DO THE RIGHT THING, NEW WORLD SYMPHONY: The Primous Fountain Case

An Orchestra That Describes Itself as “Forever Young” Employs Some Bad Old Practices

In January 2020, after two years of planning, noted composer Primous Fountain, the New World Symphony (NWS), and the orchestra’s co-founding music director laureate Michael Tilson Thomas (1944-2026) formally contracted for the orchestra to give a full concert of Fountain’s music. Mr. Fountain duly supplied the requisite scores and performance materials, and the orchestra advertised the program for April 16, 2022, with the title: Primous Fountain: An American Original.

But that concert never happened. Although the NWS told Mr. