180. How San Antonio’s Youth Orchestras Are Expanding Access to Music Education

Welcome to Big City, Small Town, the weekly podcast all about San Antonio and the people who make it go and grow. I'm your host, Bob Rivard, and in the studio with us this week is Troy Peters, the music director of the Youth Orchestra of San Antonio. Good morning, Troy. Hey, it's great to be here, Bob. Thanks for having me. Well, it's great to have you. And when we originally booked this, Troy, there was a very newsy reason to do so, which was the Youth Orchestra of San Antonio was going to get its first permanent home. But there's been some other news that superseded that, and I want to cover that first. So talk to me a little bit about what's going on in the Peters household with you and your wife Ann, who's a senior executive at UTSA and everything that's about to unfold there. Well, my wife Ann is a marketing professional, and she's been at UT San Antonio for 17 years and has had a great run there. Really privileged to work with University President Taylor Amy to be involved in the big merger between UT San Antonio and UT Health San Antonio, where she played a big role in the branding and marketing side. And with that kind of success, of course, comes people reaching out and inviting her to look at other things. And so with our youngest son graduating from high school, after years of saying no to headhunters this spring, she said, yeah, I'll take a meeting or two. And so this fall, she's going to be the new vice president for marketing at the University of South Carolina. That's a big change, obviously, very exciting position for her, and she's such a rock star that I thought, you know, yeah, yeah, absolutely, you've got to do this. But then that poses a dilemma for us as a family, because we've been here in San Antonio for 17 years. We moved to San Antonio for my job. Before that, we moved to Vermont in 1995 for my job. Felt like it was her turn, and we want to have our family be together. And so in a year, I will join her in South Carolina. She's going to South Carolina this September. I'll join her in the fall of 2027, which gives me this one last year to be music director at Yosa. And I love my work at Yosa. I'm really excited about having the 50th anniversary of Yosa coming up and the home stretch on this building that we're going to be opening as this kind of capstone project for me in my tenure as music director. Well, we'll talk about that. Building in just a minute. But congratulations to Anne. Thank you. A UTSA graduate and supporter. And I have been wa waiting, Troy, after the merger for the headhunters to descend on UT San Antonio because there's been so much positive attention to that around the country. And Taylor, Amy's been so successful at his vision of expansion for the university. We're, we're very excited downtown here that San Pedro 2 is about to open in a couple weeks. And President Amy has has said 3,500 students will be down at San Pedro 1 and 2. So that's going to change the face of downtown, and we're excited about that. But congratulations to Anne. Will you continue in your work from there, do you think, or is that an unknown, or. It's too early to tell with a year to go. Still, there is a lot of things I love to do as a musician. Right. I've been a youth orchestra music director for 31 years, but I'm also a composer. I arrange and orchestrate other music, both classical music, but also I do a lot of arranging and orchestrating of pop and rock music for orchestra when rock bands play with orchestra and things like that. I'm a guest conductor. So I've worked with professional orchestras my whole career. And often in the last few years I've had to say no to things because every Sunday I've got youth orchestra. So my hope is that I'll enter into a chapter where maybe I don't have a youth orchestra rehearsal every Sunday. And I'm writing and I'm guest conducting. I also do a lot of consulting, talking to youth orchestras about strategic planning and where they are headed in their own vision. And so I know those pieces will be part of it, but how that's mixed, I don't know. I will also be just trying to get used to having pork barbecue instead of brisket, and there'll be a lot of adjustment. Well, South Carolina has its charms, so you'll find that out. I have witnessed the growth and development of the Youth Orchestra of San Antonio over my many years in the city and the remarkable job you've done. And I would say to members of our audience, if you have never attended a performance by the youth orchestra, you need to do so because you'll have a challenge discerning it from a professional symphonic orchestra. The top levels of the you have 11 orchestras, actually, that you preside over, and we can look at those as rungs on a ladder in terms of musical experience and education and talent. But the top level orchestra is. Which is A resident orchestra in the Tobin center for the Performing Arts. It's remarkable. And I was thinking about some of the more remarkable performances I've attended with you and your, your orchestra. And I remember Abbey Road, you have done a lot of collaborations with San Antonio musicians on stage with the orchestra. Tennyson and I were talking earlier about your performance of Radiohead's okay Computer, which may be the, the most radical one I think that I ever was present for, for the orchestra. So in addition to the whole portfolio of classical music that's performed, you've done some really cutting edge stuff. I mean, my goal as a performer has always been to do something that's meaningful for an audience and to make a human connection. Right. And so while at the youth orchestra, there's no question