Let’s face it: these days, classical music is underground; it is no longer part of mainstream culture. By “underground,” I don’t mean that the San Francisco Symphony is punk, but that classical music has become something you will only hear if you seek it out. People at every level of the industry lament this — recall the outrage over the comments Timothée Chalamet made about opera and ballet earlier this year. To remedy this, many symphonies and opera houses attempt to market their work in a way that frames classical music as contemporary and relatable. Locally, San Francisco Opera has tried everything from tweet seats to immersive theater experiences to garner a younger audience, with varying levels of success. The idea is, if organizations present the music in just the right way, the uninitiated will gravitate to it the way they do to, say, a Taylor Swift concert.

In reality, different genres of music exercise different functions. A Taylor Swift concert is as much about the music as it is about the artist’s relationship to her audience. For a hypothetical young millennial Swiftie, the music’s manifest content — adolescent awkwardness, first heartbreak, being underestimated in society as a young girl or woman — is just as important as the memory of first encountering that music as a kid. Her audience grew up with her, and in a sense, through her. For her fans, attending a Taylor Swift concert is as much about enjoying their favorite songs as it is about traveling back to the version of themselves that first heard those songs.

In contrast, you cannot have a parasocial, historically contingent relationship with a composer in classical music like one might have with Taylor Swift or her epigones. Shostakovich is dead. Mozart is super dead. You wouldn’t know it by looking at the average symphony program because the overwhelming majority of programming centers on dead white guys, with their share of orchestral programming hovering close to 70 percent in the United States. What little contemporary music gets programmed is so varied that it can scarcely be bundled under the same umbrella — beyond the fact that nearly all the musicians involved have conservatory backgrounds and are largely working with notated music. Additionally, many contemporary composers devote energy to projects that travel far beyond the music’s sound itself: you cannot fully appreciate Gabriella Smith without understanding her goal of spreading ecological awareness, nor can you properly understand Jasmine Barnes without having a basic knowledge of Black history and Black vernacular genres.

These complexities present significant barriers to entry, as does the much-discussed ticket price sticker-shock. It is true that anyone who wants to hear classical music can find chamber concerts, indie opera, or something else at an affordable price — nobody is limited to the big symphonies and opera houses. But most people are wholly unaware these options exist, and that lack of awareness, combined with everything above, builds a much bigger barrier than economics alone.

However, I think this obscurity is both a weakness and a strength. Classical music being underground is a good thing, because it positions this music to do several things other genres are generally less capable of:

• Classical music can experiment along a virtually infinite number of axes — not just sonically but conceptually. Contemporary classical music seeks to ask, at its core, what can music be? In practice, the answer is clear: anything.

• Classical music is more free to depict emotions and experiences underrepresented in commercial music.

• With virtually no stylistic constraints and significantly less pressure from moneyed interests, classical music — contemporary work especially — can meaningfully comment on the zeitgeist and critique the powerful. While it is true that conflicts between musicians, donors, and administrators arise — especially with larger organizations — generally, there is a wider berth for social critique than in other music scenes. This is also because classical audiences are uniquely ready to engage with music that goes beyond mere titillation.

• Classical music engages with a rich, centuries-old tradition spanning Europe, and well beyond. In the US in particular, that hegemony is being actively critiqued by racialized and marginalized musicians who have been raised under that hegemony and trained in this tradition; the future of this music is in the hands of those who in past centuries would have been its mere imperial subjects. This is remarkable and praiseworthy.

Most importantly, I want to argue that classical music has a rare quality that I will call “wonderment.” I define this as the sensation of being changed by an encounter with musical depth that can cause the listener to reorient their idea of what music can be or say. This is not a quality exclusive to classical music, but a quality of all music that seeks to be art, not mere commodity. Abstract music can do this especially well.

One of my most memorable experiences of wonderment was hearing Patricia Kopatchinskaja perform György Ligeti’s Violin Concerto in 2018. Though the concerto has a written-out cadenza, Kopatchinskaja opted to write her own. It involved having the entire orchestra sing along with her as she improvised incredible, strange, alien figurations on the violin. I thought, “So music can be like this.” This feeling is at the heart of wonderment; it is a permanent widening of an individual’s possibility scope, musically and beyond.

So, how can classical music’s put its unique qualities to fullest use? I propose that we learn from another underground genre I know well: metal. In my piece about streaming, I talk about how I was in the right place at the right time to encounter metal music while getting my master’s in music composition: I was already a fan of the avant-garde, and of the metal songs I’d heard in Japanese anime. So when I first encountered progressive metal, I enjoyed that it combined the lyricism and groove of vernacular music with experimental technique. It became my musical home. Over the years, I’ve been to dozens of metal shows, and there are some key lessons I’ve learned from the metal scene:

• Bands live and die on fan investment, not donor money. Purists and gatekeepers exist, but their critiques are laughably irrelevant to the bands selling out stadiums. The biggest metal bands do well because they capture a diverse audience, which these days generally means a more female one.

• Opening acts supporting bigger bands expose listeners to music they have never heard. At a metal show, it is perfectly normal to hear several hours of music by bands you don’t know before hearing whichever band prompted you to attend (provided you don’t skip the openers). Orchestras try something similar — a large masterwork by a canonical composer, with a token new-music work early on the program — but the proportion of new music to old stays woefully small.

• Metalheads have a look. We all know it: a black band tee, distressed jeans, maybe even a spiky denim battle jacket. Metal’s aesthetics, the music and the fashion, are led by its youth. In contrast, if you ask anyone to imagine a classical music fan, they will picture someone generically older.

• Metal is self-policing, not led from the top. Whether it’s teaching newbie metalheads how to safely enjoy a mosh pit, or decrying fake guitarists on Instagram, the strictures of the genre are dictated by its fans.

What do all these observations have in common?

They all involve giving the reins of the art form to young people, onstage and off. Young people largely decide what music gets heard. They decide the look of the fandom. They decide the genre’s ethical codes and concert etiquette. There is a decentralized organizing principle whereby you can become a metalhead simply by choosing to be one and learning the ropes from the fans around you. What if classical music were similar? What if you went to the symphony and mostly heard new music? On every program? Cosplay is a global phenomenon now — so what if operagoers were asked to come dressed like Werther (the original goth boy), just as fans of Goethe’s novel did? What if we had more classical festivals that were less prestige experiences and more DIY, youth-led efforts? While I do not have all the answers, I think we should continue to learn from other genres outside the mainstream that nonetheless thrive and apply those lessons to classical music. We know the music is worth it. If we let those who will inherit the art form shape its future, classical music might become something more vital — and far more fun.

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It may seem like an odd pastime for professional musicians. However, several admit to not only loving airplanes, but actually flying them.

Indeed, when conductor Daniel Harding was announced as the next music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic last May (his tenure begins in the 2027-28 season), the Grammy Award-winning maestro also made headlines because he is a commercial pilot for Air France. Yes, he actually flies that company’s Airbus A320.

Talk about a risk factor!

The Oxford-born musician was quoted in The Guardian as saying, “The conductor is the only person on stage who can do absolutely nothing on their own,” which is precisely the opposite of what an airline pilot must do.

“I learned things about myself and conducting in a year that I didn’t learn in 29 years before as a conductor,” Harding added in reference to earning his commercial pilot license at age 40.

With Air France’s selection process even more rigorous than the LA Phil’s — the candidate takes mental agility tests and undergoes several trial runs over the course of a year before addressing a panel including a pilot and psychologist to identify their weaknesses — that seems as far afield as a conductor can get from a concert hall podium.

But after taking a deeper dive into the subject, one can see the parallels between musicianship and aeronautics: both demand technical precision, mental acuity, and a shared sense of purpose. Aviation actually provides a kind of counterbalance to the emotional intensity and solitude required in preparing to lead a full-scale orchestra.

For 51-year-old Russian-born Finnish conductor Dima Slobodeniouk, who collaborates with the world’s most prominent orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, and Boston Symphony Orchestra, “flying,” he said in a recent SF Classical Voice interview, “is one way of relaxing. It’s the thing which makes you really think about one thing only.”

He went on to say that he began flying a single engine plane some 20 years ago because a friend of his had been interested in aviation. “That friend gave me as a present a short introductory flight with an instructor. Having done that, there was no return. I said, ‘I need to do this. I want to learn things about aviation, about aerodynamics.’”

