Ian Passmore started conducting when he was 8, about two years before he learned an instrument.

He’s at point in his career that he’s looking for “home.”

He and is wife look at job opportunities together and only consider places they could see themselves living.

“Montana is becoming one of the happening places to be,” for classical music and the arts, Passmore said.

It has a good reputation nationwide, and being in town for about 24 hours, when he sat down with The Electric, he said he’d already “realized how much the orchestra means to the community and how much the community means to the orchestra.”

Symphony conductor candidate hopes music can bring people together

Passmore will take the stage to conduct the symphony’s April 18 concert in the symphony’s 67th season.

Each of the season’s six concerts will feature a finalist for music director and conductor.

It’s a two-year search process that began last season, drawing 238 applications from across the globe, according to Hillary Shepherd, the symphony’s executive director.

The symphony established a 12-person search committee composed of conductors, musicians and those with administrative experience.

They broke into teams of three, with each reviewing about a quarter of the applications, whittling the list down to 13 candidates who were asked to answer a set of questions on video, Shepherd told The Electric last spring.

Symphony maestro candidate: Music can be point of community pride and a draw [2025]

The full search committee reviewed those responses and further narrowed the list down to six candidates with two alternates.

The top six were scheduled for the season’s concerts and started programming, which “gets a perspective of how they think,” Shepherd said. “Programming is a vessel by which to achieve an artistic vision.”

“Really amazing programs” are planned for the search season and “our community will be involved” through surveys and events, Shepherd said. “It’s going to be a pretty amazing time getting to know everybody. It will be fulfilling and exciting for everybody involved and the community gets a say in making sure the next maestro or maestra is the perfect fit for Great Falls.”

Passmore comes from a small town in North Carolina and is working in Tennessee.

Symphony maestro candidate hopes to connect community through music [2025]

He said he’s worked in places with a music director who only comes in to conduct concerts with classical music and the public doesn’t know who the director is, likening it to speed dating.

It used to be that the music director was a part of the community, like former Great Falls Symphony conductor Gordon Johnson, Eugene Oramandy of the Philadelphia Orchesta and Herbert von Karajan of the Berlin Philharmonic.

“You imprint yourself on an organization and they on you,” Passmore said.

His first boss at the Omaha Symphony, Thomas Wilkins, used to tell him, “a person should be able to meet the music director in the grocery store and be comfortable talking to him.”

Symphony opens Saturday with first of six maestro candidates [2025]

Speaking of the importance of live music in the arts, in the context of his experience growing up in a small town, he said that as a child, he had trouble expressing his emotions.

A local college ensemble came to play at his elementary school and it turned out that classical music was the way he could tap into his emotions and feelings.

It might not be that way for everyone, Passmore said, “but it’s important that they know that’s an option.”

His had the same band director in junior high through high school.

That director was Phillip Riggs, who won the Grammy Award for music education in 2016.

Passmore said that because he had a great music educator, “I’ve really felt a sense of responsibility” for music education.

In Tennessee, he works with the new youth orchestra and choir, trying to give them performance opportunities with professional groups.

It’s important to education, but the professionals really enjoy it, he said, and offer mentorship.

But it’s just as important to educate adults about music, he said, since growing symphony audiences isn’t limited to young people.

Community members may not be comfortable with Mozart or other classical composers, but may be drawn in with music from video games.

Harville bids farewell to Great Falls Symphony; search for new conductor is underway [2025]

It’s not minimizing the classics, but providing other music programming for people who don’t yet connect with classical music and figuring out ways to take music to people.

An example, he said, is the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra that has recently launched a symphony roadshow with a mobile stage and takes the music to underserved communities that typically wouldn’t otherwise have such programming.

“You can’t always expect that people are going to come to you,” Passmore said.

For the April 18 concert, Passmore said he’s “extremely excited,” and all but one piece will be a Great Falls premiere.

The opening piece is relatively new, originally written as a band piece by Omar Thomas.

Dedicated to the victims of the 2015 Charleston church shooting, it starts as a dark, tragic piece, but shifts to triumphant and resilient, an example of a community banding together, Passmore said.

It includes the hymn, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often called the Black National Anthem, and the orchestra will sing, Passmore said.

Next is Schicksalslied by Johannes Brahms, Passmore’s favorite composer.

The Symphonic Choir joins for this piece based on a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin, contrasting the serene lives of the gods with the suffering of mortals.

The third piece is Shades and Illumination, by Nancy Hill Cobb, this season’s Second Performance Project.

Second Performance Project part of Harville’s symphony legacy [2025]

Passmore said he loves the project and would be keen to continue the program if selected for the position.

Cobb is joining the symphony for the concert and will join Passmore for the pre-concert talk.

Passmore will close the concert with Jean Sibelius’ Symphony No. 5, which is what he called one of the greatest master works of the 20th century.

It includes a three-bar theme, “so simple a child could have written it, but what he does with it…”one of the most astonishing endings.”

The “swan hymn” from the piece came to Sibelius while walking, after seeing 16 swans take flight all at once.

The piece ends with six huge chords, separated by complete and total silence, Passmore said.

“The tension in the silence is as much a part of the music as the notes themselves,” he said.

Live music, Passmore said, is “important because it gives you the opportunity to experience something in that moment that cannot be created in that exact same way ever again. That’s the great thing about art.”

Saturday’s show includes a free pre-concert talk with Passmore and at 6:30 p.m. in the Mansfield Theater and a post-concert reception in the Gibson Room upstairs at the Civic Center.