part of our goal is to train musicians, more of our goal is to change kids lives. And so in training musicians, we want to play Tchaikovsky and Mozart and Shostakovich because they need to know this repertoire if they're going to become musicians. Most of them are not going to be professional musicians, but for the ones who are, we have an obligation to sort of train them in how an orchestra works traditionally. But today an orchestra is a lot of things, right? Professional orchestras play Harry Potter movies and they play with Tony Bennett and they play Fourth of July. They do all these different things. And so we're trying to train our kids to do that stuff too. But beyond that, for me, I want our audiences to come to a YOSO performance and be like, dang, that was electric. That was exciting. Whether we're playing traditional classical music or whether we are playing Radiohead's OK Computer, and some of this is, you know, I grew up playing rock and roll and classical music side by side. In my generation of classical musicians, most of us didn't just play classical music. I'm a composer, but I'm also somebody who loves a lot of music that I grew up with and a lot of music from the 90s and the 2000s and today I sound like a classic rock radio station. But I really am committed to like finding ways to get an audience to realize an orchestra is a living, vital thing. An orchestra doesn't have to be an archive or a museum of the old. An orchestra is a big performing entity and that could be the great orchestral masterpieces, but that could also be brand new music. That could be old music with aerialists or old music with a ballet company, or, you know, it could be a collaboration. We just did a collaboration with San Antonio. Former San Antonio Poet laureate Andrea Vocab Sanderson, where we took a great piece by an African American composer and vocab wrote new poems to go along with it. She's performing these poems live with this music, and it gives us a chance to hear the music in new ways. For a lot of our audience, that was a really powerful way in to the music. And so I'm always looking for, what are the ways that we can give an audience an experience where they get fired up about being there? I think that's what every orchestra should be doing. How can you do things that are unique to your community and that people walk away from the performance saying, I'm so glad I went to that. They'll do that with Beethoven. But how can you present Beethoven in a way that. That feels new and special? In that moment, you're reaching a lot more people when you. When you veer off from just the classic repertoire and get into more contemporary music, whether it's jazz or Afro or. Or rock and roll or whatever it is. But help people understand that a lot of what they listen to every day has symphonic background in it anyway. Absolutely. I want to ask you a little bit about music education, and I'm a frustrated guy that. Who didn't get to learn a musical instrument as a. As a child and have regretted it ever since. But my experience just being around student musicians is, number one, putting somebody at a relatively, let's say, middle school age into an orchestra allows them to tap into their artistic self in a way that we don't do in the public school system in the United States. And second of all, it. It teaches them discipline. And so, in my experience, literally almost everybody that's in the youth orchestras of San Antonio goes on to a higher education opportunity and completes it. And that's extraordinary because you can't get that. If you say, look at the football programs in Texas public high schools. They don't all go on to college, and very few of them necessarily graduate. So music education to me is incredibly important for both of those reasons. The two sides of your brain that you connect with. And I would also say to the audience that's never been to one of your performances, your youth orchestras look like our city. These are not all white kids from 78209. On the contrary, it really looks like San Antonio. That's a very deliberate effort. Right. Like, we're trying to build relationships all over the city. One of the great blessings of San Antonio is that there are band programs all over the city. There are mariachi programs all over the city. There Are orchestra programs not in every school. Not all the schools have string instrument programs, but there are more districts with string instrument programs today than there were when I got here 17 years ago. And YOSA tries really hard to have relationships all over town. There's no question that the sort of powerhouse programs in many cases are in Northside, Northeast, Alamo Heights. But that's not the only places that they are. And YOSA has kids from every school district in Bexar County. We have kids from beyond Bexar County. We have homeschoolers. We really try to find a really wide variety of sources for our musicians as they enter the program. That's also why we've tried to grow the ladder of programs. So when I got here, we had five orchestras and just over 200 musicians. A solid, strong program with a lot of kids. That was 2009. Today we have 11 orchestras and more than 600 musicians. So almost triple the number of musicians in our programs today. And the reason to do that is, of course, first of all, you just reach more kids. But by having that feeder program grow, then you have more points of access, different levels of access where kids can walk into an experience, where the cohort they're in feels closer to their own ability level. And that gives you the space to reach out to more and more schools, more and more neighborhoods, get more and more kids involved from different