“Because I don’t have the pressure, I can pick up the fiddle on my own terms.”

That distinction between obligation and intrinsic motivation becomes central to Salerni’s outlook. The pandemic temporarily stripped away many external pressures and forced musicians to reconsider what remained once the institutional framework disappeared.

Teaching provided continuity during that period. Revisiting Mozart and Bruch concertos with students became both technical maintenance and a kind of personal excavation, reconnecting him with earlier stages of his own development.

That same period of reflection also deepened Salerni’s engagement with composition, where questions of pacing, structure, and artistic intention become unavoidable.

Composition, Structure, and Musical Architecture

Although best known as a violinist, Salerni’s reflections on composition reveal another side of his artistic personality: analytical, intuitive, and intensely concerned with form.

His piano trio emerged rapidly during an unexpectedly free afternoon at the Bellingham Music Festival, with much of the material arriving in what he describes as a near-continuous creative flow. Yet even when discussing inspiration, Salerni consistently returns to architecture, pacing, and proportion. He is fascinated by the way composers organize musical time and sustain momentum across long spans.

“If there’s anything that’s good or inspirational that comes out of these pieces, it’s kind of a function of who they were written for or why they were written.”

That concern with structure extends naturally into his relationship with his father, composer Robert Salerni. Their relationship functions less as a traditional parent-child hierarchy than as an ongoing artistic exchange between performer and composer.

Salerni’s upbringing reinforced his tendency to think systemically rather than narrowly. Theory, ear training, literature, theater, jazz, and classical repertoire all coexisted within the household environment. Music was never treated merely as technical execution, but as part of a broader intellectual and cultural ecosystem.

That perspective helps explain why Salerni approaches composition less as self-expression in isolation than as part of a larger continuum of structure, interpretation, performance, and cultural inheritance. Questions of pacing, architecture, and emotional timing eventually extend beyond his own compositions and shape the way he understands the broader classical canon itself.

Listening to the Canon

For Salerni, debates about composers are never purely aesthetic arguments. Questions about why certain composers dominate programming while others disappear inevitably lead toward larger institutional questions involving conservatory training, audience expectation, historical prestige, and cultural gatekeeping.

He distinguishes between what he calls “ritualistic listeners,” who seek familiarity and reaffirmation, and “responsive listeners,” who want discovery and surprise.

That distinction becomes especially vivid in discussions of Tchaikovsky. Ford criticizes the composer’s theatrical gestures and structural predictability, while Salerni emphasizes Tchaikovsky’s extraordinary command of pacing and emotional timing.

“Tchaikovsky really understands how music occupies time and what that does to an emotional narrative.”

Salerni approaches the canon not simply as an artistic inheritance, but as the product of institutional selection and historical power. His comments about Florence Price avoid simplistic ideological framing while still acknowledging the structural realities that shaped her reception relative to contemporaries such as Gershwin.

He also resists easy dismissal. Even composers he struggles with remain worthy of investigation. Wagner, Britten, Mahler, and Bruckner become opportunities to think through larger questions about scale, repetition, influence, institutional reputation, and artistic ambition.

The canon itself thus becomes less a neutral collection of masterpieces than a reflection of the systems that preserve, elevate, and circulate particular forms of musical authority.

Tár and the Culture Surrounding Classical Music

Salerni’s systems-oriented thinking even shapes the way he interprets films about classical music. His reaction to Tár, directed by Todd Field, focused less on conducting itself than on the institutional ecosystems surrounding artistic power.

Rather than viewing the film simply as a psychological portrait of a conductor, Salerni understood it as an exploration of prestige, authority, gatekeeping, celebrity culture, and the instability of artistic identity within elite musical institutions.

The film’s portrayal of professional networking, public image management, status anxiety, and institutional influence resonated strongly with his broader understanding of classical music culture.

“People who say it’s about conductors or lesbian conductors or about classical music got the wrong message. It’s a fall from grace and that can happen anywhere.”

For Salerni, Tár functions almost as a case study for tensions embedded throughout contemporary classical music: canon formation, institutional authority, celebrity culture, and the uneasy interaction between personality and power.

