KCO: How and where did your musical journey start?
KCO: How did you transition to conducting?
KCO: How did you get to Tacoma?
KCO: How did you arrive at this program?
KCO: How and where did your musical journey start?
James Welsch: I suppose, like a lot of musicians it probably started pretty early and didn’t necessarily follow a straight line. I’m sure there are people who find themselves picking one thing and sticking to it. My first interaction with music came in elementary school. I had a lovely elementary music teacher with the last name “Key” which seemed appropriate. She was a one-woman band impresario – a young teacher who wanted to do it all. She started with a choral group. We were called the Choraliers. That’s where I began as a young vocalist.
Then she started an elementary marching band, called The Minutemen. She put instruments in our hands and said, “you’re going to play this.” When I was going through this process with her, I had an affinity for the trombone. I don’t know why. Miss Key wouldn’t allow me to play it because my arms were too short. I thought, well, you’re going to run into the same problems with the rest of us, but she ended up giving me a trumpet and that’s what I started with.
That’s essentially how I began my fascination with music. There was a lot of it going on around me, not just in elementary school. My father is an amateur musician. He wrote a lot of his own songs and would hear him singing in the household.
Being surrounded by music growing up, I think what hooked me wasn’t just the sound but maybe the experience of it. I had fond experiences doing music. The way music brings people together was certainly something that created a bigger sense of not just self, but what we are able to accomplish with others.
I started performing as a young person, exploring different instruments and ensembles and always kept in touch with vocal music. But over time I found myself less focused on just my individual part and more fascinated with how things fit together. I was listening across lots of music genres.
One of my grandmother’s favorite stories: we ended up in Pick and Save, a store that doesn’t exist anymore. There were bargain bin collections of cassettes, such as the complete symphonies of Tchaikovsky, Bach’s complete organ works and Brandenburg concertos, and all that sort of stuff. I remember, as a 6- or 7-year-old, walking over to one of those bins, picking one out, and being enraptured by it. I said to my father, “Can I have this? I really want this.”
He said, “Do you even know what this is?”
And I said, “oh yes, it’s just fabulous music.” I wore those things out. That’s essentially it. It was me, a radio, recording radio broadcasts, and listening to everything! Then, just being amazed at how people could put those things together.
KCO: Where were you and Miss Key in the world at this time?
James Welsch: I was in Florida, in little suburb of Orlando called Longwood, in Kindergarten at Longwood Elementary.
I suppose that’s partially why I still do what I do. I don’t know if it’s a sense of giving back or whatnot, but everything is much better when you can do it communally. I’m unabashedly a “keep-to-myself” kind of person except for music, being with other musicians, and discovering things together.
It seems like duality. I guess I have that aspect of being a performer, a conductor, that sort of thing. The other insular aspect of it would be my background in composition. That’s very much “to yourself.” I feel like I’m in a vacuum often, but I have foot in each camp.
But I owe it all to Alice Key who really gave me a voracious appetite to know music in whatever way I wanted it.
KCO: How did you transition to conducting?
James Welsch: I don’t know if it’s particularly unique, but I spent a lot of my lunches in the band room like a lot of band kids did. Except I would remove myself maybe further and go and spend time in the library of the band room. I would open these scores and look at them. I could see my part. I can see other people’s parts, who were playing the same part as me. They didn’t have the same pitches as I did. That sort opened up questions such as why? Why are they in a different key from me.
And so that really began a different road. For me, all of that creation, re-creating other people’s music. I grew an interest in writing my own. So, all the way through middle school and high school, I wrote lots of music, some were successful, and some were not so successful.
I had interests and designs in going into music education, so I started there. But I also had been recruited at Stetson University (in FL) for music theory and composition. I went for dual purposes but ended up settling on theory and composition.
I wrote music while I was there. As any composer could tell you, when you write for more than two or three people, it becomes instantly complicated because you now need to have discussions about when we are all going to meet to rehearse? And if you’ve written an orchestra piece, who’s going to conduct it?
I found myself conducting my own work and that didn’t go so terribly. All my other composer friends started to ask me to conduct their work, too.
I still am a composer. I just do it less, and more on a need basis. I don’t have to pay my bills with composition, which is great. It’s amazing to find out that is what replaced composition, being a conductor.
I had ideas not just about my own music, but I also had ideas about other people’s music. I wondered how I could take all of these various voices, interests, personalities, good and bad days, and somehow, spin something more coherent and interesting out of it.
How could I help others understand music that might not be immediately understandable, or very complex and compounded? It became more of a mental exercise that seemed more rewarding.
I eventually made the switch from composition and went into a master’s program in orchestral conducting. I decided that conducting was worth doing. It was the technical language of music. It was the score study, gestures and rehearsal techniques, and learning by doing. I wasn’t just writing the music.
Also, how do we get the music to mean something? Working with ensembles, making mistakes, refining my ideas, and constantly asking, how can I help musicians do their best work?