parts of the city. Finally, the big thing is when they get to the top of that ladder, they've had better training and more experience. They've gone through more specific levels. They've been with us longer. We've had more time with them before they reach our top level, to give them the skills that we want them to have at our top level. So what our top group, the Yosef Philharmonic, is capable of today is a higher level of playing than when I got here in 2009. We had a good orchestra in 2009, but today, this orchestra can play things that we couldn't even touch at that point. And when we go back now and play things that I did in my first year or two in San Antonio, the transformation in the levels. I'll listen to an old recording and a new recording, and it's just night and day. What the kids we have today are able to do. That is primarily because I've got a great faculty of conductors at Yossi. We've got a great faculty of teachers who work with our kids in smaller sectional rehearsals on their instruments, all those things. It's also because we have great partners in the public Schools, there's a lot of phenomenal great band directors, orchestra teachers who are out there doing great work. Despite the troubles of classical music in San Antonio, there's still a lot of professional musicians in town who teach at a very high level and help kids with private lessons. So there's. We're part of an ecosystem, but growing that ladder has really let us change what's possible for the kids we work with. We're going to talk a little bit later about the state of classical music in San Antonio, but I want to ask you about that ecosystem a little bit, because it's not just you, it's dozens of people. So if an individual is say, 13, 14, 15 years old and in one of your orchestras, how many hours a week is he or she rehearsing at home in a studio with a private instructor? One of the things I wonder as I look at all of these inner city kids that are in your orchestra is how are they funding this? And. And many of them come from households where the education attainment levels were not high, where the monetary resources are extremely limited, some parents are working multiple jobs. How are they becoming musicians in that kind of environment? Who is mentoring and supporting them in that ecosystem? It's such an important question. And I want to start by saying this is a national problem. If you go to the New York Philharmonic and you look on stage, this is a predominantly white and East Asian orchestra, you see very few black and Latino musicians in the top professional orchestras in America. And there are all kinds of systemic reasons that this is still a struggle today. So here in San Antonio, where we have a lot of really promising Latino musicians, Llosa has been really committed to trying to make sure that our kids get the best resources we can so that the ones who want to go into this field can do so. So just before I talk more about that question of what's happening for the 13 year old, just looking at outcomes, anecdotally, we're seeing transformation. Just in the last year, we've had two Mexican American graduates of YOSA who both won jobs in top professional orchestras in the United States. The Baltimore Symphony, the North Carolina Symphony. And we are one piece of their story. It's not just because of yosa, but we are part of that story of helping those musicians have the tools and the resources to compete at the very top levels. And that's the goal. So for a 13 year old from San Antonio who's playing in Yosa, for most of these kids would be that every day in school, thankfully they have a class a Band class or an orchestra class or a mariachi class where they're on their instrument for 45 to 60 minutes every day at school, that is huge because that time just in contact with the instrument, but also in a situation where the resources of the school are devoted to that means that their family's not having to invest in that basic instruction. And it means they've got a group of peers who care about the same thing they do, which, when you're 13, 14, 15, is everything, right? Like, what do my friends like? How do I fit in with them? If you've got a group of peers who are excited about the thing you're playing in orchestra, that focuses your week in a way that's really productive and useful and keeps. Keeps you wanting to be there. Who pays for the violin or the cello? So in a lot of school districts, there are some school instruments available. And so in some cases, we have musicians who are on an instrument that's provided by their school. In most cases, the family does have to rent an instrument and. Or eventually purchase. But there are a lot of. There are a lot of good stores in town that do rent to own programs. And this is what I did, honestly. You know, my. My dad was US Nav. And when I was in fourth grade and the teacher came into class and said, orchestra is starting next week. Do you want to sign up? I came home and I said, I want a viola. And my dad said, we can't afford a viola. Also, what's a viola? But my teacher gave me a little flyer for a store down at the mall where we could rent a viola for less than going to McDonald's for a meal. And if we'd get a month on that instrument, the rent is a little higher than that today. But there are still McDonald's. Yeah, exactly. There are still some affordable options for rental instruments. A lot of shops try really hard to make it as affordable as possible. And so we have musicians whose families will rent to own instruments. Some schools provide instruments in their school program. And then if they're in a YOSA group, we do charge tuition for YOSA programs, but we also have financial aid