Oakland Symphony Music Director, maestro Michael Morgan dies at 63
Michael Morgan, courtesy Oakland Symphony.
Long-time Oakland Symphony conductor and Music Director Michael Morgan died Friday after a years-long illness, the symphony announced. Morgan expounded orchestral conventions alongside experimental music operations, preached inclusivity and education and worked tirelessly to get the people of the Bay Area, and Oakland especially, to find their own connections to classical music. He was 63.
“This is a terribly sad moment for everyone in the Oakland Symphony family. We have lost our guiding father,” Executive Director Mieko Hatano said on the organization’s website. “Michael’s plans and ambitions were set for several seasons to come. He made his Orchestra socially authentic, demanded equality, and he made his Orchestra our orchestra. He fashioned a unique, informed artistic profile that attracted one of the most diverse audiences in the nation. His music reflected his beliefs: reverence for the past, attuned to the future, rooted in his adopted home of Oakland. His spirit will always guide the enduring future of the Oakland Symphony.”
Morgan, born in Washington, D.C., had been music director at Oakland’s symphony since 1991.
The Oberlin College Conservatory of Music graduate started playing piano at age 8. At Oberlin, he worked with the likes of Leonard Bernstein. He’s been conducting professionally since 1979 and first gained international attention a year later. In 1982, he debuted at the prestigious Vienna State Opera. The same year, he became the assistant conductor of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. He moved on to the same position with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1986.
He’s also worked with symphonies Coast to Coast but has remained in the Bay Area after moving here. In his tenure he made the Oakland Symphony a dynamic presence, not afraid to experiment with formats and types of shows. Among those were a series of shows in 2018, called “Playlist,” where non-musicians picked the program. One such non-musician was W. Kamau Bell.
“He just said, send me your favorite songs. So I sent him songs from different periods of my life,” Bell told RIFF at the time.
He was one of the most prominent Black conductors and classical music leaders in the U.S., and worked to get more People of Color involved in classical music. But he wouldn’t let that pigeonhole him. He accomplished this by getting personally involved in music education. In 2020, he partnered with the San Francisco Symphony as the first curator of its Currents online series.
More recently, he was involved in the Emerging Black Composers Project, a partnership with the San Francisco Symphony that sought out emerging Black composers and awarded them with commissions that will be performed locally. He was one of the key mentors to composers. Morgan led the San Francisco Symphony on July 23 at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco.
Michael Morgan was also artistic director of the Oakland Youth Orchestra, music director of the Sacramento Philharmonic Orchestra and Sacramento Opera, artistic director of Festival Opera in Walnut Creek, taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and was music director at the Bear Valley Music Festival, south of Lake Tahoe. He’s conducted the San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Ballet orchestra numerous times.
Morgan had been getting dialysis treatments for several years. He received a kidney transplant in May at UCSF Medical Center, but contracted an infection earlier this month and has been hospitalized at Kaiser Oakland since then.
Michael Morgan is survived by his mother, Mabel Morgan, and sister Jacquelyn Morgan. A memorial service will be announced in the near future.
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