Charlotte Symphony makes history, names a Black conductor as its new music director
For the first time in its nearly century-long history, the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra will be led by someone other than a white man.
On Tuesday, the orchestra named Kwamé Ryan as its new music director.
The 53-year-old Black man grew up on the Caribbean island of Trinidad. He studied at Cambridge, lives on the edge of Germany’s Black Forest with his husband, hosts a weekly podcast for tips and life hacks, is into yoga, mountain biking and rugby, and guest-conducts orchestras throughout Europe and the U.S.
Ryan was the unanimous choice to be the orchestra’s 12th maestro, the CSO said. The Charlotte Symphony’s first Black conductor follows two other prominent N.C. orchestras that also tapped people of color to lead their organizations in the past couple years.
And Ryan’s hiring comes at a time when major orchestras across the country still struggle to elevate Black people to the role of music director, their highest post, a new study by the League of American Orchestras found.
Who is Kwamé Ryan, the new music director for the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra?
In an interview with The Charlotte Observer — his first with Charlotte media since being named to the new job — Ryan expressed excitement about joining the CSO and the wider Charlotte community.
“I think it’s wonderful that this orchestra that serves the diverse communities of Charlotte, Mecklenburg and beyond should be one of the first U.S. orchestras to take a pioneering step like this.
“I also take very seriously,” Ryan added, “the responsibility of being a potential role model for other young artists from ethnic minorities who aspire to do things in areas where they perhaps have not felt that their inclusion would be a given.”
When will Kwamé Ryan start with the CSO?
Ryan will begin his new role under a four-year contract in the orchestra’s 2024-25 season, its 93rd. Before that, he’ll serve as “music director designate” during the current season and will conduct Brahms’ “Symphony No. 1” and Tchaikovsky’s “Variations on a Rococo Theme” on April 5–6, 2024.
When asked to describe his conducting style, Ryan called it expressive, extroverted and detailed: “Coming from the Caribbean, when I hear music, it’s very hard for me not to move my body.”
Ryan succeeds Christopher Warren-Green, the Englishman who ended his 12-year tenure with the orchestra after the 2021-22 season. Since relinquishing the role, Warren-Green stayed on as conductor laureate and artistic adviser while the search for his successor unfolded.
In an interview, CSO President and CEO David Fisk praised Ryan as a dynamic person who easily bonded with the orchestra’s musicians and cares deeply about helping educate the next generation of musicians.
“He’s not only going to lift us up to the next level, but also help us deepen our relationship with the communities across the region that we’re here to serve,” Fisk said. “He’s going to be a terrific ambassador for us.”
The CSO music director search
With 65 full-time professional musicians, the Charlotte Symphony is the oldest operating symphony orchestra in the Carolinas.
To get a closer look at the candidates under consideration to succeed Warren-Green, Fisk said the orchestra invited about 15 of them to come in as guest conductors.
The symphony also insisted that its next maestro agree that the only titled position in North America they would hold would be in Charlotte. The requirement helped ensure that the CSO received sufficient attention from its next leader and Charlotte would be their priority, according to Fisk.
Diversity, equity and inclusion was also a vital part of the search. And the hard-earned gains over the years by women and minorities — in what traditionally has been a field dominated by white men — made the CSO’s work easier. “It wasn’t that we had to go out and make it a diverse field,” Fisk said. “It was a diverse field in which we were looking.”
That pool ultimately narrowed to two or three finalists, each of a diverse background, Fisk said (although he declined to say if any were women).
“We had extraordinarily high-quality candidates,” Fisk said. “But in the end, there was no hesitation at all. Reaching the decision about Kwamé was the right thing.”
About Kwamé Ryan
Kwame’s parents, both educators, were living in Canada when he was born. A month later, they emigrated to East Africa for his father’s research on African politics before returning to Canada a couple years later. They settled in Trinidad when Ryan was 5.
Two years later, during a family vacation in Canada, 7-year-old Ryan attended his first concert and saw the Toronto Symphony. He was particularly entranced by the conductor. Ryan doesn’t remember this, but his mom says he leaned over to her and said, “I want to do that.”
Well, he wanted to be a lawyer, too. But music held true, and his interest in leading an orchestra continued to grow.
At age 15, his parents sent him off to boarding school in England to further that goal. It was the only way he’d have a realistic shot at becoming a conductor, he said. When asked if it was hard to leave home at a young age, Ryan responded quickly: “Not in the slightest.”