Music, in this framework, does not exist independently from the structures surrounding it. Institutions shape opportunity. Reputation shapes legitimacy. Public identity shapes artistic authority. The culture surrounding classical music becomes inseparable from the music itself.

An Artist Still Evolving

For Salerni, performance, pedagogy, composition, canon formation, and institutional culture are inseparable parts of the same musical ecosystem. Beethoven quartets, Suzuki pedagogy, Mahler symphonies, conservatory training, and orchestral prestige all become interconnected expressions of how classical music sustains itself, reproduces its values, and defines artistic legitimacy. Underlying that perspective is an ongoing effort to reconcile artistic meaning with the institutional realities surrounding classical music. Salerni consistently returns to the question of how musicians can sustain curiosity, individuality, and artistic integrity while operating inside systems built around prestige, hierarchy, tradition, and professional expectation.

What makes Salerni especially compelling is not simply his versatility as a performer or teacher, but the breadth of his cultural perspective. He approaches classical music not as an isolated art form, but as a living network of institutions, traditions, audiences, reputations, and historical forces that continually shape one another. His reflections on performance, composition, pedagogy, programming, and cultural power all emerge from that same systems-oriented understanding of musical life.

That perspective may explain why Domenic Salerni has remained such a compelling presence since becoming Atlanta Music Critic’s very first interviewee. His reflections are never simply about violin playing. They are about the evolving relationship between craft, identity, collaboration, institutions, and culture itself.

And for Salerni, that inquiry still appears very much unfinished.

Highlights from the Interview

• Domenic Salerni reflects on winning a Grammy with the Attacca Quartet and why awards ultimately remain secondary to artistic integrity.

• Chamber music is presented not as a fallback career path, but as a collaborative artistic philosophy.

• Salerni consistently situates classical music within broader institutional and societal systems involving conservatories, prestige structures, audience expectations, and cultural movements.

• The essay explores how awards systems, programming traditions, and institutional authority shape artistic reputation and opportunity.

• Salerni discusses how the pandemic disrupted performance life while also creating space for reflection and renewed intrinsic motivation.

• Salerni offers nuanced perspectives on Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Wagner, Britten, and the problem of over-programmed repertoire.

• Tár becomes a lens through which Salerni examines power, celebrity, institutional authority, and legitimacy within classical music culture.

Follow Atlanta Music Critic:

• Atlanta Music Critic Website

• Atlanta Music Critic YouTube Channel

• Atlanta Music Critic Patreon

• William Ford Substack

For conductor, tubist, and educator Brian Kaufman, music is not an isolated art. It is something people do together, a means of communication that can reach beyond the concert hall and create a place for people to encounter one another.

Kaufman’s ambitions for music are broad, but his approach is remarkably down to earth. He talks about music less as an abstraction than as something people experience. He wants audiences to listen, respond, talk, and perhaps leave seeing something differently.

That emphasis on connection runs through his life as a performer, conductor, teacher, and advocate for contemporary music. Again and again, Kaufman has found ways to enlarge the circle around music.

Finding His Place in Music

Kaufman’s musical life began with a wonderfully practical discovery. As a sixth grader in New York State, he was given the opportunity to try several brass instruments. The tuba immediately worked.

“The teacher was jumping up and down because I immediately made a sound right away on the mouthpiece.”

There was something slightly comic about an 80- or 90-pound sixth grader taking up one of the largest instruments in the ensemble, but the match stuck. Kaufman eventually studied tuba performance and music education at the University of Michigan, followed by graduate study at the University of Maryland and conducting studies at the New England Conservatory.

Along the way came an unexpected musical detour. While living in Xi’an, China, after college, Kaufman found himself singing at a jazz club. His previous vocal training was limited, but the club needed a singer and Kaufman auditioned.

“They’re like, all right, you’re better than all of us are. You’re hired.”

He stayed for about a year and returned the following summer. It is an appealing story because it captures something essential about Kaufman. Music, for him, seems to be as much about participation and discovery as professional specialization.

