Family Connections

If a couple of names in my previous post seemed familiar, you can consider yourself alert and on top of things: the conductors Ken-David Masur and Joshua Weilerstein, who will be appearing at San Francisco Symphony in the near future, come from musical families. Masur is the son of the late Kurt Masur, who led the NY Philharmonic and the Leipzig Gewandhaus. Weilerstein's parents are Donald Weilerstein, distinguished teacher and longtime first violin of the Cleveland Quartet, and Vivian Hornick Weilerstein, pianist. His sister is the cellist Alicia Weilerstein.

Coming from such families gives you a leg up, in exposure to music, in early training, in name recognition, in the people you meet socially and in the business, contacts most of us just haven't got access to. The brilliant Kate (McMansion Hell) Wagner wrote an article in 2019 about what it's like to try to make it even in the lower echelons of classical music if you come from a less-privileged family. Think about it: classical music just isn't a meritocracy, owing to the different access and privilege that different people have.