available. So we have a lot of kids, hundreds of kids in YOSA who are receiving financial assistance, sometimes full scholarship, sometimes partial scholarship, based on the financial need of their families. And so if they're in a YOSA group, then they're going to come with us on the weekend and be there for anywhere between 90 minutes and three hours a week, depending on their level. As they get more musically advanced, the Rehearsals get longer. And so for, like I say, for a typical sort of 8th grade kind of student, very often, if they're a YOSU musician, they're in school every day playing. They are in one of our groups on a Sunday afternoon for a couple of hours. The ones who start to get serious often seek out private lessons. And private lessons are a long tradition in classical music that you. And in all kinds of music. Right. How do you learn how to play the banjo? In West Virginia, you go down to somebody's porch and sit next to them and they teach you how to play the banjo. That's what happens. It's an apprenticeship process very often to be a musician. And so a lot of our musicians who get more ambition, seek out private lessons. They're studying with a local professional musician, or they might be studying with a local music educator, somebody who is teaching in the public schools and also teaches viola lessons or violin lessons or clarinet lessons on the side. Practice, quite honestly, varies on the kid, right? And you. One of the amazing things about good instruction is that even if a kid's not practicing, you can keep them moving along for a period of time. If they're gonna get good, they're gonna have to practice. But that is, for most of us, a struggle in adolescence, acquiring that grit to really take the instrument out and do the work on our own instead of being on the Xbox or TikTok. In my youth, it wasn't Xbox and TikTok, but it was my Atari or Gilligan's island, right? And. And so there is this thing for all of us of how do we get the discipline to do that work? But that's part of what the YOSA experience does for kids, because they're in a cohort where they sit down with somebody next to them who might be working a little harder than they are. And very often they want to make as fast a progress as the person next to them. That's again, what happened to me. When I was in seventh grade, I joined a youth orchestra. My stand partner in youth orchestra knew how to do things on the instrument that I. I didn't know how to do. And I was like, how. How are you doing that? And she's like, oh, my teacher taught me. I do this, and. And then I spend. I do 20 minutes on that every day. And I was like, cool. And went home and did 10 or 15 minutes on that every day. And I started to try and. And keep up. And so, you know, the. The bottom line is we are part of this larger thing in their lives. Right. We only see them for a few hours, but the sense of belonging to that they get at YOSA and the chance to have their performance outcomes be at a really high level means that the kids start to work harder to achieve that more frequently. Once you go on stage at the Tobit center and play in front of 1500 people and have that feeling of finishing something and hearing this roar of a crowd, that's good stuff. You want more of that? That's intoxicating. Yeah, exactly. We may have some in our audience who are learning about, about what you're doing and how important it is, and they want to donate. What kind of funding does it require to bring a student through your process over a period of, let's say, high school years? Bottom line is that we couldn't do what we do without the support of donors. We are a nonprofit organization. As I mentioned, there is tuition involved for our musicians with financial aid available, but that covers only about 40% of our overall expenses. The rest of our money comes from foundations, individual donors, a little bit from the city, and we're very grateful for all that support. So donors getting involved is really, really important. If you look at the journey of one individual musician, it kind of depends on the services they're receiving from us. We have a cohort that we call Rising Star Fellows. And the Rising Star Fellows is a group of about 20 young musicians where we've identified them in 8th or 9th grade as being especially promising musicians who also have an identifiable need for resources and or mentoring. In some cases it's because they're kids who come from non traditional backgrounds, they come from a family where classical music is a new idea, or they come from a community where there are not as many musicians who are trying to go on this path. In some cases it's purely financial need. And in all of these cases, we're looking at kids and saying, you know what, this kid could be really great, but they're going to need extra help. So for those kids, we're investing about$50,000 a year in each of those kids in supporting them with private lessons. 