A Juilliard-trained violinist playing with the New York Philharmonic and the New York City Ballet, and later the first conductor ever to win a MacArthur genius grant, applied to Juilliard’s conducting program and was rejected three times. This episode traces Marin Alsop from her 1956 birth to two professional string players in New York City, through Juilliard’s pre-college division, a detour into mathematics at Yale, and her bachelor’s and master’s in violin, to the era’s mythology of the maestro as an older European man and the pseudo-scientific claims that women lacked the upper body strength or booming voice to command an orchestra.

The conversation follows her DIY response: founding the New York String Ensemble in 1981, the female jazz group String Fever, and the fifty-piece Concordia orchestra in 1984, all funded by gigs like the Philip Glass recording of The Photographer and the Broadway cast album of Big River. It covers her 1989 Koussevitzky Prize at Tanglewood, the first won by a woman, her mentorship under Leonard Bernstein, and the 2005 double milestone of the MacArthur Fellowship and her appointment as the first woman to lead a major American orchestra in Baltimore, where musicians publicly protested before she won them over through sheer competence. It closes with her OrchKids program, her Clueless About Classical podcast, historic posts in Bournemouth, São Paulo and Vienna, the 2013 Last Night of the Proms, the scrutiny of her relationship with horn player Kristin Jurkscheit, and the fellowship and Breaking Barriers Festival she built for the women following her.

• Why a full orchestral score reads like a giant spreadsheet and how a math degree fits a conductor’s mind
• The administrative nightmare of founding a fifty-piece orchestra in 1980s New York
• Why classical conducting is a lineage-based profession and what Bernstein’s endorsement signaled
• How extreme competence, not an iron fist, defused a hostile Baltimore Symphony
• The double standard that polices the personal lives of trailblazers but not male maestros