Q&A with Kyle Wiley Pickett

417 Magazine: What’s your journey been like from early music days to now?
Kyle Wiley Pickett: I’ve always been a musician. My mom’s a music teacher, so I started on piano really early, and then I played flute, and I was in the band, and I was in the marching band, and I was in the youth symphony, and then I went to college. When I was in college, I was not one of those people who said, ‘Oh, I knew from birth that I was going to be a conductor or a professional musician.’ I actually thought it was pretty likely that I was going to go into politics. But as it happened, I studied music and political science, and toward the end of my undergraduate studies, I decided I wanted to go on in conducting. I went to grad school and went to another grad school, and that’s kind of how that all launched. 

417: The new season for the Springfield Symphony kicks off in September. What can audiences expect?
K.W.P.: It’s going to be just such a great year. Every year I present a theme, and part of the reason I do that is just because that gives people something to grab onto. The theme this year is called Binge Worthy, and we're kind of playing off the idea that every concert and every piece is some sort of really compelling story. And those stories then have characters and plots and the music is telling those stories.

417: What do you hope people walk away with after a night at the symphony?
K.W.P.: What I want to happen when you come to the symphony is that you leave a little bit different person than you were when you came in. You've taken a little bit of time out of your life, you've put down your phone, you’ve stopped worrying. You and 2,000 other people have decided to sit together and be elevated—be uplifted—by something great.