KCO: After Stetson, where do you go?
James Welsch: I ended up at Syracuse University, in 2005, to get my masters in orchestral conducting. I finished that degree in two years. One of my friends, Diego Vega, was a professor at Syracuse. He was in the US teaching on a visa from Colombia (Diego Vega now teaches at UNLV). Diego needed to go back to Colombia. I was approached by Andy Wagner, who was the chair of the composition department at the time and asked, “hey, you’re pretty good at this theory stuff. Do you want to fill in for a year as an assistant professor of theory and composition?”
I said, “add conducting to it and I’m down for it.” I ended up staying at Syracuse for about six years as a faculty member and then had to make some decisions. Was I going to go into the Air Force bands, or was I going to pursue my doctorate finally? I ended up at UT Austin, as a result, to get my DMA in orchestral conducting.
KCO: Were you a trumpet player throughout that time?
James Welsch: I still am a trumpet player, but back as early as Stetson, they were really having a hard time recruiting specific instruments. So, I entered as a trumpet player and played trumpet in ensembles, but they really needed French horn players. The mechanics of both of those instruments are similar so that was an easier switch. I took up the horn, and then eventually also got some time with clarinet and viola through my education.
Right now, if people ask what are you playing most? I would say I play the horn most often but can manage through some other instruments as well.
KCO: How did you get to Tacoma?
James Welsch: I finished my degree in Austin in 2016. I had applied to everything available and got no nibble and so I thought, I guess I’ll just work at a chicken wing shop until something happens.
I found a job posting for the El Paso Symphony. They were posting late for general manager and music director of their youth orchestras. I put in an application. The next week, I got a call and went out to do the audition. I was appointed as music director and general manager of the El Paso Symphony Youth Orchestras, and an assistant conductor with El Paso Symphony Orchestra. I spent 2016 to 2021 in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez.
I moved back to Florida to take on the music directorship of the youth orchestra I was a member of in high school, the Florida Symphony Youth Orchestra. I did that for a few years.
Then this opportunity came up in Tacoma, and I’ve always wanted to live there, but never had excuse to move across the country. I made a leap of faith and came out this way.
KCO: How did you arrive at this program?
March with Trumpets – Bergsma
Charleston for Orchestra – Johnson
Song of the Liberty Bell – O’Connor
Rhapsody in Blue – Gershwin Soloist: Isabella Jie, piano
Symphony No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 21, “Nordic” – Hanson
Satchmo! A Tribute to Louis Armstrong – Ricketts
James Welsch: Like music, programs are living breathing organisms, like the orchestras playing them. When I first learned that I would be a candidate, I started going through all my books of programs. I have a list of things that would be a neat idea to try. When I’m pondering what to play on a program, I usually have more of a penchant, if I’m honest, to select things that I’m not familiar with, or things that would challenge me. We all know the greats and those are wonderful. But there’s an awful lot of music that we don’t know. I must admit, up front, most of my program selections are more of a challenge because fewer people might know them. But they’re worth knowing.
When I was pondering what we should do, I took note that we’re celebrating a certain milestone in the country. I was venturing a guess that my other colleagues might not select an American oriented program. But I’m not really interested in The Stars and Stripes Forever, Hurrah! But maybe, a more subtle patriotism and acknowledgement of the many different voices that make up our country and its history.
So, when ruminating on a general idea, I remembered a song from my early 20s, when somebody says along the lines, “oh, he’s just a 20-something, he may be doing a lot, but he’s a twenty something.” That sentiment invites thoughts about the sense that 20-year-olds might have about being able to do it all, can achieve anything. I look at America a little like that. Maybe we’ve lost our sense of what is possible, but that’s really the hitch of the of the title itself: An American 20-something.
Over time, that developed into specifically picking pieces that really are rooted in a very specific time period in America. So American twenty-something has this dual meaning: the impetuousness of youth, but also a specific period of American music where a nation is finding its voice and will continue to try to do so.
It’s about moment, or an era of American music coming into its own, the 1920s, an incredible collision of energy, identity, and experimentation. I think you can hear that in the spirit of each of the pieces on this program: The boldness of Bergsma; the identity of the Charlestown itself, being the sound of a decade; lyricism of a fiddle tune; and an American composer who’s well known for his second Symphony, but this first one, is an homage to his own Swedish background and finding that neo-romantic, American feel; and Gershwin, of course, which I feel is as much the heartbeat of the whole program as it is maybe of a country. It’s Jazz, and it seems classical in moments. It’s expansive, and it’s like America figuring itself out in real time.
It’s more of an expose of what some of America looked like, what is your vision? And what is your understanding of America’s voice? I thought it would be interesting to hear as well as play.
KCO: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us about everything.
Thanks to James for the interview on April 6, 2026.
by Francis X. Langlois – tuba player in the KCO
