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LEONARD SLATKIN

CONDUCTOR | COMPOSER | AUTHOR

LEONARD SLATKIN

CONDUCTOR | COMPOSER | AUTHOR

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Leonard Slatkin’s Conducting School, Lesson Fifteen: How It Looks and Sounds, Part Two
By leonard slatkin
December 15, 2017

This month, Maestro Slatkin teaches viewers how to conduct two short excerpts for the purpose of practicing beat patterns, the first from Copland’s “Hoe Down” from Rodeo, and the second from the last movement of Brahms’s Symphony No. 1.

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Slatkin and McTee to Support Emerging Artists Fund at the DSO
By leonard slatkin
December 7, 2017

The DSO announced that Music Director Leonard Slatkin and his wife, composer Cindy McTee, have committed $100,000 to the DSO’s endowment to showcase an emerging artist each season. Slatkin is in his 10th and final season as DSO Music Director before transitioning to the role of Music Director Laureate.

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FEBRUARY 2026

By leonard slatkin

Following the seven-week Asian tour of the past year, 2026 started off calmly. I was at home for a while, recuperating from jet lag and getting used to winter weather. For those of us from Los Angeles, this is no easy task.

As the month progressed, the news from Washington kept piling up. My colleagues at the Kennedy Center could not have truly anticipated how the transformation would disrupt their lives to the extent it has. I don’t want to dwell on this too much here. You all know what is going on.

Leonard Slatkin

Internationally acclaimed conductor Leonard Slatkin is Music Director Laureate of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Directeur Musical Honoraire of the Orchestre National de Lyon, Conductor Laureate of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Principal Guest Conductor of the Orquesta Filarmónica de Gran Canaria, Artistic Consultant to the Las Vegas Philharmonic, and Artistic Advisor to the Nashville Symphony. He maintains a rigorous schedule of guest conducting and is active as a composer, author, and educator.

A six-time Grammy winner and recipient of the National Medal of Arts, Slatkin also holds the rank of Chevalier in the French Legion of Honor. He has been awarded the Prix Charbonnier from the Federation of Alliances Françaises, Austria’s Decoration of Honor in Silver, and the League of American Orchestras’ Gold Baton. His debut book, Conducting Business (2012), for which he received the ASCAP Deems Taylor Special Recognition Award, was followed by Leading Tones (2017) and Classical Crossroads: The Path Forward for Music in the 21^st Century (2021). His latest books are Eight Symphonic Masterworks of the Twentieth Century (spring 2024) and Eight Symphonic Masterworks of the Nineteenth Century (fall 2024), part of an ongoing series of essays that supplement the score-study process, published by Bloomsbury.

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