Slobodeniouk added that he also “learns about the planet, where we are living. And there are so many things you learn about yourself: How do you perform under pressure; how do you separate and prioritize things? It helps me in my work. As a conductor, you’re constantly making choices in prioritizing. In that given moment, there are a million things to do, but you can only do one thing at a time.”

While aviation and conducting both demand a range of unique talents, the conductor focuses on something that is also both technical and precise. This so-called flow state or being “in the zone” can be likened to a performance, but with the stakes obviously different than those found in piloting an airplane.

Pianist Joanne Pearce Martin, who was appointed to the LA Phil by Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2001, comes by her love of music and aviation through her father.

“My dad, who’s still with us at 102, [is] incredible,” she said in an interview with SFCV earlier this year. “He flew airplanes into his 90s, and my brother and I were flying in little airplanes with him from infancy, so it’s something that I got to really love early on.”

That love also led Martin to accrue more than 500 skydiving jumps, acknowledging that the sport had been a big part of her life. “I’m an active person, and I do a lot of outdoor things,” she added, “but now I’m flying little airplanes more [than skydiving]. That perspective of seeing the world from above, I think people would be surprised to know that’s how I relax.”

In short, both aviation and musicianship reward scrupulous preparation, with outcomes equally fulfilling, although as much as a listener can be emotionally transported by a work such as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or a Mozart opera, such performances will not, alas, literally take one to Paris on an Airbus.

However, one can take solace in the fact that the price of a concert ticket is far less than an airline’s these days. And while it’s debatable that Harding will be piloting an Air France plane to Los Angeles when he opens the season in 2027, one thing can be sure: The LA Phil will be in über-skilled hands.

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When music captures a feeling or memory unique to my own story, it expresses my experience in a way that no other medium can. Though my musical taste is expansive, it is always connected to myself. My musical likes and dislikes are not just preferences; they connect to my values and beliefs. As a result, music ultimately reaches a deeply true part of me.

This matrix of ideas is so familiar as to be cliché, yet that doesn’t stop any of it from feeling true. If music is anything like a “universal language,” that is because it is the reliable language of oneself.

This idea permeates and fuels classical music culture, from study to performance to marketing. Saxophone player Melissa Aldana, on her Coltrane 100 Tour, described her performance as a way of literally recreating and finding herself in the legendary player: “You can hear somebody that is very pure and on a deep search… You can hear how [Coltrane] manipulated sound in order to find his identity,” she said. This is not unlike hearing Beethoven plus all of humanity in his Ninth Symphony, a tradition as old as the symphony itself.

And it works in reverse, too. Vikingur Ólafsson spoke this spring of “merging with the music” in performance: “You become the material while you’re doing it.” This is key to his creative programming and playing: “People are more open to being themselves — who they are as people and how they identify themselves. That translates beautifully into music.”

This sense of “merging” is even easier to detect in contemporary pop music, where artists’ albums are heard (and judged) as the scripts of their own lives. (See the inherently autobiographical recent releases of Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo.)

From the old to the new, it can seem like this is the very point of music: to help us figure out — if not tell us — who we are.

It wasn’t always like this. In fact, on the cultural timeline, this idea of musical sincerity is quite new. It originated in a specific time and place. And it did not arrive all at once, cliché-ready and obvious. It was the result of a gradual aesthetic development spanning decades, worked on by musicians, composers, critics, and writers.

In my dissertation, which I just completed as a musicologist at UC Berkeley, I tell the story of this development: how music came to be sincere. But it’s not a story just for musicologists. It’s for all lovers of music — not to puncture music’s affecting aura, but to cast light on the mechanisms of music’s power over us.

The story’s beginning is easily summarized. The time: 1880s. The place: Paris, though ideas were already radiating outwards, to Brussels, London, and New York. The idea of a self-consciously “sincere” art first coalesced among the French Symbolist poets. Poets like Stéphane Mallarme (1842-1891), Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) and their poetic descendants gave us misty lyric verse fixated on the senses and their evocative, emotional power.

This poetry was not meant to confound, but to depict reality. Subjective experience, the Symbolists argued, is hardly clear; it is a procession of sensations and vague associations that we attempt to clarify and understand. As Symbolists and their critics later wrote, Symbolist poetry was a “positivist study,” a mission to “objectify the subjective.” Symbolism made poetry the science of the true self.

Symbolist-adjacent composers, like Gabriel Fauré, Reynaldo Hahn, and Régine Wieniawski (alias Poldowski), undertook the same mission through music. They and their supporters claimed that music communicated not only the feeling of the poet’s verse, but that of the poet, the composer, and the musician. The combination of the concrete and abstract in Symbolist verse could easily be transferred to music, which excelled in depicting just this: a powerful, specific feeling just on the edge of communicability.

It was in the mélodie, France’s 19^th-century tradition of song, that composers employed Symbolist texts in doing exactly this. Symbolist poetry is intensely personal yet coyly nonspecific. Take Verlaine’s “La lune blanche luit dans les bois” (The white moon gleams in the woods), a famous choice for French composers, which provides just enough color and imagery while granting the composer the freedom to interpret its situation.

Composers turned to other techniques to convey this nonspecific familiarity. Sticking to the mélodie, the same composers above frequently complicated musical textures, such that the relationship between the voice and the piano could be made to represent experience in real time.

A quick detour is helpful here. Think of Schubert’s decades-earlier lied “Erlkönig” (or any other of his lieder, like “Gretchen am spinnrade”). The singer is the narrator, the figure with whom we listeners identify, and the pianist is telling the musical story (the horse’s mad gallop, the spinning wheel).

Compared to this, the French mélodie practically obliterates such clear distinctions. Fauré was criticized for his songs’ thick textures, in which voice and piano traded melodies and prominence. Wieniawski, equally adventurous, transformed textures several times in a single song. The effect of both composers’ styles, crucially, is to make the mélodie feel like one’s own experience. In the unpredictable relationship of the voice and piano, we do not hear a predetermined “song,” but an unfolding that mimics how we encounter, act on, and hope to understand the world.

General claims of music's sincerity and truthfulness are common throughout history, but the Symbolists gave that claim specificity and social force. Their ideas were adapted immediately afterward and were hugely influential on musicians such as Claude Debussy and even Bela Bartok (whose opera Bluebeard's Castle (1912) was written to a libretto by Hungarian Symbolist poet Béla Balázs).

Around 1900, Symbolism was already becoming passé. As the poets and musicians moved on, philosopher Henri Bergson, uncoincidentally, was making music the essential case study of his theories of consciousness. This laid the foundation for musico-philosophical ideas that put individual experience at the origin and end of all music.

Modernist writers like Marcel Proust and, later, Thomas Mann did the same thing, just in a different form. Aesthetics were no longer to be trusted, and most modernists began picking up sincerity’s alter-ego, the emerging persona of twentieth-century art: detached irony. Yet even in the most pessimistic visions, music retained its secret power to tell the truth.

By the end of the two world wars, amid the flickering lights of so many musical-isms and the growing mistrust of anything earnest, it would seem musical sincerity would have no place. Yet in the musics of modernists Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, and Henri Dutilleux, aesthetics still deferred to human consciousness — these composers sought to depict the feeling of consciousness.

The 19th-century quest for a music that spoke to experience never disappeared. And it’s thrilling to see, and feel, its ripple effects today.

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When Susan and Henry Samueli, philanthropists and long-time Orange County residents, discovered that a harp they’d bought through their late interior designer had once belonged to Viennese-born Alma Mahler, who was married to composer Gustav Mahler from 1902 until his death in 1911, the couple immediately decided to donate it to Orange County School of the Arts (OCSA).

“Neither Henry nor I play the harp,” explained Susan Samueli, “and it just sat in our music room. But I love the harp. Since our daughter went to OCSA, and I know about the [school’s] classical conservatory, I thought there was no better place for it to be. I also felt like it would be loved and well-cared for there.”

Indeed the 100-year old Lyon & Healy harp, which has been fully restored and is now inspiring the next generation of musicians, has a storied history. Mahler, a composer in her own right who wrote some 100 works, including nearly 50 lieder and part of an opera, was forced to flee with her third husband, Jewish novelist and playwright Franz Werfel, from Nazi Germany to America, in 1940. They settled in Southern California, where the couple hosted many a cultural salon in their homes, first in the Hollywood Hills and then in Beverly Hills, where the harp was always present.

