Meet Roderick Cox, international conductor and son of Macon

Credit: RoderickCox.com

Roderick Cox was born in Macon in the late 1980s. After studies at Columbus State’s Schwob School of Music and Northwestern University, in 2015 he landed the position of assistant and then associate conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra. When he won the prestigious Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award, his career went international. These days he lives in Berlin and conducts all over to rave reviews.

In September 2024, Roderick Cox began his new post as music director of the opera orchestra in Montpellier, France, and a month later he came home to Georgia to lead the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in concert. That performance airs March 27 through March 30, 2025, on The ASO on GPB. GPB’s Sarah Zaslaw caught up with Roderick remotely in December.  

TRANSCRIPT

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Sarah Zaslaw: What area of Macon did you grow up in?

Roderick Cox: I lived in central Macon and I went to Bethany Seventh-Day Adventist Church and Morgan Elementary School. I just remember it being such a vibrant time, living in Macon, Ga. It was the age of the shopping mall, and I remember we had one of the largest shopping malls, in Macon, Georgia, which meant lots of visitors were coming through the city. There was lots of music, lots of culture. Great fairs and parades. It was one of those times — it was before the financial crisis of 2008, 2009, 2010, where the city was still quite robust.

Sarah Zaslaw: Your family was active in your church musically?

Roderick Cox: Yes, exactly, my mom grew up singing and she continued as an adult. She was one of the soloists in the church choir, and I spent many of my younger years, before I could sing in choir rehearsals, watching the chorus rehearse. When I came of age where I could hold a tune, it was expected that my brother and myself would participate in the chorus. These were some of my first experiences with music: spending the whole day at church, wrapped and engulfed in music.

Sarah Zaslaw: When did you pick up instruments other than voice?

Roderick Cox: I started on the piano, learning how to play it by ear, in a way. My cousin owned a keyboard, and I was just so fascinated with the sound ... When I was able to get my own, I remember my mom went to Sam’s Club ... to the electronics section, and I was able to pick out a keyboard. And it still feels like a very special moment. This was a time before we could afford private lessons in piano, or maybe my mom didn’t even know that music was my aspiration. But I worked to memorize music by ear and learn how to play it on the piano — which was rather, I suppose, a common thing in the African American community, where you have this call-and-response and rote teaching of music, basically imitating what your mom or your parents did to learn how to sing, to learn how to express oneself musically.

In elementary school, I chose the path of becoming a percussionist. Later, in high school, is when I was intrigued by the sound and the shape of the French horn, and I persuaded my band director to let me switch. ... He finally let me take a French horn home over the summer — which, again, I started by teaching myself how to play the instrument, by reading books and watching videos, before I was able to actually take formal lessons.

Sarah Zaslaw: It sounds like you were kind of a dreamy kid. You read a lot. You were into Greek mythology. You conducted your action figures ... You kept yourself busy.

Roderick Cox: I guess you can say that. When I think of my niece and nephew now, when I’m spending time with them over the holidays, they ask to have the cellphone so that they can scroll on YouTube. It seems like such a foreign idea to me, because when I was a kid, I was sort of wrapped in my own imagination. I was able to stay in my room by myself and create an entire world. My mom did not have to worry about entertaining me because I had my keyboard, my action figures and all of these things, and I felt as if I was in my own storybook. So yes, I suppose I was quite a dreamy child.

Sarah Zaslaw: Do you think of yourself as an introvert?

Roderick Cox: Yes, I do ... even though it’s my job to be in front of people and inspire people and convince them to buy into my interpretation of a musical score. ... I need to energize myself for those interactions and save my energy. Sometimes I get in trouble with this, because if someone interacts with me while I’m studying or practicing, sometimes I’m not always the most open person. But I still do think that I’m an introvert, and I protect my time and my own personal space when I’m not working.

Sarah Zaslaw: There must be an art to separating the personal and professional spaces.

Roderick Cox: Absolutely. When you live in a profession where you’re sharing so much of yourself, you’re making yourself vulnerable in front of an entire public and giving so much of yourself emotionally — not only in the public eye, through interviews and social media, people want to know what’s happening behind the scenes so much these days and want to feel this connection — I feel it’s also important to also protect space for my own personal self.

Sarah Zaslaw: How did you first encounter classical music, specifically, and decide that was your thing?

Roderick Cox: I encountered classical music before I even knew that it was “classical music,” in the sense we use this terminology, today. And I think that’s a quite authentic way of establishing a relationship with music, a sincere way. ... I just knew it was music that I liked, that I enjoyed. ... Not only was I learning how to play gospel tunes and Christmas tunes, but also I’m learning Beethoven and Dvorak, Brahms and John Phillips Sousa and a variety of music. It was a very eclectic musical education.

But of course, when I went to college, the training was much more formal and you’re learning the theory and the history and you’re thinking about the structure and all the different classical forms. You realize, "OK, this is what I’ve been doing this whole time." So I would say in college did I really start to understand what this profession meant ... and what are the different genres. ... Growing up, it was just music to me. Good music.

Sarah Zaslaw: You lived in this state into your 20s. I’m curious, did you ever listen to GPB?

Roderick Cox: I did absolutely, I listened. It’s a fantastic broadcast and I think it’s a valuable resource for people. I still receive messages from people back home to say, "Oh, I heard this on GPB" or "I heard this," and it’s yeah, it’s fantastic.

Sarah Zaslaw: You studied French horn at Columbus State University’s Schwob School of Music. Tell us about the instrument you took to college with you.

