Spotlight on... Roderick Cox

“Despite ideologies, creeds, race, we can agree on music, no matter what form it is”

“We have an obligation to lift as we climb,” Roderick Cox told the Minnesota Star Tribune in January 2017, noting how Marin Alsop has used her profile to champion fellow female conductors. Though once wary of being known as ‘that African- American conductor’ rather than for his merits as a musician, he now uses his rising influence to seek out diverse audiences for classical music, and to help inspire young people from underrepresented communities.

His medium is the music. When conducting the Minnesota Orchestra’s first ever concert in north Minneapolis, at Shiloh Temple International Ministries with the Shiloh Temple Chorus lending their gospel tones to Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, he told the audience: “Music explains how a black kid from Macon, Georgia, can wind up with the Minnesota Orchestra. Despite ideologies, creeds, race, we can agree on music, no matter what form it is.”

Growing up with a basketball-playing brother and attending the same church as Little Richard, Roderick would assemble his action figures in line, conducting along to gospel records. Though he went to college to study music with the original aim of becoming a teacher/band leader, he was soon encouraged to pursue orchestral conducting by professors.

In 2005 he became one of the first individuals to be supported by the Otis Redding Foundation, through which he gained opportunities to study in Oxford, UK, and to attend masterclasses and competitions in the Czech Republic and Spain, as well as his first guest conducting opportunity outside college at the Foundation’s annual Evening of Respect.

Roderick has already graced the podium of many orchestras in the US and beyond, including the Cleveland Orchestra, Chineke! Orchestra, Santa Fe Symphony, Johannesburg Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra Washington, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and Nashville Symphony Orchestra, to name just a few. A video from his subscription debut with the Minnesota Orchestra went viral, attracting more than eight million viewers across multiple channels – the biggest reach the orchestra has ever had.

UPCOMING HIGHLIGHTS

5 May · BBC Symphony debut / Bernstein, Stravinsky, Gershwin & Copland

24 – 28 Jun · public conducting masterclasses / Daniele Gatti, Concertgebouw

18 Jul · Grant Park Festival debut / Wagner, Beethoven & Haydn

27 Jul · Minnesota Orchestra’s Sommerfest “Music for Mandela”

16 & 18 Nov · Los Angeles Philharmonic debut / Poulenc & Saint-Saëns

25 Jan – 8 Feb 2019 · Houston Grand Opera debut / Bizet The Pearl Fishers