Our Story
The Symphony is a bold and successful collaboration between musicians and all who appreciate live performance. Our legacy of musical excellence goes hand-in-hand with our longstanding commitment to providing no-cost cultural outreach programs for the greater Santa Fe community. These initiatives include free concerts at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, a variety of music education performances, and mentoring within the public schools, and performances at retirement homes and senior centers.
In addition, in 2009 The Symphony began collaborating with the Santa Fe Institute on a series of educational productions titled “Voyages of Discovery” exploring the relationships between science and music. Our first co-production was “Darwin and Mendelssohn,” followed by “The Planets” (coordinated with Chicago’s Adler Planetarium) in 2010, then by “Bach on the Brain” in 2011 and “The Majesty of Music and Mathematics” in 2013. The success of these events continues to lead to new opportunities for reaching students of all ages, nationally as well as regionally.
Founded in 1984, The Symphony today includes sixty-five professional musicians and over 80 choristers—all New Mexico residents. Our musicians have trained at esteemed conservatories such as Juilliard and Northwestern and have performed with globally-recognized orchestras, including the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Over the years, The Symphony has been praised for its diverse programming, from beloved masterworks to premieres by such noted composers as Pulitzer Prize–winner George Walker and Academy Award–winners Elmer Bernstein and Dave Grusin.
We are often privileged to work with renowned guest artists, such as Mark O’Connor, Nestor Torres, Susanna Phillips, André Watts, and Anne Akiko Meyers, and conductors including Carmen Helena Télez, Tom Hall, and JoAnn Falletta.
We are The Music
Explore the music and dance sequences of eleven cultural groups who have settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico over the past seven hundred years. These diverse communities include the Native Americans, Spanish, Mexicans, Crypto-Jewish, Celtic, German, Greek, Japanese, Tibetan, Sikh, and the Central Americans. All performers and narrators in these segments are school-aged.
Music Education
In June 2011, we received The League of American Orchestras’ Award of Excellence for our “We Are The Music” DVD and related course materials for third and fourth graders, a special multi-ethnic cultural appreciation program now available nationally through the PBS LearningMedia&trademark; online library.
The Santa Fe Symphony and the Santa Fe Institute collaborated to produce “The Majesty of Music & Mathematics: Voyages of Discovery IV,” a unique program that illuminates and explores the intersections of music and mathematics. The original production debuted in 2013, featuring dramatic music by the Symphony and narration by SFI mathematician and computer scientist Cris Moore, all complemented by an expansive overhead multimedia presentation. Due to the presentation’s success and noteworthy educational content, The Symphony and SFI worked with New Mexico PBS to produce of a high-definition edition of the program for distribution to the widest possible audience, which was filmed before a live audience at The Lensic in June 2017, and produced by Miles O’Brien.