Roderick Cox: ... Becoming a professional classical musician is a very expensive endeavor. You have the private lessons, you have the expensive instruments and so forth. My family didn’t have the resources to afford such an expensive instrument. But I was also a member of the Boys & Girls Club, and they learned of my aspirations to continue to pursue music in college. My local Boys & Girls Club reached out to the Otis Redding Foundation and Otis Redding’s widow, Zelma Redding, and told them about my story. And Zelma Redding basically volunteered to buy a French horn for me. The only condition was that I — that I maintain good grades.

That was the beginning of a long relationship that continues to this day with the Otis Redding family and the foundation, where they’ve really supported me throughout my career. Now I’ve also worked with them, giving back and sharing my knowledge and expertise with the students they’re working with these days in their singer-songwriting camps and so forth.

... And that inspired my own establishment of my own initiative, the Roderick Cox Music Initiative, which works to help finance and fund the aspirations of young, talented musicians in the Twin Cities. We’ve given out thousands and thousands of dollars of scholarships to young aspiring musicians.

Credit: RoderickCox.com

Sarah Zaslaw: There’s a prizewinning half-hour documentary about your background from Macon through your student days, through the audition process, up to your eventual breakthrough into the big leagues — which outcome was not at all a sure thing when you started out. ... It's called Conducting Life. Roderick, I especially love the footage of you [in grad school] rehearsing a student group at Northwestern while you’re getting constant feedback from your conducting professor. It’s like an instrument lesson, back and forth with the teacher — except the “instrument” is a whole ensemble of people who are watching you. You have to be humble and willing to make mistakes and take feedback in front of all of them — which is moving to see! We think of conductors as being so in charge and liking attention, because they’re in the middle, in the spotlight telling everyone what to do. So tell me about the contours of the conductor’s ego. These seem like two different sides of what you do.

Roderick Cox: That’s a very astute observation. ... It’s important as a conductor to have what I would call a healthy ego. Obviously, it takes an ego for someone to walk out on stage in front of thousands of people and stand up in front of an orchestra of absolute professionals — and some of the best in the world — and say, “Follow me, I know the way!”

A lot of the work is done at home, preparing, doing your research into the score, into the composer, establishing a firm imagination of the piece. But it's also important to be honest about yourself and your musicmaking, to know when that when you are achieving what you’ve set your mind to, that you don’t buy into false flattery, that you keep your focus on the music. But it’s also important that when you give a downbeat for the orchestra to play, that you don’t give that downbeat with question marks — that you have a sense of conviction in the messages that you’re giving the orchestra. So that’s where the healthy ego has to be developed.

When you’re a student, as you saw in this documentary, there’s a bit of pretending going on, because you’re trying to look confident, you’re trying to seem as if you have all the answers and you know what you’re doing. But also you’re a rather baby conductor, working with people who’ve been playing longer than you have been conducting, and in front of a master teacher who is trying to educate you.

So it’s definitely a balancing act and there’s a moment of great vulnerability. But it’s important to use those moments to grow and to learn. I conducted a concert last week with an orchestra in Cologne, and I have the score in front of me and I’ve been making markings of ... what I think could have been better, and the next time when I do this piece, how can I get even closer to the to the vision of this work that I have for myself, and over time how this music will continue to grow with me.

Sarah Zaslaw: In the documentary, you also talk about the importance of knowing what motivates you, to keep an aspiring conductor going through this constant effort. So you must know: What motivates you?

Roderick Cox: For me, the music motivates me, and the ability to connect to people. It’s a great privilege that I work in an art form, the performing arts and I get to perform this fantastic music that still reaches people around the world. It’s a beautiful experience that, still in 2024, with everything that’s going on, we have this singular event where thousands of people can sit in one hall and one space and put their cellphones away and engage in this community of listening — there’s no one really talking, but this community of listening as one, that is really quite rare. That’s why I recommend not only live music but live classical music, symphonic music, because it’s like entering into a sanctuary, really, and it’s a beautiful experience.

Sarah Zaslaw: In your October [2024] concerts with the Atlanta Symphony, you all played the Doctor Atomic Symphony by John Adams, based on his opera about Oppenheimer and the nuclear bomb, which the Atlanta Symphony also presented years ago, plus [Sergei] Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances in [Samuel] Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Tell me about putting these three pieces together.

Roderick Cox: ... With this program, I was thinking about this idea of death and our relationship with death. ... The centerpiece is the Symphonic Dances by Rachmaninoff and is about the composer grappling with death and it ending with him celebrating death, in a way. But Doctor Atomic is about another type of death. It’s an unnatural death. It’s death caused by our own hands as humans, this destruction that we put on the earth when we dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s about the development of that weapon. And I wanted to prepare the audience’s ear for this gigantic work by including Barber’s Adagio for Strings. ... Its melancholic nature has caused it to be used in many memorials, and many think of it as an elegy. So the program starts rather dark but ends in a more hopeful way of thinking about death in the end.

Sarah Zaslaw: What were your previous encounters with the Atlanta Symphony?

Roderick Cox: Obviously it’s the first major orchestra I listened to as a kid. I remember taking a field trip there as a child. And when I was a college student, and had just graduated from college, I sat in on the rehearsals of the Atlanta Symphony under the music directorship of Robert Spano. I would then go study with Robert Spano at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado for two summers. And then it would just be a decade later before I conducted my first concert with them, which was spring of 2023. ... I stepped in for an ailing conductor, another colleague and friend of mine, Ryan Bancroft. I already had this concert scheduled for this year ... but I got to go prematurely and meet the orchestra, which was which a wonderful experience.

Sarah Zaslaw: When you conducted the ASO this time, did people you know come up from Macon to see you?

Roderick Cox: They did. This time I had a longer notice I could give people to come, and it was wonderful — not only to have friends and family, but for my young niece and nephew to see their first classical music concert with their uncle on the podium.