By Wynne Delacoma
“The old boys’ network has existed for centuries,” says Marin Alsop in The Conductor, the recent film-festival and now streaming documentary about her life and work as the first female music director of a major American orchestra (the Baltimore Symphony).
“We need to create the old girls’ network, so that we can really be there for each other and support each other.”
In 2002 Alsop began doing just that. With support from Japanese textile industrialist Tomio Taki, she established the Taki Concordia Conducting Fellowship, designed to help talented women advance their conducting careers. Now renamed the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship, the award offers modest cash prizes and invaluable opportunities to work with Alsop and other conductors on and off the podium. Twenty years and 30 Taki awards later, the “old girls network” she envisioned is taking shape.
Marin Alsop in a 1989 publicity shot for The Concordia Orchestra with her father Lamar, first violinist with New York City Ballet orchestra
(photo: Digital Collections, The New York Public Library)
Ravinia celebrates the fellowship’s 20th anniversary July 29–31 as part of a weekend of programs titled Breaking Barriers. Alsop, Ravinia’s freshly extended Chief Conductor, will lead the Chicago Symphony on the 29th along with three Taki Fellows: Jeri Lynne Johnson, Laura Jackson, and Anna Duczmal-Mróz, as well as a program on her own on the 30th. Including master classes, exhibits and a panel discussion, the weekend focuses on the challenges overcome and those still faced by conductors who happen to be female.
The fellowship grew out of Alsop’s work with The Concordia Orchestra, a group she founded in 1984 with Taki’s help. Trained as a violinist, she had been rejected twice for The Juilliard School’s conducting program. An aspiring conductor, she had no way to learn her craft.
“When I played the violin, I could practice all the time,” Alsop told an audience at a 2015 lecture at Loyola University Maryland. “But for conducting, unless you have 40 people come over to your house every day to play, you can’t ever practice. So you can’t ever get experience because no one will let you conduct because you didn’t conduct before.”
In the early 1980s she had formed String Fever, an all-female, all-string swing band. The group played at Taki’s wedding, and she later approached him with a blunt appeal. Would he underwrite an orchestra for her to conduct? He agreed, and Alsop began building her conducting career. She was hailed as a pioneer, but as her career gained momentum she realized that the frontier for female conductors was not opening up.
Alsop, center, surrounded by members of String Fever in 1983 (photo: Digital Collections, The New York Public Library)
“I looked around,” she said,” It was five years, 10 years, 15 years. I just naturally assumed there would be a lot of women coming into [the field]. I might be one of the first, but there certainly would be a lot more. But there was kind of the same number. Maybe the names changed a little, but we were a handful of women who were always lumped together. And I thought, ‘If I don’t try to change the landscape, who will?’ Nobody else seemed willing to do it.”
In 2001 Alsop, Taki, and the Concordia’s board decided to fold the orchestra because she was so busy conducting elsewhere.
“As we were wrapping things up,” Alsop recalled, “Mr. Taki said to me, ‘We achieved this goal, getting a woman on the stage in this role. But what about the other women?’ ”
Grateful for his long years of support, Alsop called the fellowship “a thank-you for Mr. Taki,” He and Alsop contributed money to fund the award, and in 2003 Carolyn Kuan became the first Taki Concordia Conducting Fellow. Now music director of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, her long list of conducting credits range from the Royal Danish Ballet to the San Francisco Symphony. She is one of 19 Taki Fellows who are music directors or chief conductors of orchestras, opera companies, and ensembles in the US and beyond.
Laura Jackson conducting the Reno Philharmonic in Chesapeake: Summer of 1814, a multimedia concert work she commissioned to celebrate the bicentennial of the poem behind “The Star-Spangled Banner.” (photo: David Calvert)
Now given every two years, the Taki’s monetary award is relatively small; $20,000 over two years for the top winner. The more enduring prize is the mentorship Alsop offers the top winners and runners-up. She is a master teacher, and for Taki Fellows just starting their careers, working with her on the podium is invaluable.
“The fellowship was in its early stages,” said Laura Jackson, the 2004 Taki Fellow and, since 2009, music director of the Reno Philharmonic. “I applied not really knowing what was going to be a wonderful outcome.”
