Coffee With James Ross
The Alexandria Symphony Orchestra's Music Director and conductor talks about the state of symphonic music and the ASO
The Alexandria Symphony Orchestra is in its 80th year. This season’s concert program describes James Ross, the ASO’s Music Director and conductor, as a, “native of Boston, an improviser, a horn-blower, a dogged questioner of concert rituals, a man who likes to move, a phrase-shaper and a firm believer in humanizing the impact of classical music on the lives of those it touches.”
“There came a point where everybody was looking at their artists bios and they all looked so dry—full of information that didn’t make any sense. Who cares who you collaborated with, what halls you’ve been in, or even what jobs you had?” Ross said. “I know that’s a lot of descriptors, but some part of me believes in every single one of those.”
Ross acknowledges the distinction between symphonic music—works performed by an orchestra—and classical music, a term that identifies a musical period, as with romantic or baroque music.
“One of the problems we have is that name, classical music, which people assume means what they see happening with most symphony orchestras on a stage and what kind of concerts—the delivery mechanism is thought of by a lot of people as classical music,” Ross said. “Nowadays, if you say something is ‘classical’ that usually means it’s not popular and it was probably written by a dead white guy at least a hundred years ago. So, that’s the assumption--it’s not a good name for us.”
Ross also questions the tradition of orchestras in formal dress or uniforms. He said, “Why should everyone have to wear the same thing on stage when you are trying to get the individuality of voices and the human power of music?”
Ross rejects the notion of the ASO as a greatest hits machine that performs a limited symphonic repertoire by well-known composers for a mostly elderly subscriber base. “My main job is to take pieces that I believe in, even if they are written by dead white guys from Europe, or something that was written yesterday that I believe in, and try to make an event that can actually be relatable for somebody who doesn’t come to the concert already knowing they love classical music,” he said. “I’m trying to earn enough trust so that people know that they can show up at a concert of ours, no matter what is being played, familiar or unfamiliar, and make them feel like they are part of a story or an event that means something to them.”
Ross’s commitment to “de-ritualizing the event” was apparent in the ASO’s sold-out February 2024 program which featured Mozart’s Requiem, Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Sound and Fury, a 2017 work by Anna Clyne, and the world premiere of Aurora by Afghan composer Milad Yousufi that included the tabla, an Afghan drum. “You can’t change anything for anybody if you can’t lure them in,” he said.
“My job is not really to grow subscribers,” Ross said. “I just want every concert we do to be, in a way that is a challenge, an unrepeatable event—something that is unique and doesn’t fall into a format where everybody knows what is going to happen.”
The ASO’s season performs a concert every five or six weeks which gives Ross time to think individually about every performance.
Sympatico, a highly successful participatory music education program, is the way the ASO reaches students in Alexandria’s elementary schools. “We used to have support for educational concerts of the Alexandria Symphony at [the then] T.C. Williams High School,” Ross said. “But the funding disappeared—this was before my time.”
While the result was that the ASO changed its focus to the elementary schools, Ross said, “I would love the opportunity to be able to talk to the secondary schools as long as it was funded successfully through our organization.” The ASO offers student tickets and recently performed a family concert titled “Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Maestro” at the Masonic Memorial.
Ross started with the ASO in 2018-2019 season. As he began conducting the ASO he was advised to concentrate on traditional mainstream symphonic works, but Ross has been impressed with the way Alexandria audiences have supported what he calls “little quirky adventures” in music.
“People said, ‘He’s making it user-friendly, but it’s not quite what I expect from a concert,’” Ross said. “They thought that I was somehow not quite respecting the history.”
Ross points out that music opportunities are extensive in the Washington area. “Frankly, we live in a community where there is the National Symphony, there is the National Philharmonic, there is the Fairfax Symphony, there is Annapolis, there is everything happening at the University of Maryland, the Clarice [Smith Performing Arts Center]—we wouldn’t be the only people playing Beethoven’s Third Symphony if we chose to do that,” Ross said. “It seems to me that our programming needs to be and has had added value by being a little bit more unique and unexpected with a little bit more storytelling and not just worshipping the iconic masterpieces.”
Ross described the ASO’s musicians as a “wonderful core of freelance players from all over the DC community who chose to play this concert with us as the Alexandria Symphony.”
The ASO is composed of freelance players so the time available for rehearsals is relatively short. Rehearsals generally begin on the Tuesday before performances at the end of the week.
Ross met Leonard Bernstein in 1985 when Bernstein was dealing with the death of his wife. “He was tortured seemingly by the idea that he had killed his wife or that he was responsible for this, despite the cancer. He was emotionally so big…he needed to reach everybody around him,” said Ross. “He needed you in order to invest in you.”
Ross described himself at the time as reserved, but he felt encouraged by Bernstein. “I had to really take myself seriously,” Ross said. “If there were 800 or 1,000 other young conductors that he made feel that way, what’s the matter with being encouraged like that?”
“About a year after [Bernstein] died, I was living over in Spain and I was thinking, ‘Who are my models?” said Ross. “I’m nothing like him [Bernstein] in personality but his values—how much he believed in music and making it count for other people—those are my values, I want to be more like that.”
“In retrospect, I completely admire who Bernstein was and what he did,” Ross said. “I think about him more often than any of the other famous conductors of his era or slightly after.”
Ross enjoyed the movie Maestro. “Hats off to Bradley Cooper for walking the walk and trying to get the feeling of what that guy was like,” Ross said. “I think it’s important for classical music that the movie appeared now and that it’s being taken so seriously. There is such a great story about how much Bradley really loved conducting and really loved classical music and devoted so many years of his life to making that film.”
Ross attended and teaches at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia with Yannick Nezet-Seguin, a colleague he admires and the conductor who coached Cooper in Maestro.
Ross does not aspire to bring famous and expensive artists to play with the ASO. He said, “I like underdogs,” he said. “It’s not worth it for an orchestra like ours—we should put that money in something else.” The performances for the ASO’s next season will be announced in a few weeks.
Ross’ message to people who have not attended an ASO performance, or any symphony, is, “I don’t think it’s my job to try and convince somebody that they should come and like what we do, but [is rather] actually just getting them in the door so they can make a decision—our concerts are about more than the names of the composers on the program.”