Symphony, the signature publication of the League of American Orchestras, covers the critical issues, developments, trends, and people of the orchestra world. Published online year-round, with a special Symphony magazine print edition for the League’s National Conference, Symphony features breaking news, cutting-edge research, provocative essays, interviews, and in-depth articles that take readers behind the scenes to examine how orchestras are innovating to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
Symphony has reported on the orchestra field—from audience trends to personnel changes to digital innovations—since its founding by the League of American Orchestras in 1942, while also giving the latest thinking and newest ideas their first exposure. Symphony’s awards include multiple ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Awards for outstanding coverage of orchestras. Most recently, Symphony received awards for music journalism in 2020 and 2021.
News Briefs
Every weekday, Symphony posts News Briefs that excerpt articles, noteworthy reviews, opinion pieces, obituaries, and other coverage of orchestras in the media. Views and opinions in those excerpts are those of the journalists and media outlets cited, and are not to be taken as the views of the League. The League takes no responsibility for the opinions, views, or reporting of journalists whose articles are digested as News Briefs.
Submission Guidelines
Got a story idea? Here’s what you need to know.
Press releases and article ideas about activities at orchestras and in classical music may be sent to:
orchnews@americanorchestras.org and bsandla@americanorchestras.org.
Symphony accepts articles from freelance writers. Send queries with a link to writing samples or a summary of published work that relates to Symphony subject matter. Symphony requires first publication rights. We welcome written queries presenting ideas that we can shape with the writer to match our readers’ interests. We welcome article proposals from writers whose backgrounds and perspectives are underrepresented in classical music. Payments to writers are made upon manuscript acceptance.
Article ideas must directly address the concerns and interests of the orchestra field. Consider whether there is a specific orchestral connection in your story before pitching an idea. Topics of interest include classical music trends; repertoire; equity, diversity, and inclusion; new American orchestral music; business models; technology; emerging artists; music education; pops programming; public advocacy; nonprofit and board governance; and classical-music festivals.
We reprint excerpts from upcoming or recent books and articles that focus on the orchestra field. Contact us with proposals.
We welcome reprint requests. Reprints of Symphony articles must include a line crediting Symphony that appears with all subsequent publications.
Contact Us
Symphony
League of American Orchestras
520 8th Avenue, Suite 2005
New York, NY 10018
520 8th Avenue, Suite 2005
New York, NY 10018
Telephone
212 262 5161
General Information
Publicists: Press releases and other announcements concerning orchestras and classical music may be sent to: orchnews@americanorchestras.org and bsandla@americanorchestras.org.
General Inquiries: For assistance, contact League Member Services at 626 822 4010 or member@americanorchestras.org.
Advertise with Symphony and reach the people who make the decisions in the orchestra world! Contact Steve Alter, Director of Conferences and Business Engagement, at salter@americanorchestras.org or 646 822 4051.
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Meet Our People
Bob Sandla
Editor in Chief
Robert Sandla has been the editor in chief of Symphony since 2007. He was previously editor in chief of Stagebill, in the communications departments of the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center, and an editorial consultant for New York City Ballet and other performing-arts groups.
Stephen Alter
Director of Business Engagement
Steve Alter has been helping the League's business partners reach orchestras around the US for more than 23 years. In his role as Director of Business Engagement, you will find him helping advertisers and sponsors achieve ROI on their marketing investment.
Dr. Aaron A. Flagg is chair and associate director of Jazz Studies at the Juilliard School; former dean and professor of The Hartt School, University of Hartford; a professional trumpeter; a former board member of the Stamford Symphony Orchestra; and a current board member of the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project and the League of America Orchestras, where he serves as secretary and chair of the League’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee.
Anne Wallestad was President and CEO of BoardSource for nearly a decade, and is currently a leadership coach and advisor to nonprofit and philanthropic CEOs and executive directors.
is a journalist based in New York, where she has written most recently for ARTnews, Hell Gate, The Rumpus and Screen Slate. She is the author of Still Life with Meredith (Outpost19).
Ben Finane is editor in chief at Steinway & Sons and of the award-winning online music magazine listenmusicculture.com. He is producer and host of Soundboard, a podcast on artistry and craftsmanship (steinway.com/soundboard).