Alsop was music director of the Colorado Symphony in 2004, and Jackson traveled to Denver to work with her. At the same time, having won a fellowship from the American Symphony Orchestra League, Jackson was assistant conductor at the Atlanta Symphony.
“I conducted a piece on Marin’s program, the Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet overture. What was so unique was that I was mentored by her and the musicians. It was the first time I’d been in a professional guest conducting situation. I not only got her feedback, but the feedback of professional musicians encountering me for the first time. To be able to get these little snapshots from them—this is how you could be doing it better—made it a really rich week. So much wisdom was imparted to me.”
Jeri Lynne Johnson conducting the Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra, which she founded in 2008
A different sort of wisdom was imparted to Jeri Lynne Johnson, the 2005 Fellow and founder and artistic director of the Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra in Philadelphia. As a young African American woman, she faced a uniquely treacherous career path.
“Right after I won the Taki,” said Johnson, “I went out on the job market thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve got this amazing credential on my résumé and all this wonderful experience. I should really be able to land a job.’ ”
She reached the final audition round for three music director jobs but lost out on all three. She eagerly accepted one orchestra’s offer to explain why she was passed over. “That’s very rare,” she said. “It was a wonderful opportunity.”
The feedback, she acknowledged, “did me the great service of being brutally honest.” The orchestra liked her, and the board thought she had wonderful ideas. But they didn’t know how to “market” her. As the visibly uncomfortable orchestra representative put it, “You just don’t look like what the audience expects you to look like.”
Devastated, Johnson sought Alsop’s advice.
“You are where I was when I started my Concordia orchestra,” Alsop told her. “You’re going to have to create opportunities to prove to other people that you can do this job, that you can lead an organization and maintain it.”
Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra
Johnson launched Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra in 2008, emphasizing diversity, equity, and inclusion in repertoire and personnel long before they became popular buzzwords. She created DEI Arts Consulting in 2015 to assist corporations and nonprofits on those issues. When the pandemic hit, Black Pearl and DEI Arts Consulting were able to survive with online services.
“I understood that I had to be very entrepreneurial and create my own opportunities,” Johnson said. Meanwhile she continued guest conducting; her 2022 schedule includes leading world premieres at the National Symphony, the Santa Fe Opera, and Chicago Opera Theater.
Lidiya Yankovskaya, winner of a Taki Honorable Mention award in 2015, has been music director of Chicago Opera Theater since 2017. She joined Alsop for sessions in the United Kingdom and at the Cabrillo Festival in California, where Alsop had been music director from 1992 to 2015. Most important, however, was Alsop’s networking that helped Yankovskaya move beyond her home base of Boston.
“I had had a decade of high-level experience at that point,” she said,” and I pretty much knew what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it. But I had no real connections, no exposure to the music world outside the small community I was in.” Alsop’s recommendations helped her win a residency with the Dallas Opera’s Hart Institute for Women Conductors and assistant conductor work with respected maestro Lorin Maazel.
Lidiya Yankovskaya conducting the Refugee Orchestra Project, which she founded in 2016, shortly before becoming director of Chicago Opera Theater. (photo: Scott Bump)
(Mei-Ann Chen is another Taki alumna playing a leading role on Chicago’s musical scene. Music director of the Chicago Sinfonietta since 2011, she was the 2007 Taki Fellow.)
Alsop is exceedingly generous with her time and her advice, striving to stay in touch with Taki alumnae and put them in touch with one another. In mid-June, Lina González-Granados, the 2017 Taki Fellow, stepped in with only eight hours’ notice to conduct the Chicago Symphony after a positive Covid-19 test forced CSO Music Director Riccardo Muti to drop out. The Colombian-American conductor was finishing her residency as the CSO’s George Solti Conducting Apprentice. This summer she becomes the Los Angeles Opera’s resident conductor.
“The first call I received when I was going to step in in June was from Marin,” said González-Granados. “She was saying, ‘Congratulations. How can I help you? I want to support you.’ It was psychological support. She is always there to lend a hand.”
When the pandemic brought live performances to a shuddering halt around the world, the Taki Fellowship sensed an opportunity.
