Composer Kurt Rohde's Open Letter to SFS

Composer Kurt Rohde, artistic advisor to Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (and one of its founders), professor of music at UC Davis, violist, has sent this letter to SFS. I reproduce it here with his permission. Robert Commanday, longtime music journalist at the Chronicle and founder of San Francisco Classical Voice, used to editorialize about the orchestra's neglect of (with some exceptions) Bay Area composers, a varied and hugely talented group.

To the Management and Board of Governors of the San Francisco Symphony; 

 

As the 2024-25 season draws to a close, and the 2025–26 season has been announced, all of which is happening alongside the final concerts by treasured Music Director Laureate Michael Tilson Thomas and the departure of current music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, the San Francisco Symphony is entering an obvious transition that is clearly asking “Where are we now, and where do we want to go?”

I am a composer/performer who has lived in the Bay Area for 33 years. I am part of a community of composers who live, work, and do incredible music making that is largely unacknowledged and rarely gets “above the radar.” I am fully aware of the mechanisms of operation and the culture of leadership inside longstanding historically relevant institutions like the SFS. While like many others, I have numerous questions surrounding the SFS’s management choices made over the last couple of years, I understand and accept that a voice such as mine (which is in fact, no voice at all given the sphere in which you operate, and I don’t) carries little influence regarding those issues. You have a well-compensated staff that makes decisions that they feel are in the best interest regarding the health of the SFS – decisions which reflect the SFS’s artistic vision and overall commitment to the community you serve.

I am writing regarding the transition period that you are now entering, and the possibilities it affords. The SFS is a world-class performing organization that sits at the epicenter of our musical performance community. It is well-supported, well-covered, well-attended, and maintains a significant endowment. The model for an ensemble of this kind has evolved over the decades; one has only to look towards much smaller orchestras to see the range of innovative approaches to musicking, or to storied institutions like the LA Philharmonic or New York Philharmonic and see how gatekeeping institutions can thrive through change, especially by centering their own home-grown communities.

By comparison, the SFS has historically practiced a near complete lack of attention and support towards the numerous Bay Area composers making exceptional work, many of whom have exciting careers everywhere outside San Francisco, who have received important attention and support, and who have been doing so for decades. This is not to say you are not centering important composer voices. There are a small, select number composers that SFS amplifies through repeated performances of their works and the commissioning of new works. Those composers are deserving and supporting their work must be applauded. You are also doing essential work with the ongoing Emerging Black Composers Project, which is a long overdue basic step towards expanding the repertoire and musical experiences; like never before, this initiative needs to be supported in full for as long as possible. Nor do I want to bring it into my critique your now much reduced SoundBox series, which was initially the most dynamic new music offering that the SFS had ever undertaken since my arrival here over three decades ago. My critique is about the lack of support you have towards the creative community that surrounds you.

I can’t help but wonder every time a new SFS season is announced why the new works almost never include any of our significant unacknowledged new music voices from the Bay Area? There are so many of us making truly superb work! It is the SFS’s responsibility to get out and do the research to meet us where we are: You have the resources, and you have the responsibility to not just do better, but to do the bare minimum. Why is it that you do not seem to want to know what is going on in the SF new music community? Is it that we do not belong to the insular SFS network that largely relies on the oversight of our great American/Bay Area composer John Adams? Is it that we are not affiliated with gatekeeping institutions from the East Coast that carry a currency of prestige that Bay Area institutions are not afforded? Is it that there is a cultural provincialism inside of SFS whereby making an effort to investigate the community and encountering what’s being made creates the risk of having to present work by people that the public does not know? I’m not sure what the reasons are. But I do know that the facts are resoundingly confusing and consequentially frustrating.

A simple perusal of any number of composers working regularly and rigorously in the Bay Area from the ages of 20 to 80+ would reveal a constellation of extraordinary talent and art. Why can’t the SFS do something like the LA Phil’s Noon To Midnight Festival, or their more holistically integrated Green Umbrella series? Why can’t SFS have a series of commission projects that focus on an important historical event, like the New York Philharmonic’s Project 19 commissions? It is confounding. And it seems unnecessary given the wealth of our city, the wealth of your institution, the expertise your staff possesses, and the extraordinary range of people and experiences that are reflected in our creative community.

As you move forward with your transition over these next couple years, I urge you to reevaluate your vision and mission. I hope you understand that in order for an organization to thrive and endure, it must also evolve in a direction that not only undertakes renewal but also reevaluates the energy behind their purpose to do what they’re doing…the “WHAT & WHY” of the organization. Please do not just do what you’ve done before only to do it again: Do better by doing something new. To do something unforeseen and thrilling, and a little bit dangerous, can be breathtaking in ways your audiences and our community wants and needs, now more than ever. 

The ending of “In Ascension,” the remarkable novel by Martin MacInnes, concludes with a breathtaking anthem of ecstatic revelation. The novel’s protagonist is experiencing the most important transition in her life. She embraces her transition as the catalyst not just for renewal, but for the very rebirth of the act of becoming new. It reads: “And I’m glad at the end to be a part of this, intermediate in this, glad that everything I’ve seen and done, everything I’ve felt will be continuous in this, generative and fertile in this flux, cycles of transformation, not ending but beginning, beginning again as it always was and will be, new worlds and transformation, new eternities, new life, new.” 

This is the thrill when one understands and embraces the potential of the new! The SFS has so much potential! I urge you to explore and mine it differently than ever before, to look forward in a way that acknowledges and celebrates our region’s creative community. Please make the effort – give it your all – and show the music world what you stand for and why you are doing it. Please don’t let us have to rely on the fine work that the New York Philharmonic and Los Angeles Philharmonic, or smaller, nimbler, and innovative orchestras are doing with their communities in order to experience a world class institution standing up, holding up, and showcasing the amazing talent that exists in their own backyard. We are ready.

Thank you for your consideration.

Kurt Rohde 

(he, him/they, them)

UC Davis, Dept. of Music, Professor of Music Composition

https://ucdavis.zoom.us/my/sfkurtrohde

 

www.KurtRohde.com

Artistic Director – Composers Conference

Artistic Advisor – Left Coast Chamber Ensemble

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