Editor in Chief, Symphony
Robert Sandla has been the editor in chief of Symphony since 2007. He was previously editor in chief of Stagebill, in the communications departments of the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center, and an editorial consultant for New York City Ballet and other performing-arts groups.
Brian Wise is the radio producer for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and editor of Overtones, the magazine of the Curtis Institute of Music.
As a music journalist, dramatist, and composer, brin solomon writes words and music in various genres and is doing its best to queer all of them. It has written essays, profiles, and reviews for Symphony, San Francisco Classical Voice, and NewMusicBox, among other publications, and its theatrical works have been hailed as “soul-stirring.” (Illustration by Meg Smitherman.)
Caen Thomason-Redus is Vice President of Inclusion and Learning at the League of American Orchestras.
Cathy Trower is immediate past chair of BoardSource and president and a principal of Trower & Trower, Inc., which provides consulting services to nonprofit CEOs and boards. She was co-founder of the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and most recently served there as a senior research associate and research director. She is the author of The Practitioner’s Guide to Governance as Leadership and the second edition of Govern More, Manage Less (BoardSource). She holds a BBA and an MBA from the University of Iowa, and a Ph.D. in higher education administration from the University of Maryland.
Chester Lane was a New York-based classical music journalist, director of communications for Sciolino Artist Management, and the longtime former senior editor of Symphony.
Johnson is a writer and critic living in Brooklyn, New York. Former U.S. Head of Communications for music publisher Edition Peters, he has written about contemporary composers for Chamber Music, Musical America, Parterre Box, WQXR, and more.
David Styers is the director of Learning and Leadership Programs at the League of American Orchestras.
Elena Dubinets is the artistic director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. She previously held top artistic planning positions at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Seattle Symphony. She received her MA and PhD degrees from the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Russia and has lived in the U.S. since 1996, moving to London in 2021.
The author of eight books and 53 articles, arts educator Eric Booth founded ITAC/International Teaching Artist Collaborative, and was on the faculty of Juilliard (12 years, co-founding the teaching artist program), Tanglewood, the Kennedy Center (20 years), and Lincoln Center Education (41 years). He’s a consultant for many arts organizations, cities, states, and businesses in the U.S. and 11 other countries.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance music journalist and researcher, writing most often for the Chicago Tribune as its classical music and jazz critic.
Heidi Waleson is the opera critic of the Wall Street Journal and author of Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America (Metropolitan Books/Picador).
Hugh Robertson is the deputy editor of Limelight, Australia’s leading arts and culture publication.
James Chute has served as music critic for the Cincinnati Post, Orange County Register, and San Diego Union-Tribune, and is a Pulitzer Prize finalist in criticism for his reviews in the Milwaukee Journal. He has contributed to the New Grove Dictionary of Music, New Grove Dictionary of American Music, and other publications.
JANAYA GREENE is a Chicago-based writer covering film, literature, music, and the African diaspora. She finds overlooked stories that are of interest to millennials and marginalized communities, and amplifies them through reporting, writing, visual storytelling, and social media. Greene is a freelance writer and social media coordinator at the Chicago Reader.
Janelle Gelfand is Cincinnati Business Courier’s arts contributor and critic. She was the classical music critic and arts writer of the Cincinnati Enquirer from 1991 to 2017.
Jasmine Liu is a journalist from the San Francisco Bay Area who writes about literature in translation, contemporary art, classical music, and more. She holds bachelor’s degrees from Stanford University in anthropology and mathematics.
Jeff Lunden is a freelance arts reporter whose work is frequently heard on NPR and other public radio outlets. He’s also a musical theater composer who wrote a show about the Transcontinental Railroad that played in New York City and toured the country for Theatreworks/USA, a leading presenter of theater for young audiences.
Jeffrey Weisner is a double bassist in the National Symphony Orchestra and a former faculty member at Peabody Conservatory. He currently chairs the NSO Artistic Advisory Committee and the DEI Committee. He has been a member of the Steering Committee of 350MoCo since its founding in 2014. He resides in Montgomery County, MD with his husband and their two daughters.
Jennifer Gersten is a writer and violinist from Queens, New York.