50,000? Yes. Supporting them with private lessons, supporting them with YOSA tuition support, letting them come on our international tours, all these different things. And so donor support of that cohort is especially important. But, but everybody at yosa, no matter what level of resources they're receiving from us, ultimately they're all benefiting from the support of our donors because it costs money to rent venues and buy sheet music and all the things that we do to give kids These experiences. Well, your own experience as a young musician took you to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, which maybe a lot of people haven't heard of here in San Antonio, but it's truly one of the the premier music institutes of higher education in the country. And I said that once to a friend of mine in the San Antonio Symphony, said it's not one of it is the one, and corrected me. Do you help your top rising stars and other members of that top tier orchestra? Do you encourage them and help them apply to the Berkeleys and Curtises of the world? Yeah, absolutely. We are really committed to trying to help kids who want to go into music have the best support they can to do that. So we have the networks and connections, not just of me, but of all of our conductors. Right. We have other folks on the YOSA conducting faculty who went to other top conservatories. We're really fortunate that we also have an executive director in Jared Price, who has been with YOSA for almost five years. His job before he came to YOSA was being the dean of admissions at the Cleveland Institute of Music, which is another of the top schools in the country. And that means that not only he knows Cleveland, but he has a network of friendships with the admissions directors at all the other top schools. And so every year in September, San Antonio hosts a performing arts college fair that YOSA is the center of. We pull in these college admissions folks from all over the country from the top music schools at universities, at conservatories, and not just YOSTA musicians, but any San Antonio high school musician can go and meet with these folks face to face and get a sense of what does it take to get into those schools. Do they perform in that case? There's not performance involved in that case, it's a room full of folks from these schools meeting the kids. We don't have a mock audition or an audition in that case because it's the wrong time of year for it, but they form those relationships where then a few months later or a few years later, depending on their age, when they want to go audition for these schools, they have someone who opens the door for them and welcomes them into that process. It's really worth noting, most of our YOSA musicians do not go into music as a profession. Most people who are in YOSA go into, quote, unquote, normal jobs and they become attorneys and journalists and they become basketball coaches and massage therapists. But for all of them, their time in YOSSA gives them not only a skill set that helps them with college admissions and college success, but a calling card that helps them with colleges. They're more attractive candidates for colleges. So right now, just a couple years ago, we had a young musician who graduated, who's in college right now with a generous scholarship at smu, an oboist. They're not studying the oboe, but the oboe got them a scholarship that helped them with being able to make SMU a possibility. And that happens for a lot of our kids, that their high level of attainment in achieving what they've done as musicians gives them more tools when they go into other fields. Well, before the big news developed for you and Ann, we were having you on this podcast to talk about the fact that the youth orchestra is going to have its own permanent home. So walk us through that process and tell us about where that is and when it's going to be built or if it's being renovated. What. What do you have coming up? Well, we are really happy that we purchased about two years ago a property in the Shearer Hills neighborhood in San Antonio along Oblate Drive, kind of directly south of North Star Mall a little ways. A property, 802 Oblate Drive that was the original home of Shearer Hills Baptist Church, and then for the last 20 years or so, was a charter school. And so we bought this building in the summer of 2024. We've been quietly raising money for about three years to renovate a property and create a music center, a home for YOSA that we hope will become a performing arts hub for the entire community. That will be a place that can host not only YOSA activities, but activities by lots of other performing arts organizations, not just in music. There could be dance, there could be theater. So this campus is 55,000 square feet. We've so far raised about $10 million. And that gave us enough resources to say we're breaking ground. We're moving forward with this. So we know that in the fall of 2027, we will open at least some of this facility with a large rehearsal space that can also be a public performance space and all kinds of a beautiful lobby and a space for off the lobby for kind of gathering of students. We expect that we'll also renovate two other big rooms that will enable us to each of them have large orchestras in there as well. And what that'll do is we'll be able to get to a point by the fall of 2027 where all of our orchestras are rehearsing in one space. That has never happened in the history of Yosa since we went from one orchestra to two. We've been in multiple locations for 50 years. And so to have everybody in one place means that the peer to peer mentoring that goes on between different levels of the group, the ability for families who have kids at different levels in multiple ensembles to have a weekend schedule that makes sense, all of these things will become easier and more fluent, more flowing and logical for our customers, for our kids as they grow up in usa. This building will also have breakout spaces for us to do chamber music with smaller groups or individual lessons or classes. It'll also have space for our offices. And so we're on this journey, quite honestly, where we are continuing to raise money for this capital campaign. And over the next year, that's going to be one of my big focuses at YOSA is trying to help us get across the finish line on doing more of this building so that when we open in the fall of 2027, we can have as robust a program as we can. But