And while many rare instruments are sealed behind glass or kept in a museum, to have this harp currently shaping the artistic imagination of students who may be encountering Mahler’s legacy for the first time is particularly special. Said Samueli: “How amazing it is to be able to play on an instrument that someone like [Alma Mahler] used. I think the classical kids have such a beautiful relationship to their instruments, and that could be lifechanging.

“It never occurred to me to call a museum,” she added. “It seems to me, that an instrument being used and played on and loved is even more meaningful.”

Dr. Maria Lazarova, assistant principal of arts at OCSA, agreed, saying that the gift of a harp with this level of historical and cultural significance for the school to steward, is exceptionally significant. “In a museum, we get to admire beautiful pieces, but an instrument of this quality that is played regularly, not just by anyone, but by students who are learning the craft in the very beginning stages of their artistic development, is particularly impactful and appropriate when it comes to passing on the traditions, especially in the classical world.”

The harp may have only been at OCSA since early this year, but Lazarova is excited that the students are in the process of learning about its history and “about Alma and the journey this instrument has been on. We’re still in that discovery phase, but in the long run, it’s going to be really important in how they connect with the music, not just the history of the music itself.

“Any time we get an instrument of that beauty and stature,” Lazarova continued, “we’re thrilled. Alma Mahler was a major figure in being a muse to so many artists at the turn of the century, not just to Gustav, but other artists. Then there’s the history about getting that instrument here to the United States and being in the center of social circles where it was probably admired. The students have a lot to learn, and they’re still absorbing it.”

Lazarova pointed out that the broader Orange County arts community can also benefit from a harp that is actively heard. “Classical music [is] alive and well in our community, and it is not only the history of the art form that is being celebrated, but it’s actually the future. It’s really the students who are continuing to play the harp and that are continuing that tradition, that’s really the most important part here.”

The administrator has hopes for the harp’s next century, as well. “First of all, I hope this school is thriving even more than it is now — that it’s still around. And that that harp is still being played by 14, 15, 16-year-old kids 100 years from now, and talking about how it was transferred to this institution, how the many artists that have come through this institution have played it, have had their fingers on it, and that they are continuing to do that. I hope that’s the future.”

And as Alma Mahler lived through seismic cultural and political upheaval, Samueli noted that her story has informed the way she considers artistic resilience today. “When you think about the Holocaust, and some of the beautiful music written during the Holocaust, I think that that’s what helps keep people alive. When they’re going through tragedies, they have music and drawings, as well. Art,” she emphasized, “keeps us sane.”

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Like many people, I’ve moved on from Spotify. My decision was partially due to CEO Daniel Ek’s unsavory investments, underpayment of artists, and choice to crowd the platform with AI artists. But I confess, I am no perfect angel. I largely made the move for pragmatic reasons.

After purchasing a pair of audiophile headphones (yes, the Sennheiser HD 600s really are fantastic. And no, you don’t need the higher-priced variants), I desired a platform with genuine high-quality audio. While Spotify’s “lossless” option theoretically returns CD quality, in practice, platforms like Tidal and Apple Music boast higher-quality, uncompressed audio.

I chose Tidal as my Spotify replacement because it offers many of the features that made me love Spotify back in the day. Spotify used to suggest songs that were sufficiently orthogonal to my preexisting musical tastes, but usually different enough to be enticing and cultivate a sense of discovery. This exposed me to progressive metal, a chance encounter that would change my life and set me on the artistic path I walk today: synthesizing metal into music for the concert hall.

Chance musical encounters of this kind are becoming increasingly rare — Spotify changed its algorithm within the last few years (allegedly) to a classic payola model where artists (presumably) pay for their latest single to be queued up once you finish an album, exposing you repeatedly to a song that isn’t a reflection of your personal music tastes and artificially driving up the artist’s streaming numbers. Sure, in some cases I discovered great new tracks, but in most cases I felt like I was being overexposed to earworms I’d never signed up for.

Tidal’s algorithm is more expansive and sophisticated:

1) It exposes me to more music I have never heard of.

2) The music it offers is different enough from what I typically listen to, and functions to expand my musical tastes.

3) While on the platform, I often encounter music I genuinely love.

For example, I was listening to an album by avant-garde metallers Pyrrhon (whose guitarist, Dylan DiLella, played in my whale metal opera this January!) when Tidal’s album radio queued up a song from an absolutely wacky one-man band called Hoplites [Ὁπλίτης], an extreme black metal project featuring vocal recitation in Classical Greek above whining, rapid chromatic guitar riffs (and also saxophone?!) This is the sort of freaky stuff that should get more exposure.

I’d like to propose some simple ways out of the algorithmic rut, but first I need to talk about the slightly unorthodox way in which I use streaming apps, and the mechanics and real-world impact of algorithmic listening.

I’m old-fashioned: if I want to listen to music, I play an album in-full. When I finish an album, I am able to discover new artists through algorithmic matching — like album or artist radio. Tidal does this much better than Spotify nowadays. When algorithmic matching works well, it functions as an essential tool for musicians like myself. As a professional musician, listening to music is not often recreational. Rather, it is an act of research — I am always looking for new, captivating work, and keep a record of artists I plan to circle back to (like avid readers who maintain a “To Be Read” shelf). When I do return to an artist I’ve discovered through Tidal, the experience is often an intensely rewarding one.

Incidentally, my whale metal opera was deeply inspired by two bands I’d put off listening to for years: Germany’s The Ocean Collective, and France’s Hypno5e. But once I took the time to go through their discographies in full, I developed a deep relationship with their work. Now, they are both in my top 5 favorite bands ever. The lesson here is this: to grow as a musician it’s best to aim for depth, not just breadth, in a listening practice.

However, this is pretty antithetical to how streaming platforms target their users. Streaming apps assume that listeners have an instrumental relationship to music (pardon the pun.) Music exists to fulfill a function, like getting you out of bed, keeping your energy high for a workout, preparing you for a night on the town, or helping you grieve a breakup. The platforms are mostly right in their assumption, and science supports this. The problem is streaming platforms started reinforcing our preexisting listening behavior and tastes rather than opting to expand our musical horizons. Then, over time, in the pursuit of profit, they decided it was better business to make you listen to whomever paid them, or made them the most money (even if it’s a robot). This sort of manipulation is intended to keep users addicted to the platform, which is the entire problem with social media today.

I am no luddite. I will not tell you to delete all of your social media immediately, but I do think that technology can and should be engaged with as mindfully as possible in an era wherein our attention is a battleground for advertisers, politicians, and CEOs who financially benefit if we use chatbots as our therapists and partners, and if our favorite songs are AI music prompted by our own whims.

Indeed, Suno is an AI app that allows users to create any music they want through prompting. It is billed as The Next Big Thing in music; a bold claim for a plagiarism machine that was illegally trained on all the music on the internet. Suno’s CEO openly proclaims that learning an instrument nowadays is too boring for most people and that the solution is to gamify music-making to make it “as engaging as [the popular video game] Fortnite.” In Adam Neely’s fantastic documentary on the app, he posted an open question to Suno users about who their favorite AI artists were. Most of them answered: themselves. Suno is the natural end result of algorithmic listening; a world of solipsists creating their own endless AI playlists to tune out the rest of humanity.

So how do we escape this? Neely, I think rightly, predicts that as AI continues to create more convincingly serviceable music for the average utilitarian listener, live music will become more of a separate art form, continuing to innovate and attracting audiences who desire genuine artistic experiences. But in the meantime, there are ways to use streaming apps more effectively to expose ourselves to new, great music, written by humans:

1) Engage with music on an artist/album level. This will help you build a relationship with the music as art, not just a commodity.

2) Try listening to things that are not your usual jam. Branching out is a great way to get to know new artists, discover future faves, or fuel a cocktail party conversation.

3) Repeat, repeat, repeat. Being a fan of avant-garde metal (and certainly classical music) often means listening to music multiple times before fully forming an opinion. One of the bands I mentioned earlier, Hypno5e, I initially found to be intriguing but rather rough around the edges when I first heard them in 2018. Listening again in 2025, I could really appreciate their craft more fully after having heard more music in the interim.

