Jacobs School of Music alumnus Krishna Thiagarajan is president and CEO of the Seattle Symphony and Benaroya Hall. Thiagarajan spent time in Bloomington in early February to judge the annual JSoM Innovation Competition and to reconnect to his alma mater. While here, he sat down to talk about his musical roots, the world of music, and changes in the profession.
How is it to be in Bloomington once again?
It’s a pleasure to be back in Bloomington after 35 years and I am excited to see how much has changed. I’m excited to see how much the town has grown and to see the wonderful interactions between students and faculty. It just deepens the relationship that I already have.
Can you give us a brief overview of how you came to study at IU and what are its unique qualities?
I had the choice at the time to apply to Juilliard, IU, and USC in Los Angeles. For a lot of reasons, I chose Indiana University. I was drawn to the beauty of the campus, the friendliness of the place. When I took my audition, it seemed to click, it seemed to fit. I realized that it was a safe place, a place where you could try things, where you could also fail safely and then retry again. To me, this was like a little oasis where you could safely try things out and, at the same time, you were still very connected to the big wide world out there.
How has the world of music shifted around you, as you worked with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and others?
When I moved to New York, I saw how the market was changing. The recording industry had collapsed in the United States and an orchestra like Orpheus, with its huge catalog through Deutsche Grammophon, was seeing less and less residuals. The touring market on the other hand was key for them and the area where they were most successful was tours to Europe and Japan. That’s when I began to grasp how international our business is. If you focus only on one market, you will likely not be successful. You have to be prepared to travel to your audiences, in addition to asking your audiences to come to you.
Now, with the advancements in online, internet, and digital, we’re seeing another major shift happening. For a short while, people said “Well that’s going to be the end of the live concert. Everybody’s just going to get what they need off the internet.” I don’t think that’s true and the reason why I don’t think that’s true is that, as soon as the Seattle Symphony went back to in-person concerts after COVID, people told us that they wanted that person-to-person interaction after two years of sitting in front of TV and computer screens. They wanted to be with people. This is what gives me great hope because it means that we will always be sustainable long-term. It’s just a question of how we do it.
What’s the voice of classical music today?
In Scotland, I was privileged to be invited to join the UK creative Industries Federation in London. It’s an Advisory Board that looks at the creative industries across the United Kingdom. The first thing we did was to investigate the barriers of nonprofit versus for-profit. When you do that, you realize that the entire industry – classical, movies, pop music, the other creative arts, fashion, for example – is significantly larger than all of the manufacturing industries taken together. The creative industries are the UK’s largest export product, period.
When I moved to Seattle, we started doing the same sort of thing: investigating the value and power of the creative industry as a whole. I’m happy to say that I’m now on the Washington State Arts Commission, which advises the governor. We’ve started looking at our industry as a creative industry rather than separating out performing arts organizations, museums, educational systems and so forth. Even with some large corporations in Washington State like Boeing like Microsoft, like Google and Amazon, the creative industries are on a par with most of those.
The next step is to acknowledge the power and value of all cultures. When you start going down that path, you realize that you can’t just say that “my culture, the Beethoven culture, is the only high culture that exists.” You have to acknowledge that everywhere on this globe, people have high cultures. So, it’s possible to create these connection points that get people to come to your hall, that come to your orchestra, that may not know all that much about Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, but they have a high culture. If you find a way to connect with it, you can significantly expand your audiences.
We’ve come to celebrate that Seattle is a connection point between Asia and North America. That’s where our really strong points lie in terms of our communities. We’ve also added another component to this which is to acknowledge the Coast Salish people who for centuries have lived all the way up and down the coast of the Pacific Northwest. We have decided that we need to acknowledge that the indigenous people were there a long time before us, that they were creative in the space that we now live in. We haven’t spent enough time in our education to really learn this. But, we’re trying to compensate for that now. To do so, we’ve invited a member of the indigenous tribes onto our board to advise us. In the same vein, we’re engaging with Asia Pacific countries on a very sort of eye-level to eye-level, peer-to-peer basis on programming.
Coming back to this question of making a differentiation between entertaining music and supposedly ‘earnest’ music, the answer is we shouldn’t do that anymore. There’s good music and there’s less good music and that’s about all that we can say. So, we now have composers who have been active in the field of movies such as Joe Hisaishi (Studio Ghibli). We’re working with Tan Dun in a residency as well. We want to make sure to give everybody a forum to be seen to be heard and to introduce things that we may not have understood. When we do that, we generally double our audiences. So, it makes good business sense to be aware of cultural diversity as a solution. The empty concert halls we were afraid of having 15, 20 years ago haven’t happened. In fact, at the Seattle Symphony, ever since the middle of December, our halls are really full. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, because our programming has been more diverse than it’s ever been before.
MORE ABOUT KRISHNA THIAGARAJAN, CEO OF THE SEATTLE SYMPHONY
Prior to joining the Seattle Symphony, Thiagarajan was chief executive of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO). Born in Karlsruhe, Germany, he was previously the executive director of Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, president of Symphony in C, and the senior director of artistic operations for the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. An accomplished pianist, Thiagarajan received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from IU and doctorate from the University of Maryland, College Park. He most recently earned his certificate for Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management from Harvard University.
Seattle Symphony President & CEO Krishna Thiagarajan addressing the audience at the Raise the Curtain concert in 2023 at Benaroya Hall, with Iyori Makoto, Consul General of Japan in Seattle, and attending the 2022/2023 Opening Night Gala at Benaroya Hall. Photo Credit: Brandon Patoc.
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