From there, he studied musicology at the University of Cambridge, then trained under Hungarian composer and conductor Peter Eötvös.
Ryan served as general music director of southern Germany’s Freiburg Opera from 1999 to 2003. He quickly realized that for classical music, Germany remains a bountiful land “with an orchestra or an opera house in every medium-sized town.”
Between 2007 and 2013, Ryan worked as musical and artistic director of the National Orchestra of Bordeaux Aquitaine in France. From there, he returned to the Caribbean for a much-needed break. Ryan contacted the Academy for the Performing Arts at the University of Trinidad and Tobago and offered his services to give back to the community, figuring he’d stay on the island for about a year.
“I ended up becoming its director and staying there for the better part of eight years,” Ryan said with a chuckle. He later received the Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence in the Arts.
Ryan also has worked as musical director of the National Youth Orchestra of France, where he was made an officer of the Order of Arts and Letters, and became involved in children’s programming with the BBC.
As a freelance conductor, Ryan has led concerts for multiple orchestras in the U.S. and Europe, including in Baltimore, Dallas, Brussels and Paris.
During the pandemic, he and his husband (a cellist with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra whom he met more than 20 years ago) remained in Germany, where they can see the outskirts of the Black Forest from their home in Freiburg im Bresgau.
And in his new role, Ryan intends to divide his time between there and here. “I absolutely love Charlotte, and want to spend as much time as I possibly can here, even outside of conducting,” he said. That includes seeing close family members who happen to live in Charlotte and Raleigh.
Ryan also looks to continue focusing on music education in Charlotte, an area that’s of keen interest to the Charlotte Symphony, which fosters three youth orchestras.
Diversity among orchestra leaders
So how rare is it to have a Black music director?
Just 2.3% of all orchestra music directors were Black or African-American last season, according to the League of American Orchestras study. Released in June, the “Racial/Ethnic and Gender Diversity in the Orchestra Field in 2023” report covered between the 2013-14 season through 2022-23.
In fact, representation of Black music directors sharply declined during the past decade, even as gains were seen by other minority groups, including Hispanics, and Asians and Asian Americans. In the 2013-14 season, Black musicians comprised 5% of orchestra music directors, the study found, a figure that would be cut in half by last season.
But North Carolina orchestras are helping accelerate the pace of diversity among music directors.
In February 2022, the state-supported North Carolina Symphony Orchestra in Raleigh announced that Mexican-born Carlos Miguel Prieto would be its music director starting in the 2023-24 season. When Prieto’s appointment was revealed, the symphony touted it as “the beginning of a new era.”
And in June, the Winston-Salem Symphony announced it hired its first female conductor, Michelle Merrill. At the time, the symphony said Merrill was the only woman to lead a professional orchestra in the Carolinas.
Then there’s the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra.
It’s in the midst of the “Season of the Seven” to find Geensboro’s next maestro. Seven conductors chosen for their artistic range, global perspective, diversity and leadership will take take the podium this season, but only one will be named the next director.
Ryan and the Charlotte community
Ryan starts at a fraught time for arts groups around the region and country who are still working to retain audiences and funding in the post-pandemic era, amid a vast expansion of entertainment options.
But according to Fisk, audiences are returning to the CSO.
The challenge for Ryan and the symphony, Fisk said, is to ensure that anyone who wants access can get it. To that end, the symphony continues to take its music into neighborhoods across the city while also exploring new programming, including music and wellness.
Ryan has a challenge of his own in mind.
During his last trip to Charlotte, he saw lots of people walking alongside one another, all wearing the Carolina Panthers’ colors. Ryan was impressed by how strangers just started chatting with the folks around them over their shared interests.
That’s what he wants the symphony to experience: people from different backgrounds bonding over a common experience. He’s made it his mission to find as many ways as possible for people to connect with the CSO, and to make the orchestra accessible to as diverse an audience as possible.
When you make a commitment to a symphony, Ryan said, you also make a commitment to the community. Ryan already felt he was on the same musical wavelength with the orchestra. He found the city just as welcoming and invigorating.
“I don’t think I have ever looked forward to taking up a new job as much as I’m looking forward to becoming the music director of the CSO and becoming part of the Charlotte Mecklenburg community,” Ryan said. “I’m so excited about those two avenues in my life.
“We’re on the threshold of this new adventure together.”
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