Stradisphere — August 4, 2026

In 1968, Booker Rowe was freelancing in New York when the phone rang. On the line was Mason Jones, the Philadelphia Orchestra's personnel manager, calling on behalf of music director Eugene Ormandy. Rowe could hear the orchestra rehearsing behind him through the receiver. He took the gig as a substitute that season — the first time a Black musician had ever sat in the ensemble.

The orchestra announced his death this week in a short institutional statement, calling him "a well-loved member of the second violin section" for "almost 50 years" and extending sympathies to his family. It's the register organizations default to for a long-serving employee, and it undersells what his colleagues in the wider field had already recognized: months before his death, the Black Orchestral Network — a nonprofit built specifically around the experience of Black orchestral musicians — sat him down for their oral-history podcast, introducing him as a man who carried "triumphs and setbacks" and told his story "in the style of a true gentleman." That's the tribute that actually reads like it knew him.

The full-time chair took three more years to land after that 1968 substitute call, and even then Rowe wasn't quite first. A season with Washington's National Symphony came between the substitute gig and his return to Philadelphia in 1970; violist Renard Edwards beat him to full membership by a year. Rowe joined permanently in 1971, the orchestra's second Black player rather than its first — a distinction the institution's own retirement tribute skipped over too.

He'd grown up in North Philadelphia, started on violin as a boy through the public schools, and had exactly one place to watch Black musicians play classical repertoire in any number: the Philadelphia Concert Orchestra, the city's only community ensemble built around Black players, because the real one wouldn't have them. Temple for his bachelor's, Yale for a master's — a path built entirely on a public arts pipeline his wife, the soprano and music theorist Dr. Patsy Baxter Rowe, later pointed out no longer exists for kids growing up where he did.

Backstage at the Academy of Music, someone once scrawled a racial slur in the stairwell. It was gone by the next day; Rowe never learned who wrote it or who erased it, and he didn't leave. "I had an obligation to everybody not to leave," he said. He stayed fifty years, until 2020, when he retired at 79 into an orchestra that still had exactly three Black members. He said so himself, without dressing it up: "There should have been others. There are others out there who can play. It is disheartening."

In 1986 he stood as soloist with the Chestnut Brass Company to honor a cohort of early-nineteenth-century Black composers working in Philadelphia — musicians who'd made the same case Rowe spent his career making, a hundred and fifty years earlier, and lost.

On August 5, the composer Betsy Jolas turns one hundred. She is one of the last living people who sat in a classroom with Olivier Messiaen and absorbed his musical thinking firsthand, at a time when almost everyone else who did the same is now dead — Pierre Boulez, taught in that same circle, died in 2016. Messiaen built a system of rhythm and harmony so intricate that musicologists still argue over how parts of it actually function: modes of limited transposition, rhythms that read the same forward and backward, birdsong transcribed directly into orchestral notation. Jolas is one of the only people alive who can say what it was like to have it explained to her in person. She is also still composing — the Berlin Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Philharmonie de Paris have all commissioned new work from her in the past decade.

She came to it sideways. Her mother, Maria Jolas, was an American mezzo-soprano from Louisville, Kentucky, sent to Germany alone at seventeen to study singing; she came home knowing the full Lieder repertoire along with the Spirituals and Creole songs of her own childhood, and taught all of it to her daughter at the piano. Her father, Eugène Jolas, edited the Paris literary magazine transition, which first serialized James Joyce's Finnegans Wake under its working title, "Work in Progress." When the war broke out, the family fled to New York. In Princeton, taking organ lessons, young Betsy had an uninvited audience some days: Albert Einstein, who liked to listen and occasionally played violin with a neighbor, the pianist Gaby Casadesus. Casadesus's assessment of his playing, delivered flatly: "He had a problem. He couldn't count."

Back in Paris after the war, Jolas studied first with Arthur Honegger, then, after his health failed, with Darius Milhaud, whose classes ran out of his home rather than the Conservatoire because rheumatoid arthritis had confined him to a wheelchair. He appeared to doze through lessons. He wasn't: he knew Jolas was terrified of telephones, and made a habit of announcing incoming calls just to watch her answer in front of everyone. Messiaen, meanwhile, wasn't allowed to teach composition at the Conservatoire at all — the institution considered him too radical — so he taught analysis instead, and admitted students from around the world as unofficial "special" cases, in a class meant to hold twelve. Jolas sat in.

What happened after is the accident that shaped her career. She ran, unsuccessfully, for a teaching post at the Conservatoire; Messiaen had promised his vote but missed the meeting where it counted, and she wasn't hired. He apologized, and offered her something bigger instead — his own classroom, the next time he went on tour. She had never taught a class in her life. The students who showed up turned out to be Tristan Murail, Hugues Dufourt, Gérard Grisey, and Gisèle Barreau: the founders, within a few years, of Spectralism, one of the defining compositional movements of the late twentieth century. "It was total luck," Jolas has said of the whole arrangement.

