“Music is wired into us,” says Keith Cerny (MBA 1991). “Singing is something that is very human, and from singing, it’s very easy to go into playing instruments.” Cerny’s own connection with music began at age 10, with the San Francisco Boys Chorus. It continued as a teenager, with piano performances throughout the Bay Area with a range of groups, including the Berkeley Contemporary Chamber Players. After majoring in music and physics at the University of California at Berkeley, he studied conducting at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Before he joined the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra in January, Cerny’s experience included stints with the opera companies of Calgary, Dallas, and San Francisco. In Dallas, Cerny helped create the Linda and Mitch Hart Institute for Women Conductors. He also commissioned three world premieres and launched 16 free public simulcasts that reached nearly 75,000 patrons in the United States and abroad, and produced a performance and global simulcast of an opera, Tod Machover’s Death and the Powers, that featured robots. In Fort Worth, he’ll be co-leading the search for a new music director, in addition to considering expanded holiday programming and niche offerings in jazz and country and western. “Part of what we’re able to do is target small segments in parallel with our big symphonic and summer concert series,” says Cerny, who names the 19th- and 20th-century composers Gustav Mahler and Dmitri Shostakovich as two personal favorites. “We want to serve the surrounding community in the most diverse way possible.”

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