Yankovskaya conducting the Fort Worth Symphony (photo: Karen Almond)
“During the pandemic, Marin organized monthly Zoom meetings for all of the Taki Fellows that were incredible,” said Yankovskaya. “We got together, and we met different people in various fields. It was [esteemed veteran conductor] Bernard Haitink one time, or a librarian from an orchestra at a very high level or the concertmaster of a major orchestra. Different people would give us insights we might not otherwise know. And more important, it was also an opportunity for all of us to connect. It’s so rare to have a chance to speak to so many other conductors, especially women, in the same place.”
“I love them so much!” said Alexandra Arrieche, the Brazilian-born 2011 Taki Fellow and newly appointed music director of the Olympia Symphony Orchestra in Washington. “If you ask me whom I admire most, it would be Marin and my Taki fellows. Though we’re all conductors, we are so different. We all bring a different background to the table.
“We are always helping each other. For example, when we have a piece we’ve never conducted, we ask, what can the group share? If not in the next five minutes, within 24 hours, you have all the help you need. Next year I will be conducting the Hartford Symphony, which is Carolyn Kuan’s orchestra. She’s the first Taki ever, and she invites the Takis to come there.”
Alexandra Arrieche was appointed music director of the Olympia Symphony just last month.
The Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship is not the only program focused on developing woman conductors. In addition to Dallas Opera’s Hart Institute, a competition based in Paris, La Maestra, was launched in 2020. Among the 12 winners this year is Polish conductor Anna Sułkowska-Migoń, a 2022 Taki Award Recipient. In the wake of the #MeToo movement and the social justice upheavals two years ago, some orchestras have established their own programs to focus on women conductors as well as other underrepresented groups.
The Taki Award is distinctive because it has no set ideas about what a successful conducting career should look like. Arrieche regularly collaborates with dancers and visual artists, and during the pandemic she hosted a podcast looking at the links and limits between pop and classical music. She has conducted a popular annual European pop-music event, Night of the Proms, and worked with Earth Wind & Fire, the Pointer Sisters, Alan Parsons, and Chaka Khan.
Kelly Corcoran, a 2007 Taki awardee, founded the Nashville Philharmonic and spent a total of nine seasons with the Nashville Symphony, seven as associate conductor, two as chorus director. In 2014 she founded Intersection, a contemporary music ensemble dedicated to challenging the traditional concert experience and performing concerts for all ages. She earned a master’s degree in public health and is interested in the connection between music and physical well-being.
Arrieche conducting Night of the Proms, featuring the Antwerp Philharmonic Orchestra
Going into its third decade, the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship is shifting from what Alsop calls “a mom-and-pop operation,” to a more business-like model. Kristin Jurkscheit, Alsop’s life partner and a former horn player, became the organization’s executive director in 2019. With an executive MBA from Johns Hopkins University, she is looking at data to chart the fellowship’s future.
“We usually have 50 applicants in our fellowship years,” said Jurkscheit. “But the last round we had 141. It was crazy. And 70 percent were in the 31–50 age range and at a very high [talent] level, which was compelling. It speaks a lot to how women of a certain generation who didn’t have a community are still looking for opportunities.”
“There’s a group of women who kind of missed out,” said Alsop. “Now everybody wants young women. I was on the first wave, so I had a little of the novelty, and now I have experience, so that’s good. But that second group in the middle—age 30 to 50 or so—were too soon for the #MeToo movement, so they didn’t get a benefit from doors opening.”
Alsop is delighted that Taki fellows are becoming a community, willing to help one another, offering advice, psychological support and, when they can, jobs. Laura Jackson thinks something even more significant is happening: “I feel there’s this river of fabulously gifted women that is turning into a flood.”
Alsop is a little more cautious about the momentum.
“I’m vigilant because I don’t trust that the doors are going to stay open,” she said. “We really have to stay the course. You have to keep your foot on the gas. You can’t let up. As soon as you do, there will be people who want to go back to the old way.” ●
Wynne Delacoma was classical music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1991 to 2006 and has been an adjunct journalism faculty member at Northwestern University. She is a freelance music critic, writer, and lecturer.