Jennifer Melick, Symphony magazine’s former longtime managing editor, is a freelance journalist based in Detroit.
Jeremy Reynolds is the classical music critic at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the editor of OPERA America Magazine.A former clarinetist, he also writes program notes for a variety of orchestras and music festivals around the country.
Jesse Rosen was the President and CEO of the League of American Orchestras from 2008 to 2020. He is currently an arts leadership consultant and lecturer.
Jim Farber has been a music critic and arts feature writer in Los Angeles since 1982. He is the Los Angeles correspondent for San Francisco Classical Voice and has received five Los Angeles Press Club awards for feature writing and criticism.
Joe Kluger is a principal of WolfBrown, with over 30 years of experience as a nonprofit executive and consultant in strategic planning, human capital strategies, organizational collaborations, and problem solving for museums, theaters, performing arts centers, opera companies, orchestras, and arts education institutions.
Michael Bronson has over 40 years of experience as an arts administrator, producer of television and radio programs, and arts management consultant to opera companies and orchestras in labor relations and electronic media projects.
Bronson and Kluger are recognized experts in the use of technology to accomplish strategic objectives in the arts and are consultants in this area to the League of American Orchestras and OPERA America and their members. Find more information on the League’s Electronic Media Services at https://www.americanorchestras.org/knowledge-research-innovation/electronic-media.html.
is the former director of Learning and Leadership Programs at the League of American Orchestras. He is a professional horn player and holds an adjunct faculty position at the New School University, Mannes School of Music, teaching music entrepreneurship.
John Adams is a composer, conductor, and creative thinker. His works, both operatic and symphonic, stand out among contemporary classical compositions for their depth of expression, brilliance of sound, and the profoundly humanist nature of their themes. Over the past 40 years, Adams’s music has played a decisive role in turning contemporary musical aesthetics from academic modernism and toward a more expansive, expressive language, entirely characteristic of his New World surroundings. Works spanning more than three decades have entered the repertoire and are among the most performed contemporary classical music today: Harmonielehre, Absolute Jest, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, and stage works including Nixon in China, El Niño, and Doctor Atomic. Author of the acclaimed autobiography Hallelujah Junction, Adams has also been published by both The New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review. (Photo by Deborah O’Grady.)
John Masko is the founding music director of the Providence Medical Orchestra and the National Virtual Medical Orchestra and associate conductor at the Wellesley Symphony Orchestra. As an assistant and cover conductor, he has worked with the San Francisco Symphony, Boston Ballet, and Symphony New Hampshire, among other ensembles.
The author of ten previous books about American music, Joseph Horowitz is co-founder and executive producer of PostClassical Ensemble, an experimental chamber orchestra based in Washington, D.C. He has also served as an artistic consultant to more than two dozen American orchestras. An annotated playlist for his inclusive “new paradigm” for American repertoire may be found at http://josephhorowitz.com.
Keith Powers covers music in greater Boston for GateHouse newspapers and WBUR’s ARTery
Ken Smith divides his time between New York and Hong Kong, where he is the Asian Performing Arts Critic of the Financial Times.
Mari Yoshihara is a professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and specializes in U.S. cultural history, U.S.-East Asian relations, Asian American studies, and gender studies. She is the author of Musicians from a Different Shore: Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music (Temple, 2007) and Dearest Lenny: Letters from Japan and the Making of the World Maestro (Oxford, 2019).
Mark Pemberton is the director of the Association of British Orchestras.
Martin Steinberg is an editor at CNBC.com and was for many years an editor and writer at the Associated Press. A professional cellist, he has been cello coach at the New Jersey Intergenerational Orchestra since 2004, performs with numerous orchestras and at private events in the New York tristate area, and teaches cello privately.
Matías Tarnopolsky is president and CEO of the Philadelphia Orchestra and Kimmel Center. He previously held key leadership roles at the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and Cal Performances at the University of California, Berkeley, among others.
Michele C. Hollow writes about autism, Alzheimer’s, health, and animals. Her byline has appeared in The New York Times, AARP, The Guardian, Parents, and other publications.
