About Andrew Balio

Andrew Balio is Principal Trumpet of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the Founder of the Foundation for the Future of Classical Music. He has been a frequent soloist since his earliest days as a student, having made his debut at the age of 15 playing Haydn’s Concerto with the Milwaukee Symphony in his home state of Wisconsin. Over the years, he has appeared as soloist with various orchestras in Europe, the United States, South America, and Asia under the batons of noted conductors Mehta, Venzago, Herbig, Temirkanov, Rozhdestvensky, Lintu, Stenz Bergman, and McGegan. His Carnegie Hall solo debut came in 2013 in the company of the Moscow Chamber Orchestra and Maestro Constantine Orbelian. Visit his website.

Building Communities With Music

By |2023-06-06T13:49:46-05:00May 11th, 2023|Categories: Beauty, Community, Culture, Music, Timeless Essays|

Classical music must find its place in love—love of home, of community, of neighbor, and of the culture that binds all these things together. In all but the most exceptional cases, our orchestras won’t survive if they don’t get this part right. Editor’s Note: This essay was presented as the opening address at the Future [...]

The Persistence of Beauty

By |2023-05-05T13:03:44-05:00August 10th, 2022|Categories: Beauty, Featured, Modernity, Music, Timeless Essays|

It may be the greatest challenge facing those who love classical music in our modern age is the one facing those who do not also love Beauty. Those who reject the idea of Beauty, who deny its value, or who relegate it to meaninglessness—as in fact so many of today’s most vocal proponents of classical music [...]

A Candid Conversation With Architect Allan Greenberg

By |2023-05-08T11:40:12-05:00September 28th, 2018|Categories: Architecture, Liberal Arts, Music|

I have always felt a kinship with architecture because in architecture you have form, which grows in your brain, and then the function—250-square-foot kitchen, three bedrooms of 80-square-footage or whatever—and it is very clinical. Relationships between these elements are pretty straightforward, and you can write them all down, but how do you make a great [...]

Site & Sound, Size & Scale: How to Build Humane Concert Halls

By |2023-05-04T23:01:51-05:00June 21st, 2018|Categories: Architecture, Books, Culture, Music|

We spend so much time in these giant buildings—shopping malls, monstrous office complexes, big box stores. Classical music should bring people together in a more social, intimate way. We’re hoping to design the whole concert experience from the beginning to be smaller. It’s about shrinking the scale, bringing classical music into the human scale. There [...]

The Difference Between Artistic & Musical Education

By |2023-05-08T09:45:02-05:00January 2nd, 2016|Categories: Art, Beauty, Music, Truth|

Can we say that all is well in the world of higher music education on this side of the pond? For now, we continue to produce an ample supply of musicians that rank among the world’s best, with the technical proficiency, confidence, and maturity to faithfully perform the great works that were handed down to [...]

Should Musicians Be Social Activists?

By |2023-05-08T10:40:19-05:00December 23rd, 2015|Categories: Beauty, Culture, Music, Truth|

How exactly do music schools intend to train their students to “spark positive change.” Are they putting the string section through classes in the theory and tactics of social and political activism? In the first part of this series, I acknowledged the growing consensus that there is something wrong with higher music education today, and [...]

Should Musicians Be Entrepreneurs?

By |2023-05-05T13:04:47-05:00December 16th, 2015|Categories: Art, Beauty, Featured, Modernity, Music|

The world of higher music education reform is abuzz with the excitement and promise of entrepreneurship. But entrepreneurship does not describe the process by which a tradition such as musicianship is handed down from one generation to another. Since at least the 1920s, America has done a fine job of nurturing its budding classical musicians within [...]

Is Luxury a Bad Thing?

By |2023-05-05T13:06:11-05:00June 10th, 2015|Categories: Culture, Featured, Modernity, Music|

It shouldn’t surprise up that orchestras are distancing themselves from the idea of luxury. We generally, and perhaps rightly, sense that there is something wrong with it. The most obvious reason is the uncomfortable fact that luxury represents a category that might necessarily exclude us—or indeed anybody. That, of course, does not describe classical music, and [...]

Beauty, Home, and the Concert Hall

By |2023-05-05T13:02:42-05:00May 14th, 2015|Categories: Architecture, Art, Culture, England, Featured, Music|

Classical music comes to us from a very long and very human tradition. The concert hall thus should be the embodiment of classical music’s character: it should above all feel human, feel familiar, feel knowable, and feel intimate as often as it feels exalted. Hot on the heels of what was surely disappointing news for Maris [...]

Can an Orchestra Help Bring Peace to Baltimore?

By |2023-05-08T09:35:17-05:00May 6th, 2015|Categories: Civilization, Music, War|

We are raising a lost generation. And that is the problem to which classical music, like classical education, is part of the solution. Questioning the relevance of our orchestras is like discarding the legend to our map of Western civilization and still expecting to find our way again. As I sat on the front steps of [...]

To Orchestrate A Renaissance

By |2023-05-08T12:53:43-05:00July 20th, 2014|Categories: Classics, Culture, Featured, Music, Roger Scruton, Rome, Virgil|

The purpose of cultural traditionalists ought to be to orchestrate a new renaissance for live classical music, to ensure that the dawn breaks on symphony halls that rise like polished temples in our midst rather than like ruins on abandoned hilltops. Sed me Parnasi deserta per ardua dulcis raptat amor. 1 —Virgil Perhaps our modern [...]

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