She never founded a movement of her own, despite knowing everyone who did. She was close with Iannis Xenakis and with Karlheinz Stockhausen — who wasn't especially drawn to her music but was delighted the time she lectured five hundred schoolchildren on his — and with Boulez, whom she liked personally while rejecting his central doctrine outright: what he called le devoir d'amnésie, the obligation to forget the musical past. Her own roots, she's said, run too deep in that history to cut loose from it.

Sir Simon Rattle has commissioned her repeatedly over the last decade — A Little Summer Suite for the Berlin Philharmonic in 2015, dedicated to him, and Ces belles années… ("These Beautiful Years"), her most recent orchestral work, co-commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, and the Cleveland Orchestra, and premiered under Rattle at the Barbican in June 2023. She wrote it after Rattle mentioned he'd finally be conducting Tristan und Isolde at Aix, which sent her back to the first time she heard the opera, as a teenager in New York, sung by Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstad. She'd decided in advance she wouldn't like Wagner — she was fresh out of a war in which Hitler had claimed him — and found herself "totally taken" anyway. Rattle's own verdict on her: "one of the most extraordinary living composers... funny and wise and imaginative and slightly off the wall, and so is her music."

A hundred years old this week, and by her own account, still saying yes.

Barbican Chimes, a sheet music and instrument shop that has served London's classical musicians since 1985, is closing. It sat next to the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, one of London's major conservatories, which meant its real customer base wasn't tourists — it was students buying exam repertoire and professionals buying orchestral parts they couldn't get anywhere else. It's part of a chain, Chimes Music, in business since 1951. Its closure looks small on its own. It isn't, once you see what else has gone down with it.

In May, Travis & Emery closed after 65 years at 17 Cecil Court, a narrow alley off Charing Cross Road. It specialized in old and rare music books and scores, and its story is stranger than a shop has any right to be. It was founded in 1960 by Valérie Travis, daughter of Sir Edward Travis, the wartime director of the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. She married an organist and Bach scholar, Walter Emery, and gave him a typewriter she'd acquired from a captured U-boat, which he used to type up his musicology notes. When her nephew Giles inherited the shop in the 1990s, it was drowning in debt with three years left on its lease — until he found a page from one of Beethoven's own sketchbooks under an old box of tissues, sold it, and cleared the debt. The shop went on to sell a vocal score of Peter Grimes signed by Benjamin Britten for about £40, and shelved scores that had once belonged to Lord Harewood.

The shop's manager, Charlie — also a working choral conductor — told one interviewer he conducts from paper exclusively: "At this point I feel like I have to." His reasoning wasn't sentiment. A printed score takes a pencil mark, needs no power, and can be annotated, inherited, and sold on with all of that accumulated history intact. That's a small, practical case for paper. There's a much bigger one underneath it, and it's the one actually worth making.

A musical score isn't just a storage format for sound. It's a notation system that encodes reasoning, not just pitch. Take a triad spelled E♯–A–B♯. Play it on a piano and it sounds identical to F–A–C. But no trained musician would call those interchangeable, because the spelling tells you something the sound alone doesn't: which direction that note is resolving, what key context produced it, how the composer is arguing through the harmony rather than just landing on it. That distinction is called enharmonic spelling, and it's been a live part of how literate musicians read intention off a page for roughly three hundred years. It is also a distinction the standard MIDI protocol — the code underneath every piano-roll and loop-based production tool — cannot represent at all. MIDI assigns each pitch a single number; E♯ and F share one. The software has no concept of the difference, because it was never built to encode musical argument, only sound.

This is where two of the field's more serious scholars come in, because the authority of the written score has never been a settled question even among people who take it seriously. John Butt, in Playing with History, spends a chapter unpacking notation and lands on an uncomfortable point for anyone who wants the score to be a simple set of instructions: notation is an imperfect guide to practice. It never tells a performer everything; it demands interpretation, argument, judgment. Richard Taruskin went further and more provocative in Text and Act, arguing that the entire modern obsession with textual literalism — the urtext editions, the "historically informed" performance movement that insists on playing exactly what's on the page — is itself a distinctly modern, ideological stance, not a neutral recovery of the composer's true intent. Taruskin's point wasn't that the text doesn't matter. It was that treating the text as sacred is itself a choice people are actively arguing about, and have been for decades.

That's the argument today's musical culture has quietly stopped having — not because one side won, but because an entire category of people making music professionally never entered the debate to begin with. "Composer" now covers both a person who can tell you why a chord is spelled with a double sharp and a person building tracks entirely inside a DAW's piano roll, where that distinction is structurally invisible. Neither is illegitimate as a way of making music. But collapsing them into one word — treating literacy in a three-centuries-old argument-encoding notation system as equivalent to fluency in a modern production interface that can't even hold the argument — is exactly the kind of flattening that happens when a field stops maintaining the physical, institutional infrastructure of its own literacy. Bookshops like Travis & Emery weren't just selling paper. They were the last retail-level evidence that reading a score was a skill people still argued about, bought rare examples of, and paid to preserve. When that infrastructure goes, the argument doesn't get resolved. It just stops being visible enough to have.

Further reading: John Butt, Playing with History; Richard Taruskin, Text and Act.