IIn 2019, at a Handel and Haydn Society concert in Boston, the final chord of Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music swelled and then ebbed into a reverent silence. On any other night, the connoisseurs at such an event would freeze for a few seconds before bursting into applause. But this time, the hallowed silence was broken by a high-pitched “Wow!” from the stands, as Ronan, a nine-year-old with special needs who had accompanied his grandfather, could no longer contain his excitement and delivered his rave review on the spot. The moment was captured on local radio and eventually made its way to social media, where I discovered it along with tens of thousands of others. As I listened, I found myself thinking that as a professional conductor, I would love to inspire that kind of spontaneous fascination in young audiences, especially since my childhood exposure to the orchestra inspired my love of classical music and a fulfilling career in its service.

I grew up in Trinidad and Tobago in the late 1970s and early 1980s, where, not particularly interested in calypso or carnival, I became fascinated by orchestral film soundtracks, annual productions of the country’s Opera Society, and television broadcasts of concerts Live from Studio 8H, an NBC venue that hosted the New York Philharmonic (NYP). When I was Ronan’s age, I had videotaped one such performance with soprano Leontyne Price, violinist Itzhak Perlman, and conductor Zubin Mehta, and watched it ad nauseam until one tragic day the machine ate the tape. I realize now that every time I watched that concert, I also thought “Wow!” and imagined what it would be like to hear the NYP play in person or even do what Mehta did.

But what about today’s kids? Some commentators would have us believe that attracting young people to orchestral music is fundamentally more challenging now than it was in my youth, with the genre associated with a need for everything from prior knowledge to high income, not to mention the demands it places on modern attention spans, which have been eroded by the internet and social media. The current context may be different, but in my experience the fundamental principles of music reception are constant – and connection is key.

Whenever I hear people say that orchestral music is arcane or unsuitable for young ears, I realise that every young person who has enjoyed a Marvel or Star Wars film has heard a full-length orchestral performance (of some kind), and would probably want to hear and see more, if it were presented in a similarly imaginative and recognisable context. So in the summer of 2019 I was delighted to attend the already popular CBeebies Proms for Off to the Moon, an “edutainment extravaganza” marking 50 years since the first astronauts walked on the moon, featuring giant video screens, a model Saturn V rocket, a new work by Hans Zimmer, much-loved TV presenters as crew, and myself as the conducting Mission Commander! Cinematic appropriation? Perhaps, but popular cinema has borrowed some of its most evocative musical vocabulary from the concert world, so it’s only fair that the pedagogical concert world occasionally steals some cinematic storytelling in return.

My own Charlotte Symphony Orchestra (CSO) in North Carolina uses similar methods to create youth-relevant programming. Building on strong relationships with partner schools, upcoming Gen Z-focused projects include concerts featuring music from popular video games or a mash-up of the music of Beethoven and Beyoncé, which have recently sparked an uptick in our youth attendance.

We also take our music outside of its usual context: the CSO Roadshow performs directly with communities, at the request of their leadership and in collaboration with them to select the content. All of this is at no cost to them, because making orchestral music more accessible is as much a financial consideration as it is a motivational one. I know this to be true because just nine years after the Trinidad videotape disaster, I found myself in a crowd of “Prommers” in London, having paid a small fee to see Mehta, the only conductor of color I knew, lead the NYP at the Royal Albert Hall. It was the ultimate “Wow!” moment of my life, made possible by the right price.

Since my trip to the moon at the 2019 Proms, I’ve returned to the Royal Albert Hall for an Ocean Adventure in 2022 and again for this year’s Wildlife Jamboree, not least because passing on the ‘power of wow’ from the platform it gave me as a boy was uniquely satisfying. At my most recent CBeebies Prom, as I walked on stage I heard a round of applause from the audience that left me speechless. Backstage after the show the director told me that this was in fact the moment when the children enthusiastically recognised their trusted musical friend and the only conductor they knew, thanks to watching previous Proms on iPlayer. I thought, if this is the start of a lifelong musical journey for even a handful of them, then we’ve come full circle. Mission accomplished.