Enlarging the Circle

Conducting gave Kaufman a way to expand that experience. Even while completing graduate studies in tuba, he was conducting extensively and formed a brass and percussion ensemble with another graduate conducting student.

What attracted him was the possibility of shaping a musical experience for many people at once.

“As a conductor, it might be the best way to be able to work with the most people and to be able to have the biggest impact.”

That emphasis on people has remained central to his career. Kaufman is now at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where his responsibilities include conducting the wind ensemble, teaching conducting, working with music education students, and providing private instruction in tuba and euphonium.

UMBC also gives Kaufman access to students whose primary interests extend well beyond music. Music majors perform alongside students pursuing science, engineering, English, and other disciplines. Kaufman values what those different perspectives bring into the rehearsal room. He describes many of the science and engineering students as “some of the best musicians around” and has found that they sometimes make connections that music majors do not immediately see.

For Kaufman, teaching, performing, and conducting all become ways of bringing people into a shared musical experience.

Music as a Sounding Board

That impulse found its clearest expression in The Sounding Board, an organization Kaufman co-founded with Michael Reichman after his studies at the New England Conservatory.

The premise was to use music as an entry point into contemporary social issues. Kaufman makes an interesting comparison to The Daily Show. Just as comedy can draw people into discussions of current events, he wondered whether music could provide another way of approaching difficult subjects.

“We wanted to use music and the creativity and the humanity of music to be a way to help people connect with different issues going on locally and globally in our world.”

Programs were organized around themes, with music supplemented by video, interviews, panel discussions, facilitated conversations, and informal opportunities for audiences to talk afterward. Music provided a common experience from which conversation could begin.

One project in Boston brought together young people from about ten arts organizations around the subject of sustainable development. Participants created music and visual art responding to environmental issues important to them. The event also brought together a representative involved with sustainable development at the United Nations and a Boston official working in the same area.

What Kaufman remembers most vividly is the young people.

“It was just a really inspiring event to see all of those young people come together with such energy and passion through their music or the arts to express their views.”

The Sounding Board reveals something fundamental about Kaufman’s conception of a musician. For him, music can provide a place where people with different backgrounds and perspectives gather, experience something together, and perhaps begin talking to one another.

Enlarging the Circle → From Performer to Conductor

Kaufman eventually found another way to extend that circle, this time beyond the people gathered in a concert hall. Kaufman’s work with The Sounding Board had established a pattern. Music could begin with the experience of an individual composer or performer, but Kaufman was interested in what happened when that experience was shared. Could it draw other people into a conversation? Could it provide another way of encountering the world around them? Could a musical work continue reaching people long after its premiere?

Seen in that context, his new recording Brass for Uncommon Times seems almost an inevitable extension of Kaufman’s musical life.

He selected seven works by seven contemporary composers, each responding in some way to the unsettled circumstances of recent years. The project grew particularly from Valerie Coleman’s Fanfare for Uncommon Times, written in response to the convergence of pandemic, racial unrest, uncertainty, and hopes for greater unity that characterized 2020.

Kaufman’s guiding question when developing the recording was characteristic of the way he approaches music:

“How can music play a role in helping us navigate how we move forward?”

The recording became one possible answer.

A Life Beyond the Premiere

There is one important connection Kaufman hopes Brass for Uncommon Times will make, and it may ultimately be the most consequential.

Contemporary classical music has a familiar problem. A composer receives a commission, musicians prepare a new work, an audience hears its premiere, and the piece may then struggle to find another performance.

Kaufman wants these works to travel.

“You hate to see such wonderful music only get performed a couple of times.”

The album’s release on Naxos gives the seven composers an opportunity to reach conductors and ensembles far beyond those involved in the original performances. Kaufman hopes musicians elsewhere will discover the works and bring them before new audiences.

In that sense, the recording is less an endpoint than another link in a chain. A composer creates something from an experience. Musicians give it sound. Listeners encounter it. Another conductor discovers it, another ensemble performs it, and another audience enters the conversation.

That may be the clearest way to understand Brian Kaufman. He is a musician who thinks in terms of connections: performers with audiences, students with teachers, music with contemporary life, and composers with musicians who might perform their work next.