4) Go out and see your favorite artists live. I literally started going to metal shows because of Spotify! It is increasingly common for young people to avoid concerts post-COVID; I am shocked by how many twentysomethings I’ve talked to at metal shows who’d never been to a single live show. Live music has its own pitfalls these days, but lesser-known artists need your patronage to keep working.

5) Maybe: write your own stuff. I got into prog metal through listening to anime theme songs, then Japanese metal more broadly, then progressive metal, and then the rest of metal. Now I write metal fusion music that’s performed around the country and abroad. Even if you never become a career musician, it is good for the world for more people to be making music for audiences of many, or just themselves.

I hope this provided you with some interesting ways to use streaming apps, which we take very much for granted these days. I also hope you find, watch, and make some incredible music. I’d love to hear if this resonated with you, and if you did end up finding some new music you like in the comments.

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A cellist and a neuroscientist walked into a bar … no, it’s not the beginning of a bad joke. It was, in fact, the start of an intimate partnership between music and science, love and work, and an ongoing conversation that has meandered through life for over four decades and given rise to joint ventures of creating workshops and parenting two (now adult) children.

The origin of our workshop, The Buddha, the Brain, and Bach: Exploring Practice in Mind, Music, and Life, traces back to that blind date in the Nanny Rose bar on Manhattan’s Upper Westside that shook the cobwebs out of my brain and expanded my insular musician’s worldview to interweave with threads of cognitive science, contemplative practice, and Buddhist philosophy.

It was the 1980’s and there was no Google to go to when a cellist colleague set me up with her boyfriend’s college roommate, and I had only the vaguest idea what a neuroscientist did. I quickly learned about Cliff’s research on human cognition and attention, as he expanded his musical understanding to include historical performance practice and the rigors of preparing for orchestra auditions.

It took several years of dating and gentle (or not-so-gentle) persuasion until I found myself wrapped in a knitted shawl sitting cross-legged on a cushion eight hours a day at the Insight Meditation Society in western MA, walking ever so slowly back and forth across the room at regular intervals, and for evening entertainment listening to Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Sharon Salzberg encourage me to follow my breath and cultivate a neutral, non-judgmental attitude toward whatever was presenting itself in my sphere of awareness.

For the first few days of the silent meditation retreat my resisting mind insisted I’d never make it through two weeks of this insanity and begged me to find an escape route before I died of boredom. Then, as monkey mind gave way to curiosity, I began to notice an odd familiarity in the instructions: “Listen deeply to the sounds around you — pay close attention to the internal sensations of your body — when the mind wanders gently bring it back without judgment — stay present with each moment as it arises.” Where had I heard this before?

Several dharma talks later, it hit me as I mind-wandered on my zafu — this sounded a lot like what I do when I practice the cello. Could insight meditation provide a guide to bring more conscious awareness into the practice room? If I slowed down my observations could I better understand the basic components of learning? Was the Buddhist concept of wise discernment the key to turning my ever-present inner critic into an inner coach? And this glimmer of a calm internal center I glimpsed at the end of the first long week of meditation — what if I could bring that with me onstage when I perform?

Dozens of retreats and meandering conversations later, my now-husband Cliff Saron and I teamed up with dear friend and Spirit Rock Meditation Center founding teacher Sylvia Boorstein to create “The Buddha, the Brain, and Bach,” a workshop where ancient Buddhist teachings meet modern brain science and Baroque performance.

Over the past dozen years, we’ve evolved our workshop structure with another senior meditation teacher, our friend Nikki Mirghafori, to integrate the contemplative practices of samatha (steady attention), vipassana (clear seeing), and mettā (kindness), and their application to daily life. Cliff uses his scientific training to delve into the mysteries of the brain and share contemporary thinking on neuroplasticity and his own long-term research on meditation. Nikki leads guided meditations and teaches the underlying contemplative principles that help participants cultivate greater awareness, discernment, and compassion. In performing and discussing the music of J.S. Bach, I integrate the insights on practice and performance that have been germinating since my first retreat, which can be applied to many other skills we do in life.

In the workshop, we take as a starting point that each of these three strands are complementary ways of knowing the world. They create braided understanding as we consider our connection to ourselves and others through the lens of mindfulness, science, and art. As we explore the impact of music on the brains of performers and listeners alike, meditation practice grounds us in the here and now.

At our most recent workshop in May, we partnered with emotion researcher and founding teacher of the Compassion Cultivation Training, Erika Rosenberg at the Drala Mountain Center in Red Feather Lakes, CO. Our group of 20 clinicians, retired professionals, musicians, teachers, and meditators of all stripes showed up with goals as diverse as wanting to understand how the brain works, improve their meditation, share their love of Bach, listen to a cello up close, and find more inner peace. The multidisciplinary nature of the workshop meant there was something for everyone.

We’ve now presented “The Buddha, the Brain, and Bach” at conferences in Europe and South Africa, the Universities of Southern CA and Indiana, at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY, and annually at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA. Esalen boasts a spectacular natural landscape and has the added attraction of offering hot sulfur (clothing-optional) baths on a cliffside overlooking the grandeur of the Pacific. Spaces are still available for our upcoming Esalen workshop September 14-18, 2026 — and of course, there’s always room in the hot tubs.

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At the SFJAZZ Gala last month, Gabrielle Armand, the organization’s recently appointed CEO, had her first opportunity to directly address members and supporters.

Hiring her away from Jazz at Lincoln Center, where she’d held a series of top positions over 17 years, was widely seen as a coup for the Bay Area presenter. Still in transition after the four-decade reign of its founder Randall Kline, SFJAZZ seemed in need of a steadying presence to balance glitzy Executive Artistic Director Terence Blanchard, the opera-and-film-score composing trumpeter, bandleader, and Herbie Hancock sideman whose creative cup perpetually runneth over.

At the Gala, less than a year into her new job, Armand referred obliquely to big changes in the works, hinting at ambitious plans taking shape. Her remarks got me thinking about the Bay Area’s rapidly shifting leadership profile, a sea change that has seen a wave of women taking over many of the region’s most influential performing arts organizations. With shards of the glass ceiling scattered across the Bay Area we’re entering an era marked by the ubiquitous presence of women making the most consequential decisions about programming and personnel.

Each organization is an experiment unto itself, responding to an arts landscape reconfigured by the COVID shutdown. More than just about any other arts organization in the Bay Area, SFJAZZ seems to have avoided a pandemic hangover. Armand’s initiatives will presumably come into sharper focus in the coming year, while women in other organizations have already settled in, particularly San Francisco Opera’s Eun Sun Kim, whose steady leadership has burnished the venerable company’s start of its second century.

At San Francisco Ballet, Tamara Rojo is putting her stamp on a superlative company defined for decades by Helgi Tómasson. The first woman to lead the company, she’s made her mark less as a dancemaker in the Tómasson mold, than as a canny programmer who also has a long-term commitment to finding and nurturing choreographic talent via her Creation House program. With an averted strike, the announcement of a solid 2026-2027 season, and the departure or retirement of company mainstays, particularly dancers Yuan Yuan Tan, Angelo Greco, and Anita Paciotti (and choreographic icon Val Caniparoli), her fourth year is shaping up as a breath-catching pause.

If the story at the Ballet is coming into focus, the picture at the Symphony is entirely undeveloped, even if viewed through a thick veil of optimism. Following the dispiriting, unceremonious departure of Esa-Pekka Salonen and the fumbling response of the Symphony’s board, the left-field choice of Elim Chan as next music director is a major gamble. In a welcome return to the pages of the Chronicle, emeritus critic Joshua Kosman wrote that “the San Francisco Symphony has tapped the most inexperienced, unproven new artistic leader the organization has had in more than 40 years. The choice could not have been wiser or more opportune.”

The stakes are more than institutional. The fact that women now lead powerhouse Bay Area arts organizations for the first time is a blow against entrenched male privilege, but it’s what happens onstage that ripples out far beyond Hayes Valley. In the end, who runs the show matters less than who benefits from an arts institution’s resources, and the true measure of progress is the platforming of women performers and creators in contexts where their presence has been scarce.

Michael Tilson Thomas, dauntingly effective on so many fronts, never demonstrated much interest in women composers, a blind spot that Salonen didn’t share. Female choreographers are more welcome at SF Ballet than ever before, with Rojo’s pick of Aszure Barton as the first woman ever commissioned to create a full-length ballet for the company. (2024’s Mere Mortals returned for the 2025-2026 season.)