you know, with nonprofit fundraising, it's not unusual with capital projects to phase them. And so there is a chance that we will open phase one and go right into phase two and keep, keep raising money to do more of the building. But we know, thanks to the support of a whole bunch of really generous capital campaign contributors, that we're going to be able to realize this dream. The dream is not new. When I interviewed for this job in March 2018, 2009, the second question I got from the search committee was, how do we do a building? Because I had just been involved in a building project in Vermont that changed the trajectory of the youth orchestra there. And so it's been a long conversation at yosa, but we are finally in motion. And it's a really exciting property. So anybody who's interested, I'm serious, like, if you reach out to yosa, we would love to show you around and tell you about what we're doing in that facility. And it's going to be an exciting, exciting hub for youth and music in San Antonio. How much more in the capital campaign do you and your colleagues hope to raise? And not unrelated question is, as a nonprofit, who does get an annual stipend from the city of San Antonio? How worried are you about their budget deficit and the inclination of the mayor and some others to say we should end a lot of our nonprofit funding to balance the books? I'll take the first part first, that we're at. We're sitting just over $10 million, and if we get to $15 million, we will complete the bulk of what we want to do in this first few years in the building. And so our. Our dream is that we have achieved$15 million in the next year. We are able to move forward with 10, which is why we did it. If we get to 12, then a whole bunch more things become possible. And if we get to 15, then we're there in terms of the next decade in this building. So we feel really confident about the fact that we've got this ability to, at 10, to do what we need to do to open, but that the most exciting way to get people to get involved in this story is for them to be able to wear a hard hat and walk around and see it happening to help us finish that last phase. So that's why we'd be pushing for. In regard to city funding, I mean, the big thing I'd say is we're incredibly grateful for city funding. City of San Antonio is more involved in nonprofit performing arts support than some other American cities. And that is one of the things that drew me to this job when I first came here was robust support from the city. I think it has been something that's been really great. I understand the impulse of any. Anybody in leadership who thinks, gosh, we have limited resources, we should be careful about where they go. But I would just make the case that a robust nonprofit community enriches a city tremendously. And when I think about Yosa's impact over the last 50 years, it is not small. We're talking about tens of thousands of peoples whose lives were incredibly enriched, whose economic possibilities were enriched. And again, this is not primarily musicians. This is people who go into all kinds of fields. This is a work development program in a lot of ways. We're developing the skills for a modern workforce that you're going to have people who can work together on a team and can achieve at a high level. And so this is a really affordable way to invest in adolescents and give them a brighter future. I think that's true of a lot of our nonprofit, the performing arts, the Botanical Garden. Lots of other things in this city are not luxury accessories. These are things that create the fabric of the city. And anybody who's ever walked around at the Botanical Garden with their five year old on a summer day, as I did many times when my kids were growing up, will know that this enriches the city. This is part of what great cities do. Great cities have all kinds of cultural opportunities. And so to me, prioritizing those is an investment in quality in life, quality of life, an investment in economic development, an investment in the kinds of things that draw businesses, that draw populations, that draw people to want to live in a community. And if you visit communities that are less robust in these regards, then you can feel it. You can feel places where there are fewer things going on in the performing arts or where there are not as many lovely spaces. And so San Antonio can use those beautiful spaces. We have a lot of them. The engine of an economy is not always focused on those as the prime driver. And so having everybody in the city trying to hold on to spaces and places where beautiful things happen, whether that's nature or whether that is performances or whether that is people gathering and sharing their voices with each other, that's really important. That enriches a city. And so it's part of what has made San Antonio San Antonio. And I hope that it'll continue to be a priority for us. That's very well said. Symphonies enrich cities as well. So as you prepare over the next year to leave Troy, can San Antonio afford a professional, robust symphonic orchestra or not? And I've watched over 40 years struggle with that question. And to me, we were a much richer city when the Tobin center for Performing Arts was announced that we were going to create it and that we were going to have these resident companies, ballet, opera, youth orchestra, the symphony, etc. And now we don't have one. I know we have some substitute organizations, but we do not have. We once had. And I wonder, in your professional opinion, can San Antonio look to the day when that will happen again? Or are we going to be a city without a professional symphonic orchestra? It's hard for me to imagine a city