SC native makes history as 1st non-white conductor at major US orchestra
A South Carolina native is receiving national attention for breaking barriers in the music world.
Jonathon Heyward, a 29-year-old classical musician who grew up in Charleston, was named Thursday as the new music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, making Heyward the first non-white leader of the orchestra in its 106-year history.
Heyward talked to the New York Times about his new job, and about growing up in South Carolina as the son of a Black father and a white mother.
He started playing the cello at the age of 10 and quickly became something of a musical prodigy. He attended the Boston Conservatory and later served as an assistant conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in England.
“My family came from a very low socio-economic background,” Heyward told the Baltimore Sun. “My father was the chef and my mother was a waitress. I grew up listening to jazz and rock, but certainly not to classical music. I owe my entire career to the Charleston Public School System and its music education programs that provided me with free instruments and free lessons.”
The Sun traces Heyward’s career as a conductor to the eighth grade. When his music teacher was sick, the substitute teacher selected Heyward to conduct by pulling his name out of a hat.
A similar set of circumstances led to Heyward being noticed at 25, when he was praised by music critics after he stood in for an ill conductor at a concert of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Heyward currently serves as the chief conductor of the Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie in Germany.
“If a 10-year-old boy from Charleston, South Carolina, with no music education background, with no musicians in the family, can be enamored and amazed by this, by the best art form there is — classical music — then I think anyone can,” he said in an interview with the Times. “I plan on trying to prove that in many, many ways.”
Heyward is a trailblazer in the world of classical music. The 25 largest orchestras in the United States have been led almost exclusively by white men, the Times reported. His five-year contract with Baltimore will begin with the 2023-24 concert season.
He told the Times he would work to expand the audience for classical music by bolstering education efforts and promoting underrepresented artists. To make the orchestra more relatable, he plans to program a wider variety of works, feature a greater diversity of performers and move some concerts away from traditional venues — and hopefully bringing back patrons who have stayed away from concerts since the COVID-19 pandemic struck.
“It’s simply a knack of being able to really understand what the community needs and listening to what the community needs and then being able to get them in the door,” Heyward told the Times.