No Bay Area organization has been transformed more conspicuously by new leadership than the Jazzschool, where bassist and indefatigable creative catalyst Lisa Mezzacappa was appointed executive director in December. Founded in 1997 by pianist Susan Muscarella as a community educational resource, the Berkeley school steadily expanded in size and scope, eventually transforming into the California Jazz Conservatory, the only independent, accredited, degree-granting jazzcentric school on the West Coast.

Veteran producer Nick Phillips took over the CJC helm from Muscarella in the fall of 2023, but within a year the board decided that the pandemic-induced drop in enrollment made the CJC untenable (even as the Jazzschool’s community classes continued to thrive). The degree-granting program shut down in December 2024, and the school gave up the lease on half its campus (including the 100-seat theater where dozens of leading jazz artists performed annually).

In taking over a diminished organization, Mezzacappa seemed to be stepping into a minefield, but she has seized the reins, turning the Jazzschool’s remaining facility into a buzzing hive of activity.

A free brown-bag lunch series brings in musicians to talk about favored artists and topics, like the June 24 session with Julius Zimmerman, a newly minted UC Berkeley grad discussing his senior honors thesis fieldwork in Morocco exploring Gnawa practice in Morocco. She’s presenting free career development workshops for musicians and thematic concert series, like a fascinating array of Pride Month concerts highlighting the growing “queer” presence in jazz. Mezzacappa’s wide-ranging music has often focused on women, like her 2017 project inspired by 19th and early 20th century women explorers, Glorious Ravage.

But in taking over a cornerstone of the Bay Area’s expansive jazz education archipelago, she’s creating a tide that lifts all musicians, powering a scene in which women can succeed at all levels.

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These days, I find myself in the peculiar position of doing a lot of writing — text, that is, not just music.

I never expected to work as a professional freelance writer, but it feels obvious in hindsight. During my childhood, my father emphasized the importance of developing this skill. I later received my undergraduate degree from Pepperdine University, a rigorous liberal arts college. So, I was inevitably pushed to write. And I did. A lot.

I didn’t write much of value until midway through my bachelor’s, and I didn’t properly hit my stride until I completed my master’s at The New School, where I received a (paid!) prize for a lengthy analysis of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky — an unexpected yet welcome surprise.

I outline my history not to brag, but to make a point: both of my degrees are in music composition, yet as a freelancer I find myself using a wide variety of skills, including writing, public speaking, video production, advertising, and much more. Such is the state of the modern artist. While the amount of extramusical courses I was required to take during undergrad felt galling at the time, I have demonstrably benefitted from a liberal arts foundation that has prepared me for a multifaceted career path. Becoming a competent writer and thinker has been central to my post-collegiate success.

Unfortunately, a liberal arts education is increasingly not the norm for student musicians. Modern conservatories train students to execute, not to think.

I was struck during my graduate studies by how little coursework aimed to spark thought about the music my peers and I were making and learning. Rather, we were given a brute force download of The Classical Canon™ (with some Modern Music™ sprinkled in there, because “look, we’re trying!”) Even in social settings, when I tried to discuss the sociopolitical implications of music we’d studied or saw performed, I felt a chill of disinterest from colleagues.

I find this cultural tendency deeply disheartening. Because we live in an era in which the arts are under siege, it is imperative that our institutions for musical education also provide a robust liberal arts education. There are three main reasons why these types of classes are essential for the modern musician:

1) They provide social skills crucial to a music career.

2) They provide historical context that can inform enticing musical decisions.

3) They provide literary and critical-thinking skills with extramusical applications.

I will now elucidate these points.

Social Skills

What are the social skills necessary for a career in classical music? Sternberg et al. put it quite well in their scholarly essay, “Lessons from the Conservatory Model as a Basis for Undergraduate Education and the Development of Intelligence,” for MDPI’s Journal of Intelligence:

“We even live in a time when some states in the United States are trying to eliminate prosocial skills, even at the elementary level where they are usually taught, using the argument that such skills represent a hidden ‘political’ agenda.”

I like their use of “prosocial” here. In the Western classical tradition, music-making is deeply social. Not just in the obvious sense that music can inspire and connect people across their differences, but on a more pragmatic level, too.

It reminds me of a lesson from my longtime composition mentor, Randall Woolf. He once asked me, “When should you begin writing in tenor clef in the cello?” I responded, “Well, I assume in the tenor register of the instrument.” I was close, but not quite. “You should use tenor clef when the notes fall in the ledger lines of that clef,” he responded. I was puzzled by this. Wasn’t the point of the clef change to minimize the need for ledger lines? No, he said. “It is what the players have come to expect in previous repertoire. You see, orchestration is social.”

This practical knowledge that one can only acquire by speaking with players over the course of many years separates a composer who can orchestrate by the book versus a true artist capable of utilizing the orchestra’s full palette. Of the two, players will grow to trust and respect the true artist over time.

But respect is not borne from skills of the trade alone. As both a performer and a composer, I frequently encounter delicate social scenarios that require an ability to assess the situation and exercise a diplomatic, considered response. Hypothetically speaking, if a stage director demands that you do something you are not comfortable with, or a musician in an ensemble premiering your piece is uncooperative and hinders the progress of the work, being able to think quickly and communicate informally can be the difference between having a career that progresses and one that ends prematurely.

Remaining gracious in the face of institutional dysfunction, or troublesome colleagues, is essential. This is how people will remember a colleague as “so great to work with.” On the other hand, knowing when and how to speak up in the wake of unfair treatment is also essential in a business that is largely unregulated.

Historical Education

Informed musicians are more fun to watch. Imagine a recital program comparing the musical patterns of baroque keyboard music to modern synthesizer music, in which Scarlatti performed on synth is paired with Aphex Twin performed on harpsichord? Or a program that features avant-garde vocal music by Saariaho and Berio alongside newly commissioned piano-vocal arrangements of hip-hop music? While these are just silly hypotheticals, concept recitals are becoming more common, including in my own work: I am currently working on a piece for flutist Emily Duncan for an album entirely comprised of commissions inspired by the writings of Edgar Allan Poe which she will be performing live around the country.

There are more conventional applications, too. If you are an artist from a marginalized background and want to perform music by composers of that background, you will inevitably do a lot of research. Scouring archives, ordering manuscripts on interlibrary loan, searching old internet forums, and speaking to colleagues — even strangers online — will all be necessary to find music that is not “canonical.” This labor is worthwhile, because this music desperately needs to be heard. Musicians who are trained in and enthusiastic about the craft of research are needed to bring composers from marginalized backgrounds to light. They are also needed to perform established works in new, imaginative ways.

Writing & Critical Thinking

The fact that I have this writing gig for SF Classical Voice is itself proof that writing and critical thinking skills are meritorious to develop professionally. However, I am not so glib as to think this fact is convincing enough to young musicians to take the liberal arts seriously. (A budding star violinist may not dream of freelance journalism, but I do!)

Today, musicians face ever more pressing ethical questions: does being a classical musician uphold hierarchies that oppress society? What investment should one have in musical institutions that promote this art form, but also contribute financially to systems that immiserate people on the other side of the globe? (Fun fact, it wasn’t until the workshop for my very first opera was in progress that I learned the project was funded by a major weapons manufacturer.) What would a more ethical and equitable classical music landscape look like? How would this affect programming, hiring, and administration? How could classical music make a bigger impact in a world where art is seen as powerfully seditious and thus wholly expendable by those in power?

Obviously, there is the question of AI as well. We need young musicians willing to take these questions head on, and not simply be passive performers in a system replicating the great works of long-dead white composers in a perpetual museum piece. For this classical art form to survive, to be a living discipline, its participants must actively engage with its past, present, and future. We can only take the reins if we are sufficiently educated, and excited about that education.

With this, I hope I’ve encouraged some to realize that a little more thinking about music is worthwhile. The future of classical music is yet unwritten. More liberal arts education in conservatories will give musicians the opportunity to take hold of the pen.

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As the overture to The Barber of Seville plays in the background, baritone Tim Blevins is centered onscreen. Except, instead of being filmed while performing on a stage, Blevins is on the sidewalk across from the San Francisco Public Library, two blocks from the War Memorial Opera House.

Blevins used to command attention from the stages of hallowed opera halls until drugs took his life in a different direction — that juxtaposition is central to the documentary film Figaro Up, Figaro Down.

