Illustrative ideas
I am drawn to programming built around a single organising idea — an image, a region, a form, a number, a meeting of voices. The above programmes are written that way: each should read as a concert a subscriber can describe to a friend in one sentence, not as a sequence of accidentally adjacent works. That said, I have considered some aspects of the KSO (with my outdated personal experience) to help temper these.
Beyond single concerts, the kinds of structures I find compelling and would be interested in exploring with the KSO include:
- Multi-season arcs that thread a composer, theme, or community through three or four years — a partial symphonic cycle, a "Voices of the BC Interior" thread, a sustained Canadian commissioning line. People love sequels!
- Festivals and short residencies that concentrate energy around a composer or idea over a short time-frame. Events that create a regional (or greater) pull to our artistic hub in Kamloops.
- Curated juxtapositions that recontextualise the canon — a Brahms symphony next to a contemporary Canadian work whose materials echo or answer it.
Exactly where the KSO goes on any of this is precisely the kind of decision the planning process should make, not a single voice. I arrive with appetite and ideas, not finished plans.
Balancing core repertoire, innovation, and community
My habit — like so many raised in a Western European tradition — is to anchor each season with pillars from the core symphonic repertoire — the works a traditional audience trusts the orchestra to deliver — and to structure the rest of the season around them. That default needs to be tested and evolve against organisational priorities, an honest analysis of recent seasons' programming, changing audiences and tastes, and stakeholder discussion before it becomes a commitment.
Innovation, in this context, comes first through commissions and the underexplored canon: women composers, BIPOC composers, Canadian voices, and the artists rooted in Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc territory and the wider Interior. Curatorial innovation and format experiments — a non-traditional venue, an immersive concert, an unexpected pairing — are meaningful but trickier to land, and easier to land well once the orchestra and its audience have a shared trust.
Community relevance, for me, is not a programming category. It is an input to every programming category. I treat audience signal, community co-creation, and education-aligned programming as three concurrent inputs to a single decision, and I am keen to leverage modern tools to analyze those inputs so that strategic planning is incrementally manageable with measurable outcomes.
This is one place I genuinely lean on the tools we now have. Audience analytics (who comes, why, what they renew); repertoire-to-attendance correlation drawn from KSO history and from comparable orchestras; predictive modelling for ticket and donor patterns; and AI as a creative collaborator for discovery and season pressure-testing — these are all in my working practice, and I would advocate for them at the service of the KSO. Arts organizations have never had more powerful tools available to drive success.
The regional-orchestra role
A regional orchestra in the BC Interior isn't a smaller version of a city orchestra. It's its own kind of organisation, with its own job to do. What gives the KSO its place is everything specific to it: Kamloops, its musicians, the music school it shares a name with, and more than fifty years of work in the BC Interior. Programming is where that relationship gets renewed, in public, every season.
To me, a Music Director's job is to keep those connections strong: ambitious enough artistically to make the orchestra proud, close enough to the community to keep earning its place, and careful enough with money that every future season stays possible. It comes from listening and adapting, with the orchestra, the Board, the audience, the school, and the wider community, and then making the artistic call. I would consider it a privilege to do that work with you.