of the scope and vision of San Antonio not having an orchestra that survives. Because if you look around this country, there is no other city in America anywhere near the size of San Antonio, Antonio that doesn't have a professional orchestra. A professional orchestra isn't necessarily central to the life of every single person who lives in a city, but it has a tremendous impact on lots and lots of people who live in a city. And it's one of the things that you see and go, you know, this is a serious city. This place matters. So in San Antonio, that has undoubtedly been complicated, as lots of people know. And I want to. I'll begin by just saying, like, I have friends in all of these places. There are multiple orchestras happening in San Antonio right now, and I am close to people working in all of these places, and I admire the work they're doing. I have been wrong on this question. Multiple times in the last five years. You know, I was the resident conductor of the San Antonio Symphony when it went away. I have the dubious distinction of having conducted the last public performance by the San Antonio Symphony myself. I'm not sharing that out of pride. I'm sorry that that was an opportunity that I had. But the last time I conducted them, they. They didn't come back after that. I don't think it was because of my work on the podium, but it's tricky. So during that time when the Symphony was on the ropes, I kept thinking, well, surely this could happen or this could happen, but this is not likely. And I was wrong every time. I'm not good at predicting the future. What I will say is that there are three players in town right now going into the fall of 2026. Tobin center has the orchestra San Antonio. There is the San Antonio Philharmonic, which was started by a group of San Antonio Symphony musicians as a successor to the San Antonio Philharmonic. And then there's a new group launching this fall that will be called Harmonium of Texas. And this is a professional orchestra being headed up by Jeffrey Kahane, who is a former music director of the San Antonio Philharmonic. Is some overlap between the pools of musicians. It's complicated, but I think all three organizations are focused on trying to make things happen that are meaningful to this community. I don't think I'm in a position to pick who's going to survive. I would be surprised if we have three different professional orchestras for an extended period of time. And so what does that path look like for these groups? I don't know. I am encouraged by the fact that the existence of three groups and donors who support them points to the fact that there are a lot of people in this community who want there to be professional orchestra. And so I think that means that at some point there is probably something that's going to survive. Maybe multiple groups among these will survive. Maybe all three of them will survive. I think we're in a situation right now where there's a kind of Wild west opportunity for people to figure out what's classical music going to look like in the orchestral level in San Antonio. I'm not directly involved with any one of these three groups. I've worked with some of them in the past. I've, you know, YOSA has had partnerships with all three of these groups, and YOSA will continue to partner with anybody who's doing cool stuff that will benefit our kids. So we've got all kinds of things we're doing with chamber music groups. With different orchestras because at the end of the day, if people are like, hey, we're doing something cool that your kids could learn from, we're going to try and partner with that. But I am concerned for San Antonio. I love this town and I want there to be great concerts. And like a lot of people, I do think about the Tobin center having been built as a place for high level performing arts of all kinds and that the orchestral diet there is smaller than it was imagined being. That said, I think the orchestra San Antonio is doing really interesting concerts. I think YOSA is doing great concerts at the Tobin center, and I'd like to see more orchestral music in the Tobin center in the long run. But I think the Tobin center is still enriching the community in a lot of really great ways. Well, this town has benefited enormously from your wife Ann's work at UTSA UT San Antonio, and from your work at the youth Orchestra. And you're going to be both missed. But we can take some pride in everything you've accomplished here and the fact that other people want you guys elsewhere. So good luck in your next year and look forward to my hardhat tour of the building. And thanks for coming on to Big City, Small Town. Thank you, Bob. And I'm here for one more year, so this is a great year to come to a YOSA concert. Everybody. I'd love to see you show up, come shake my hand afterwards, and it's been such a thrill to be a part of this journey in San Antonio. And thanks for having me on. All right, y', all, thanks for listening to this episode of Big City Small Town. If you enjoyed the conversation, please do share it with friends and colleagues who might find it interesting. You can also keep up with our newsletters, Bob Rivard's Midweek and my own San Antonio Something. You can find those linked up@bigcitysmalltown.com Our show, Big City Small Town is made possible by Westin Urban building a city our children want to call home. Geekdom, where startups are born and smart ideas become businesses. And now swbc, the San Antonio based financial services company that has been putting clients first for decades, serving individuals, businesses and financial institutions across insurance, investments, payments and more. 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