“I got a chance to work with Tim over 25 years ago in an opera composed by the great flute player James Newton where Tim sang the role of Paul Robeson,” Jazz great Marcus Shelby commented on an Instagram post. “Tim was absolutely elite and well on his way to becoming an opera star.”

Now, Blevins busks in public spaces. His voice has the power to stop passersby racing to get to their seats inside the War Memorial, Davies Symphony Hall, or Orpheum Theatre. One day, it drew the attention of filmmaker Javid Soriano, who dedicated 12 years to following and capturing Blevins’ life.

Figaro Up, Figaro Down won the audience choice award for a documentary feature at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival, indicating this film of contrasts resounded with audiences.

In black and white, the film provides a glimpse into Blevins’ life in the Tenderloin: sleeping in gated escalator tunnels, experiencing homelessness. In color, the film captures Blevins on opera stages, his voice and person, riveting.

“It all goes down in how you see yourself. That’s how you survive in the streets,” Blevins states at the beginning of the film. “This lifestyle breaks you down. You’re just another piece of the sidewalk. You’re just part of the shrubbery. You start seeing yourself as a bum, as a derelict. You’re tempted to give up. You’ve got to believe that you are the one. Just like Figaro.”

People rarely want to talk about addiction. At the SFIFF, I spoke with people outside the theater who believed Blevins had a choice in doing drugs and could stop any time… until I met one woman after the film who quietly shared she had been sober and in AA for 30 years, then remarked what Blevins has gone through is infinitely harder than it looks.

The film shook me. How could it not? He is the hero. He is also his worst enemy. The drugs are the ultimate villain. The movie description for Figaro Up promises a redemptive arc, but the journey to get there is a kind of hell. Naturally, we as an audience are all rooting for him.

Music is the key to Blevins’ survival. In a post-film Q+A, he told the audience that busking is still how he makes a living. In the film, a voiceover from Blevins says, “Everyday is a struggle. It’s a fight. The disease of addiction is always doing push-ups” as he is shown singing “Let My People Go.”

In a year in which San Francisco Opera opens its summer series with a lithe portrayal of Figaro in The Barber of Seville, then in the fall season will present an older version of Figaro in The Marriage of Figaro, this Figaro — Tim Blevins’ Figaro — now feels engrafted into the story of Figaro told in 2026.

Inside the War Memorial, on the night I attended the final dress rehearsal of SFO’s Barber, Joshua Hopkins sang the famous aria depicting how sought after Figaro is — as it goes, “Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro.” In Figaro Up, Blevins sings it from the sidewalk in Union Square.

What is it about Figaro, the character, that audiences everywhere connect to? Is it possible that Figaro is the ultimate survivor, that living by one’s wiles is a model for how to stick it out — to keep going?

Early on in Figaro Up, with the same street smarts and wiliness of Beaumarchais, Rossini, and Mozart’s Figaro, Blevins tells the camera, “If you need a barber, c’est moi. If you need a poet, ‘To be or not to be, that is the question.’”

Blevins has transcended the stage and taken opera to the streets, with an earned quality of tenacity lacing his voice. His story is a testament to never give up in the face of adversity. But Figaro Up is just part of Blevins’ story. His story continues, just as the character of Figaro continues too.

The palette of SFO’s Barber starts out cast in neutral tones — the darkness of evening when Count Almaviva first comes to Rosina’s window, moonlight dappling him in shadow. By the end of the opera, all is well and in dazzling technicolor — a projection of fireworks in the background, confetti falling from the sky, a full-color festivity shown on the opera house walls.

Figaro Up ends with a different kind of celebration: Blevins is indoors, making music, shot close-up and still in black and white, a ballcap on his head emblazoned with the word ‘opera.’

Next time you leave the War Memorial, Davies, or the Orpheum, listen for Figaro and you just might find Blevins crooning, his baritone pricking something in your opera-loving heart.

Back to the War Memorial, imagine with me: in between the two operas this season, or even after Marriage wraps, picture a watch party of Figaro Up, Figaro Down in that hallowed hall. It would be a full circle moment, bringing baritone Tim Blevins back inside, albeit in a different way, but still singing.

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This week on “What Resonates,” our in-house podcast here at SF Classical Voice on Substack, I had the pleasure of speaking with composers Kyle Rivera and Jens Ibsen — both recipients of the San Francisco Symphony’s Emerging Black Composers Project prize — to talk about their recent compositions inspired by the lives, afterlives, behaviors, and cultures of cetaceans. In other words, music about whales.

Several curiosities led me down this path, primarily the coincidence that two recipients of the prize, a 10-year initiative launched in 2020, both went on to write about the same animals. But I was also interested in how this focus fit into a larger trend in contemporary classical music of writing and performing music about the environment, and in particular about climate change.

Recently, composers — and the organizations in California who program and showcase their work — have placed the spotlight on the environment. In November 2025, Charles Burns reported for SF Classical Voice on composer Christopher Stark’s new record Fire Ecologies, a meditation on California’s 2020 wildfire season; Richard S. Ginell noted in an SF Classical Voice review that Tigran Hamsyan’s March recital at the Soraya included reflections on the environment in Armenia; just a few weeks ago, Burns again reported on an ecology-focused performance, this time Gabriella Smith’s experimental work for the Green Umbrella program, music that she also curated as part of her SF Symphony SoundBox concerts. Some of these pieces and performances, including ones I have not listed, explicitly included elements of environmental activism — so where, I wondered, do the whales fit it?

Rivera spoke to me about his forthcoming piece, which is set to premiere with the SF Symphony in February 2027 and is inspired by the process of whale fall. We discussed his ongoing research process, which includes speaking to labs and going on whale-watching tours. Ibsen and I talked about his piece Whale Road, where he blended heavy metal influences with the task of writing for a community chorus. But when I asked each if justice was a part of their visions, they both responded with a form of “not quite.”

The relationship between justice and music is not novel, nor hardly a contemporary concept — protest music is a well-defined, though perhaps declining, genre. The two also are not always partners in crime; sometimes, justice and music are at odds with each other, as in “separate the art from the artist” debates (see the years-long discourse surrounding Ye, the rap artist formerly known as Kanye West).

But in my conversations with Rivera and Ibsen, they shared a new perspective: justice is sometimes implied but not intended, almost in a “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” way. This led me to reflect: art is inherently political, sure, but is that true of its subject matter?

Climate change — and, by extension, other environmental concerns — is a topic that is simultaneously technical and all-embracing. Controversy surrounds it, which explains why, though rich in political discourse, it inspires hedging from artists. To give a non-music example: the movie Twisters (a 2024 reboot of the 1996 film Twister) was put in the spotlight for choosing not to mention climate change, prompting mixed responses. Some interviewed experts said that failing to mention climate change leads to a misrepresentation of the causes of extreme weather. On the other hand, the conservation organization Rare argued the movie was “an undeniable win for the climate movement,” as discussion of increasingly frequent extreme weather brings climate change to mind for many without it having to be explicitly mentioned.

Rare’s interpretation places a degree of faith in the audience, which, I learned from my conversations with Rivera and Ibsen, might also be a kind of neutrality. It leaves space for viewers — or, more pertinently to their work, for listeners — to fill in the blanks based on their background and knowledge of climate change, ecological concerns, and environmental justice. It’s not the direct approach many associate with artistic activism, but it might just make room for a greater diversity of reactions and debate.

One thing I gleaned from my conversations with Rivera and Ibsen is that whales are creatures strikingly similar to us humans: they have community, culture, curiosity, grief, and song. The two composers present starkly different takes on these facts. Rivera’s piece is rooted in scientific research, while Ibsen’s Whale Road is a fantasy-flavored, action-movie-inspired version. Even if justice is not the goal, the pieces are nonetheless rich with interpretations, including, yes, ones focusing on climate change — in our conversation, Rivera brought up that he had learned that the rising sea temperatures have changed patterns of whale song.

Finding a subject that does not in some way relate to the world we inhabit, whether it be rooted in fantasy or science, is nearly impossible. Thus, it’s intentions that matter most. Artists should be clear and transparent when their work touches on a subject like climate change, and either commit or leave the topic alone completely — not simply dip their toe in while resisting the obvious connections, as Twisters does. Audiences, of course, will apply their own interpretations, but the artist ultimately bears the responsibility for a work’s value in our cultural conversation.