Nancy Malitz, who chairs the Music Critics Association of North America, is the founding music critic at USA Today and spearheaded the creation of Classical Voice North America. She has written about the arts and technology for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Detroit News, and dozens of other publications.
is the theater critic for The Washington Post. His previous work has appeared in The New York Times, Variety, The Daily Beast, and more.
Francesca Pecoraro, Alex Turrini, and Mark Volpe are the authors of Fundraising for the Arts, published in 2023 by Bocconi University Press. Mark Volpe was president and chief executive officer of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1997 to 2021. Prior to Boston, Volpe held leadership positions with the orchestras of Detroit, Minnesota, and Baltimore. Volpe has advised orchestras and music festivals in the United States and Europe and lectured at Harvard University, Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University, the University of Rochester, Southern Methodist University, and the University of Miami. Francesca Pecoraro has worked since 2009 in the Marketing and Audience Development Department of Teatro di San Carlo in Naples (Italy), with specific responsibility for marketing and sales, business analytics and support for management control. After completing her Bocconi University MSc in Economics and Management for the Performing Arts in 2008, Pecoraro worked in digital marketing and community management for the Marketing Department of Piccolo Teatro in Milan and collaborated with performing arts festivals. Alex Turrini is associate professor in public and non-profit management and Director of the MSc in Arts and Cultural Management at Bocconi University, Milan. He has been visiting chair of the Southern Methodist University Meadows Division of Arts Management and Arts Entrepreneurship as well as visiting professor in arts management and cultural policy at SMU Meadows and Cox School of Business (Dallas, TX).
Piper Starnes is a journalist who specializes in music and film. She has written for Opera America, Syracuse.com, Rochester City, and Charleston City Paper. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Clemson University in performing arts for keyboard instruments and a master’s degree from Syracuse University in Arts Journalism and Communications.
REBECCA SCHMID is a music writer based in Berlin, contributing to the Financial Times, New York Times, and Berliner Morgenpost. She has moderated and written program notes for the Metropolitan Opera, Salzburg Festival, and Karajan Music Tech Conference.
Rebecca Winzenried is a New York-based arts writer and a former editor in chief of Symphony.
Rita Pyrillis (Mnicoujou Lakota) is a freelance writer in Evanston, Illinois. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Crain’s Chicago Business, Los Angeles Times, and Newsweek, among other publications. “Native Sounds,” her 2021 Symphony article about Native American composers and musicians, won an ASCAP Award for music journalism.
Rosalyn Story is a Dallas-based writer and violinist who performs in the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, Sphinx Symphony Orchestra, and other ensembles. She is author of And So I Sing: African-American Divas of Opera and Concert (1990) and three novels: More Than You Know (2004), Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans (2010), and Sing Her Name (2022), the latter inspired by the life of soprano Sissieretta Jones.
Simon Woods is the President and CEO of the League of American Orchestras. He brings over 30 years of experience working with orchestras, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and Seattle Symphony. He was honored to become an American citizen in 2018.
Steven Brown writes about classical music and the arts. He is the former classical music critic of the Orlando Sentinel, Charlotte Observer, and Houston Chronicle.
is the news and special reports editor of Musical America
Susan Howlett has been strengthening boards for four decades, as a trustee, an executive director, and as a consultant to thousands of nonprofits. Author of two acclaimed books, Getting Funded and Boards on Fire!, she’s been core faculty since 1990 teaching nonprofit leadership at the University of Washington. She speaks regularly at regional and national conferences, including several League of American Orchestras conferences and meetings, and she leads about 40 board retreats each year.
Theodore Wiprud is a composer and a consultant in the arts and education, and was the longtime Vice President, Education, at the New York Philharmonic. He has been active in multiple EDI initiatives, including the launch of The Catalyst Fund in 2019.
Thomas May writes and lectures about music and theater. He is the author of Decoding Wagner (Amadeus Press, 2007) and The John Adams Reader (Amadeus Press, 2006)
Tim Diovanni is a classical music critic and reporter at The Dallas Morning News.
Travis Newton is the author of Orchestra Management Handbook: Building Relationships in Turbulent Times.
Vivien Schweitzer is a writer and pianist who contributes to publications including The Economist, The New York Times, and the American Scholar. Her book, “A Mad Love: An Introduction to Opera,” was named one of the New Yorker’s “Best Books We Read in 2021.”
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