For Kaufman, a musical performance need not provide the final word. It can be the place where something begins.

Paticipate in our survey about the future of classical music:

The ideas, judgments, and conclusions in this article are my own. AMC digital assistant Luchino Discounti helps organize material, refine language, and verify information.

Too often, discussions about the future of classical music are driven by assumptions. We hear what boards think, what administrators think, what critics think, and what musicians think. Much less often do we hear directly from the people who attend concerts—or those who choose not to.

That’s why I created this survey.

It explores topics that are rarely discussed: concert experiences, programming, pricing, dress codes, venue preferences, technology, streaming, entertainment, community, and much more. There are no right or wrong answers. I’m simply interested in what you think.

The survey is longer than the typical online questionnaire because meaningful questions deserve thoughtful answers. Every completed response strengthens the quality of the research and helps move the conversation beyond anecdotes and assumptions.

As a thank-you for participating, everyone who completes the survey will receive:

• A summary of the survey findings.

• A complimentary PDF copy of Balancing the Scales of Classical Music I: Comparing Strength, Fragility, and Community Support Across 18 Major Orchestras (a $25 value).

Simply scan the QR code below to begin.

Whether you’re a lifelong subscriber, an occasional concertgoer, a musician, an arts administrator, or someone who has never attended a symphony concert, your perspective matters.

Together, let’s replace speculation with evidence—and help shape a stronger future for classical music.

Andrew von Oeyen: Living Inside the Music

For pianist Andrew von Oeyen, performance at its best involves a peculiar disappearance of conscious effort. Technique, memory, collaboration, and interpretation have been prepared in advance so thoroughly that the performer can simply inhabit the music. “Those are the best performances when you’re literally, you’re in the moment,” he says. “You’re not thinking about what’s coming up or you’re not thinking about what you just did. You’re literally living inside the music.”

That description offers a useful way of understanding von Oeyen as a musician. His approach combines rigorous preparation with a desire for freedom, and a respect for classical tradition with considerable openness about how classical music might change. Whether discussing memorization, working with an orchestra, unconventional performance spaces, or the increasingly visual presentation of classical music, he repeatedly returns to the same underlying priority: whatever surrounds the performance should ultimately serve the music.

“I Think I Play Better When I Don’t Have a Score”

Von Oeyen has developed an unusually broad repertoire, something he attributes in part to studying with teachers representing several different pianistic traditions. At Juilliard, his teachers included Herbert Stessin and Jerome Lowenthal, while earlier studies exposed him to still other approaches. Rather than emerging from a single pedagogical lineage, he sees that diversity as central to his development: “I feel that I’m not a product of just one style of piano playing and comfortable in one kind of repertoire.” He describes having encountered Russian, Austro-Germanic, and French schools of playing, giving him different ways of approaching the keyboard and the literature written for it.

Memory is an important part of the freedom he seeks in performance. Music learned when young, he says, can remain remarkably durable: pieces may need interpretive reconsideration after an absence, yet the notes themselves often remain firmly embedded. For von Oeyen, performing without a score therefore has a practical artistic purpose. “I feel freer. I feel I can just listen better. I can pay more attention to my sound than if I have the score.”

He makes no doctrine of memorization and has no objection to pianists using scores. What matters is whether the performer has sufficient security to play freely. Anxiety about memory can become more distracting than the printed page itself. His preference for playing from memory is consequently personal rather than prescriptive: “At the end of the day, I care how it sounds.”

The Art of Collaboration

A concerto soloist may occupy the visual center of the stage, but von Oeyen describes concerto playing as fundamentally collaborative. The quality of an orchestra changes what a pianist can do because accomplished orchestral musicians anticipate phrasing, maintain rhythmic stability, and listen actively to the soloist. “They just feel where the music is going,” he says. “And they really listen to what you’re doing. And that makes your job so much easier.”

Rehearsal with a conductor can establish tempi and interpretive agreement, although von Oeyen recognizes the excitement that can come from less preparation. “Sometimes magic happens that way,” he observes. “Sometimes the lack of rehearsal really creates this energy and spontaneity.” For complex works with extensive tempo changes and strong performance traditions, however, preparation gives conductor and soloist a common framework from which that spontaneity can emerge.