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By Michael Zwiebach, senior editor

SFCV’s avid orchestra-watchers have long had Elim Chan on their lists of candidates for one of California’s top two conducting jobs. The SF Symphony and LA Philharmonic have both been looking for music directors and Chan has a relationship with each of them — she was a Dudamel Fellow with the LA Phil in 2016-2017, directly after winning the Donatella Flick LSO Conducting Competition, in 2015.

San Francisco jumped in and took the chance.

As was announced last Thursday, Chan will be SF Symphony’s 13th music director — she will be the first woman to assume the role.

From the audience side, it looks like a great appointment. This past February, Richard Ginell wrote of her LA Phil concert, “The orchestra responded faithfully to the subtle and extravagant gestures in her repertoire. She’s good — there’s no doubt about it.”

Of her March 2025 appearance with the SF Symphony, I wrote: “Chan clearly works from a detailed conception of the score, but what the audience sees is a conductor who is as communicative as a dancer. She leads without a baton, but her hand and arm movements are connected to her body’s core, and she stretches and bends with the musical phrases. She actively engages all the orchestra’s sections, regularly switching her focus.”

In Michael Tilson Thomas’s brilliant formulation of the conductor’s job, Chan can communicate “when ‘now’ is.” She’s also excellent with rhythm and orchestral balance and if some of her interpretations show room to grow — well, good.

Chan is 39 with several appointments under her belt and is clearly ready for the big leagues. Is there risk? Of course: we won’t know how she handles the business side of the job — meeting with board members and donors, connecting the orchestra with the community and being the face of the organization, handling relationships with the musicians and appointing new members, planning seasons — until she does it.

American orchestras are much more demanding in this regard than their European counterparts. And they should be. In a country where government arts funding ranges from anemic to nonexistent, there’s no alternative to having a music director who will lend a hand in donor relations. If you want to be an American music director, practice your smile and handshake.

Likewise, a California arts nonprofit is operating in an extremely competitive environment in which attracting attention and maintaining deep community relationships is critical, not simply a plus. But it’s a great sign that Chan is leading the New York Philharmonic in several community concerts in various parks a few weeks from now. That’s part of the work.

And in the case of the San Francisco Symphony, there will be orchestra contract negotiations during Chan’s term here, which have been contentious in the past. She will be stuck, as always, between her employers and her fellow musicians. Undoubtedly, CEO Matthew Spivey and the board have talked with the conductor about these matters, but we will see how things unfold.

We’re also keenly awaiting her ideas about programming and curation. Chan will participate in putting together the 2027-2028 season, so we’ll have to wait until then to see her ideas on paper.

But this past February she conducted a Green Umbrella new music concert at the LA Philharmonic. An August 2024 concert with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra included Wynton Marsalis’s Trumpet Concerto, Witold Lutoslawski’s Concerto for Orchestra, and Arnold Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto. This coming week, with the New York Philharmonic, Chan leads the premiere of Noriko Koide’s Swaddling Silk and Gossamer Rain, as well as Sergei Prokofiev’s Cinderella on a program that was originally intended to include Ernest Bloch’s Schelomo. Then she’s with the Staatskapelle Dresden leading Unsuk Chin’s Puzzles and Games and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. In between, of course, she conducts the SFS in Richard Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from “Tristan und Isolde,” Hector Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été, and Claude Debussy’s La mer.

Somehow, I don’t think range of repertory and interests will be a problem.

So yes, I’m excited for this next chapter in SF Symphony history. I believe in hiring a music director before they have recording contracts, a stack of competing appointments, and honored “maestro” status. This orchestra doesn’t need a big name. It needs a strong leader and an exciting presence on the podium. It needs Elim Chan.

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I go to a lot of concerts every year and the vast majority are well-attended. New Century Chamber Orchestra’s season finale with guitarist Pablo Sainz-Villegas? Sold out. The San Francisco Bach Choir last weekend? Close to fully sold. Gabriella Smith’s SoundBox concert of experimental music for San Francisco Symphony last month? That, too, was sold out.

Now, any nonprofit arts manager will tell you that attendance doesn’t correlate perfectly with financial viability. Decisions are driven by income and expenditure rather than popularity. For example, SF Symphony cut down the number of SoundBox concerts this season — they wouldn’t have done so if experimental music in a club-like setting was a cash cow. (By contrast, they’ve increased the number of movie screenings with a live orchestra accompaniment.)

Attendance does tell us about the arts’ relevance in American life, however. And the news here is actually very good. You do have to compare apples to apples, of course: in terms of revenue, the for-profit arts sector is exponentially bigger than the nonprofit side. But nonprofit arts draw people in.

There are stars whose prominence lifts all boats: only a couple of weeks after pianist and heartthrob Hayato Sumino caused a sensation at Stanford Live, he broke the Guinness world record for solo piano recital ticket sales — yes, they have a record for that. (18,546 people attended Sumino’s concert at Yokohama’s K-Arena.) Organist Anna Lapwood, I recently learned, has 1.5 million followers on TikTok. A video of her 2022 performance with electronica artist Bonobo has 5.6 million views on the platform and 3.5 million views on YouTube.

I hear all the time that classical music and performers don’t appeal to younger audiences, but my Gen X cohort and I are not driving anybody’s TikTok numbers. These artists are millennials and Gen Zers who appeal to younger audiences. And as for jazz, it turns out millennials are okay with that, too: SFJAZZ publicist Kevin Kopjak informed me that SFJAZZ “sold 125,000 tickets last year, and the last three seasons have been our best from a ticket revenue standpoint since we opened the SFJAZZ Center in 2013, with this season being our best to date.”

As it happens, Arts Journal founder and editor Douglas McLennan recently did his own spelunking to see if he could gain some perspective on the relative popularity of nonprofit arts in the larger U.S. arts ecosystem. And what he found is intriguing:

In 2024, all commercial live events in the U.S. combined drew 1.3 billion attendees; nonprofit live events drew 965 million. That’s not as large a gap as one would expect. Coming out of the COVID pandemic crisis, a study by WolfBrown suggested that performing arts nonprofits might expect a permanent drop of up to 20 percent of their pre-pandemic attendance. But the overall statistics McLennan collected seem to suggest a different story.

In the nonprofit sector, according to this data, museums dominate: they attracted a similar number of visitors (850 million) as the movies in 2024. At the other end of the spectrum, unfortunately, is opera, with 2.1 million tickets sold that year, according to Opera America, continuing a long-term downward trend. (It is possible to resist the trend, however. During the 2024-2025 season, the San Francisco Opera sold just over 107,000 tickets. That’s 82% of capacity for its 44 mainstage performances — beating the previous two seasons which played to 75% of capacity, according to the Opera’s publicity department.)

Some of McLennan’s additional findings —

• Commercial music festivals like Coachella and Lollapalooza: 12 million attendees

• Nonprofit music festivals like Tanglewood and Aspen: 20 million attendees

• U.S. orchestras: 22 million attendees

• Commercial comedy clubs and dinner theaters: 20 million attendees

• Las Vegas shows: 25 million attendees

Many different entertainment options are competing for attention and no one is winning. So everyone has to innovate to keep up. But if participation is connected to relevance, then those of us in the nonprofit arts should buck up.

We exist in a world where profitability is the main marker of success and, in the U.S. particularly, that drives impressions of artistic relevance. The common understanding is that consumers pay for art and subsidies are a sign of weakness. But that framing is misleading: if capitalists never sought subsidies, then Oakland would still have its professional sports teams.

In the U.S., nonprofit arts groups do have a sustainability problem that we need to solve. But that doesn’t mean we need to buy into the narrative that only the rich are relevant. I think we all know where that leads. The sector has to promote a different story, one that emphasizes community and audience. I see lots of organizations doing extraordinary things to engage with the broader culture and audiences are responding. In the “attention economy,” score one for creativity.

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Last Wednesday, the 29th San Francisco Silent Film Festival opened at the Castro Theatre — returning after a two-year hiatus while the venue was renovated at a cost of $41 million.

Financed and overseen by Another Planet Entertainment, the renovation transformed the venue from a movie palace to a multi-use venue equipped to handle concerts and other events. The theater’s surfaces — the ceiling, proscenium, and murals — have been preserved or even restored, and they look better than they have in decades.

But the film festival returns to a venue that is no longer organized around film as its default use.

