It cannot stop a war, settle a political dispute, or erase the grief that conflict leaves behind. It cannot make uncertainty disappear. But music can give us a place to stand inside uncertainty. It can help us listen more carefully, remember what matters, and hold grief and hope in the same human space.
That is the question at the center of Symphonicity’s 2026/27 season, The Long Road: music in search of peace.
Peace, in this sense, has two meanings. There is peace among nations and communities: the difficult, unfinished work of resisting violence and choosing cooperation. And there is peace of mind and heart: the quiet we seek when the news is too much, when loss is close, or when we need time to recover our sense of proportion.
Across four Masterworks chapters, the season follows music through conflict, lament, reckoning, and renewal. It is not a story about reaching a final answer. It is a journey toward better questions.
Music does not look away
Artists have always created in unsettled times. Some wrote for public ceremonies and national occasions. Others worked under censorship, pressure, or fear. Some composed memorials for those who were lost, which is something I’ve done numerous times in my own career. Others wrote music that offered courage, consolation, or a glimpse of a more humane future.
The meaning of a piece is rarely simple. A march can carry celebration, sorrow, propaganda, solidarity, or all four at once. A melody written for a film can become a vessel for historical memory. A symphony can sound triumphant while still bearing the strain of the world in which it was written.
That complexity is part of what makes music valuable. It does not always tell us what to think. Instead, it lets us experience conflicting emotions without forcing them into a single conclusion. This perspective is especially needed with music that may share some connections to certain people and places at the center of today’s global tensions.
In Dmitri Shostakovich’s music, for example, public grandeur and private anxiety often seem to stand side by side. He was celebrated, censured, and frightened by the Soviet state. His music could be commissioned and publicly interpreted by institutions of power, but the work itself remained more complicated than any official explanation. I’ve come to hear him as something of a protest composer — though he made his protests artistically, and often with a straight face.
It underscores the fact that a government can commission an artist. It can place music inside a ceremony or attach it to a message. But it cannot make the work its own.
That tension can be heard in the Festive Overture, which opens the season’s first Masterworks chapter. Its brilliance is unmistakable, but brilliance is not the same thing as simplicity. Sometimes a bright surface makes us listen more closely for what lies beneath it.
A road through many kinds of peace
The first chapter, Ceremony & Conviction, begins on October 4, 2026. It explores the distance — and the connection — between public spectacle and private belief.
The music moves through celebration, courage, resistance, and generosity. Reinhold Glière’s life offers one example of how difficult it can be to place an artist inside a single national story. Born in Kyiv in 1875, Glière later became associated with several musical and political worlds. It would be easy to file him under one flag. People have tried. But Kyiv is Kyiv.
That simple truth matters. Composers, like all people, carry complicated histories. Their identities do not always fit the categories later generations want to impose upon them.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Marche slave, written in 1876 for a benefit supporting wounded Serbian soldiers, raises a different question: What happens when music is created to help strangers?
The piece emerged from a particular political moment, but its life has continued beyond that original occasion. The place that benefit once honored has since lived through its own long and complicated history. Music offered in one moment of crisis can be heard very differently by later generations, which is all the more reason not to mistake it for a verdict. The music is not a claim. It is an offer, made to whoever it reaches. A benefit work can begin in response to a specific crisis and still remind us that compassion is not limited by geography.
The first chapter also includes music shaped by collaboration, imagination, and cultural memory: from Glière’s Harp Concerto and Richard Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto to Chaerin Kim’s Rendezvous, a work that has traveled across more than 100 versions and dozens of languages. Each invites us to consider how music crosses borders, changes hands, and becomes meaningful in new settings.
The Long Road begins for us by starting right with the heart of the matter. What can music do when the world feels unsettled? This season, we aim to find out.
Thanks for reading and see you at the concert!