Professionalism also means adapting when circumstances are less than ideal. An orchestra may be unable to sustain a desired tempo, or individual players may have practical needs that require adjustment. Von Oeyen regards compromise as part of making music with other people. “At the end of the day, it’s a collaborative process,” he says. His goal is to make “the music sound as good as possible,” even when that means abandoning an interpretation he might otherwise prefer.

Classical Music Begins With Exposure

Von Oeyen’s international career has given him an opportunity to observe striking differences among classical-music cultures. He is particularly enthusiastic about performing in Japan, where he points to excellent halls, instruments, technicians, organization, and knowledgeable audiences. His explanation for the vitality of classical music there is refreshingly straightforward: “Again, that’s because of education.”

That principle extends well beyond any single country. “At the end of the day, I think it just comes down to, again, education and what you’re exposed to,” he says. Where music education is valued, he sees greater potential for concert attendance, subscriptions, listening, and recording consumption. The health of classical music therefore depends partly upon creating familiarity with it long before someone is expected to purchase a concert ticket.

Von Oeyen also sees encouraging signs in the willingness of musicians and organizations to experiment with presentation. Classical music had relied upon familiar formulas for a long time; he sees musicians increasingly exploring social media, different venues, new forms of presentation, and new ways of talking about their work. “People are really trying all kinds of things to spur interest in what we do,” he says, adding that some experiments succeed and others do not. The willingness to experiment itself strikes him as hopeful.

Listening With Our Eyes

That experimentation raises a more complicated question. Classical music now exists within a culture dominated by images, video, screens, and social media. Von Oeyen welcomes the greater attention being paid to visual presentation, while recognizing a potential danger: “The only risk of this is that we start to train our audiences to listen with their eyes instead of their ears.”

His solution is integration rather than retreat. Lighting, projections, clothing, and other visual elements can contribute to a performance when they are artistically congruent with the music. “If we can combine the two, I think that can be really powerful,” he says. He has experienced performances in which lighting and projections worked effectively with the music and welcomes the move away from an endlessly repeated visual formula of tuxedos, bow ties, orchestral shells, and traditional concert staging.

The venue itself can also change the relationship between performer and listener. Von Oeyen points approvingly to concerts in homes and other unconventional spaces. House concerts particularly interest him because their intimacy reconnects contemporary listeners with the environment in which much nineteenth-century chamber music was originally experienced. A recital in a residence becomes “a very different kind of experience,” both socially and acoustically.

He is similarly enthusiastic about films accompanied by live orchestra. Hearing musicians perform the score while the movie is projected changes the experience of something normally fixed and reproducible. “It makes the film come alive,” he says, while also drawing attention to a part of filmmaking audiences can easily overlook: the score itself. For orchestras, such programming can also provide valuable revenue, something he regards as a legitimate part of sustaining the institutions that make large-scale musical performance possible.

Tradition With Room to Move

What emerges from von Oeyen’s thinking is an appealing balance. He values rigorous technique, memorization, excellent instruments, knowledgeable audiences, strong music education, and the accumulated traditions surrounding great repertoire. At the same time, he welcomes visual experimentation, unusual venues, film concerts, social media, and other attempts to change the way classical music reaches an audience.

The connecting principle is quality. Innovation works when it draws attention toward the musical experience rather than becoming a substitute for it. As von Oeyen puts it when discussing the increasingly visual character of performance, such experimentation is valuable “if the number one value is the music making itself.”

Perhaps that explains why his description of being “inside the music” is so revealing. Everything else—the training, memorization, rehearsal, instrument, conductor, hall, lighting, and presentation—is preparation for the moment when all of those things recede. What remains is the experience von Oeyen describes so simply: listening, responding, and living inside the music.

Take the survey and let them know what you think about the future of live classical music:

The ideas, judgments, and conclusions in this article are my own. I use AMC digital assistant Luchino Discounti to help organize material, refine language, and verify information.