The Castro’s symbolic identity remains rooted in film history and the queer public life of San Francisco. But the restored theater has reopened into the live-events infrastructure of 2026, where cultural institutions’ survival depends on their flexibility, and where local curatorial traditions have to contend with promoter-operated venue management.

Control over performance venues has become a central question in live culture. This was especially visible in April’s federal antitrust verdict against Live Nation and Ticketmaster. But the issue also applies at the regional level, where concert promoters are increasingly operating mid-sized cultural venues.

The Castro Theatre is owned by the Nasser family, doing business as Bay Properties. The family has owned the theater since the early 20th century. In the 1970s, they leased the venue to Surf Theaters, run by Mel Novikoff, a major film exhibitor — it was Novikoff who transformed the venue from an “increasingly rundown neighborhood theatre, playing second runs and somehow limping along” to what one journalist described as a “cozy homo haven”: home to Hollywood-studio programming, camp audience culture, AIDS-era memorials, and gay political organizing.

After Novikoff died unexpectedly in 1987, the Castro’s operations passed to Blumenfeld Enterprises, an Oakland-based theater chain, under whose direction the theater continued to flourish through the 1990s. The Nassers took over again in 2001.

In 2022, when the theater’s continued existence was in doubt after COVID, the family announced a new partnership with Another Planet Entertainment, a midscale regional concert promoter. The company runs venues including the Greek Theatre in Berkeley and Fox Theater in Oakland. At the time, Mary Conde, APE’s senior vice president, said, “It had been in our business plan for years to find a venue around 1,400 seats.”

The deal was controversial. The Castro Theatre Conservancy, a nonprofit incorporated in 2020, launched a “Save the Castro Theatre” campaign in 2022. The conservancy proposed to convert the Castro Theatre into a mission-driven, nonprofit institution. Its campaign included detailed programming commitments: 365-day programming, with 52 days of film festival presentations and at least 24 days of LGBTQ+ programming — proposals designed to continue the historic legacy of the venue in light of leaked plans for renovation from the APE deal.

The conservancy was led by Peter Pastreich, former executive director of the San Francisco Symphony, who was the chief SFS administrator responsible for building Davies Symphony Hall, with named supporters including former S.F. mayor Art Agnos and a massive list of Hollywood luminaries including Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, and many more. But the conservancy lost a Board of Supervisors vote in 2023 over the Castro’s landmark designation — the conservancy wanted the existing exterior designation to include interior features, specifically the orchestra seating and raked floor. The vote left the conservancy’s alternative vision without a clear path forward.

APE’s plan was to turn the Castro from a movie palace into a venue flexible enough for standing-room concerts, dance events, drag shows, private events, and film screenings. The company would remove the orchestra-level fixed seating, replace the raked floor with multilevel flat tiers and removable seats, and upgrade the theater’s long-neglected systems, including HVAC, accessibility, and backstage infrastructure. Flexibility was the point: the building would no longer be organized around film as its default use, but around a calendar that could accommodate many kinds of ticketed events. When the city approved the plan in June 2023, it attached cultural-use requirements, including minimum levels of film and LGBTQ+ programming. The conservancy and the Castro LGBTQ+ Cultural District had pushed for stronger guarantees, but the city accepted APE’s lower thresholds. Both sides foregrounded the importance of preserving the theater as a center for LGBTQ+ culture and performance, but the battle over that cultural legacy ultimately turned it into a quantity to be negotiated.

The Nassers went with APE.

The Castro Theatre reopened in February 2026 with a 35mm screening of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, a 1994 Australian comedy-drama following two drag queens and a transgender woman traveling across the Australian outback. After this public ribbon-cutting screening, the venue’s marquee reopening salvo was a residency from the singer Sam Smith, titled “To Be Free: San Francisco.” The residency started with four announced shows, but sold out so quickly that it was ultimately expanded to 20 performances.

As part of the residency, Smith filmed a music video for a cover of Bill Withers’s 1971 Ain’t No Sunshine, with the pronoun in the lyric changed from “she” to “he.” The video is a promo-celebration of the residency: it features Smith gazing contemplatively at the interior of the newly renovated Castro Theatre, with scaffolding still up around the proscenium; aerial shots of the Castro neighborhood, pride flag flying; and the singer mingling with a diverse group of people on the city streets.

The Sam Smith residency was the kind of event that the new Castro Theatre was designed to facilitate. The calendar for this season is dominated by indie acts, including Father John Misty on March 24–25 and Lucy Dacus on May 18–19; podcast events, including Prof G Markets with Scott Galloway and Ed Elson on May 27; and film festivals, including the San Francisco Silent Film Festival on May 6–10 and Frameline50 on June 17–21 and 25–27.

Films are still screened as part of the venue’s programming, of course, but they are concentrated mostly in dedicated festival weeks, along with a repertory series, “Movies for Maniacs,” once a month, and special event screenings, including “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” with John Cameron Mitchell on July 17. The shift from daily film programming to a more varied rotation of offerings had already started when APE began to operate the venue. But the renovation made the building fit its new, more flexible purpose.

The Castro Theatre attained its status as both a home for great cinema and queer cultural life under the stewardship of visionary curators like Monga. Novikoff rebuilt the neighborhood theater as a destination specializing in Hollywood studio-based repertory; he “set the tone” of irreverent theatricality and camp around which its audience coalesced. Anita Monga started the “Silent Tuesdays” weekly series in 1988, using the venue’s built-in 1922 Mighty Wurlitzer pipe organ for live accompaniment. The impresario Marc Huestis produced 55 celebrity tribute evenings between 1995 and 2014, with drag performances and onstage Q&As with stars like Debbie Reynolds, Ann Miller, and John Waters.

Pollstar, an industry trade publication, has described the new Castro Theatre as “a formidable competitor for The Regency Ballroom,” a 1,400-capacity music venue operated by Goldenvoice, the major concert promoter that produces Coachella and operates several major San Francisco venues. In the same piece, an APE representative is quoted as saying that the Castro would be a “perfect place for an afterparty” for Outside Lands, the company’s Golden Gate Park festival.

Even at the regional scale, consolidation dynamics at play on the national stage are shaping cultural life in cities like San Francisco.

The Sam Smith residency wrenched the Castro out of a long period of drift, where its very survival was uncertain, and made its future seem newly viable. But it also reminds us that even iconic performance venues are part of a shared infrastructure. Davies Symphony Hall was built by Pastreich in 1980 to give the SF Symphony a permanent home. But the venue now hosts events like Paul Simon’s “A Quiet Celebration” tour performances in July 2025, co-presented by SFS and APE (no SFS members participated), with tickets sold through APE’s branded Ticketmaster portal. On October 12 of this year SFS and APE will co-present a concert by Ludovico Einaudi. APE presented Einaudi at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, their flagship venue, last year — bringing him to Davies reflects APE’s ability to use the SFS brand as an imprimatur for commercial music with a “classical” sheen, just as the Castro Theatre’s history helps position Sam Smith’s residency as an inheritor of the legacy of queer activism.

As the scope of the Castro Theatre’s calendar widens, the return of the SF Silent Film Festival testifies to the persistence of the venue’s storied history. The festival opened at the Castro Theatre in 1996. Its founders, Melissa Chittick and Stephen Salmons, were inspired to create it after seeing Anita Monga polling people in ticket lines about whether they would attend a dedicated festival. Monga programmed at the Castro from the 1980s until 2004, and her curatorial vision is credited with helping build the theater into one of America’s great cinema institutions. But Monga returns to the institution she helped build from a position outside its management. She was fired by the Nasser family in 2004. Stacey Wisnia, who had managed the Castro Theatre alongside Monga, resigned shortly after Monga’s firing, saying she did so in part to protest the way her colleague had been dismissed. Wisnia later became SFSFF’s executive director and hired Monga as artistic director in 2009, bringing her back into the Castro’s orbit through the festival it hosts.

In a recent interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Monga praised the renovated Castro as “exquisite,” saying that the movie palace was “as beautiful as it was in 1922, but with top-notch projection, sound and better sight lines.” She was right, but the physical changes may not have been the most consequential transformations the venue has undergone. The Castro has been upgraded after years of deterioration and given an economically viable future as a flexible live-events venue. But the curatorial work of visionary, individual programmers now only returns to it intermittently. For five days a year, Monga can do what she once did year-round.

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