New York Youth Symphony

American youth music organization

The New York Youth Symphony (NYYS), founded in 1963, is a music organization for the youth in New York City, widely reputed to be one of the best of its kind in the nation and world. Its programs include its flagship Orchestra, Chamber Music, Jazz, Apprentice Conducting, Composition, and Musical Theater Songwriting Programs. Its members range from 12 to 22 years of age. NYYS members are said to include the most talented young musicians in the New York metropolitan area. In 2023, the New York Youth Symphony won the Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards. The NYYS is also a leader in classical music with its innovative commissioning program called First Music, established in 1984, in which young composers under the age of 30 are selected to write works for the programs. Commissions have included composers such as David Lang, Augusta Read Thomas, Julia Wolfe, and Aaron Jay Kernis. The orchestra performs three concerts per year, each of which is performed at Carnegie Hall. The New York Times reported: "Its Carnegie Hall concerts are always ambitious and usually excellent". The orchestra has not appointed established educators to fill its role as music director. Rather, it has had music directors who at the time were young; many of those conductors have become renowned. The music directors of the Orchestra have been:

David Epstein (1963–66)
Leonard Slatkin (1966–68)
Richard Holmes (1968–69)
Isaiah Jackson (1969–73)
David Stahl (1973–74)
Kenneth Jean (1974–76)
Myung Whun Chung (1976–77)
Robert Hart Baker (1977–81)
Salvatore Scecchitano (1981–82)
David Alan Miller (1982–88)
Samuel Wong (1988–93)
Miguel Harth Bedoya (1993–97)
Michael Repper (2017–2023)

Andrew Jihong Kim is the current music director with assistant conductor Adrian Rogers.

The New York Youth Symphony Jazz Band is a 17 member big band dedicated to studying, rehearsing, and performing jazz music. Modeled on the bands of the 1930s and 1940s, Jazz Band preserves this heritage and, keeping with jazz traditions, incorporates it into the current and emerging styles that define the genre for the present generation. The Jazz Band performs at renowned venues all over New York City including Birdland and Jazz at Lincoln Center. The Jazz Band has featured soloists and clinicians such as Joe Lovano, Maria Schneider, Conrad Herwig, Steve Turre, Warren Vaché, Victor Goines, Slide Hampton, Jimmy Heath, Joe Locke, Eric Reed, Lew Soloff, Gary Smulyan, and Frank Wess, giving students a chance to play alongside today's most exciting professional musicians.

Alumni include violinists Marin Alsop, Pamela Frank, Cho Liang Lin, Shlomo Mintz, and Peter Oundjian; violist Lawrence Dutton; conductor and trumpeter Gerard Schwarz; flutist Ransom Wilson; and members of the Juilliard, Emerson, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Mendelssohn String Quartets, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, the Israel Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, and other major ensembles throughout the world.

The New York Youth Symphony abruptly canceled the Carnegie Hall performance of a piece it had commissioned after it was discovered to include a 45 second musical quote of the Horst Wessel Song, written by Sturmführer Horst Wessel, a district leader in Hitler's Sturmabteilung (SA). An anthem of the Nazi Party from 1930 to 1945, it is now banned in Germany and Austria. Shauna Quill, executive director of the Symphony, said the decision to pull the piece was informed by Tarm's refusal, when asked, to explain why the excerpt is included in the work.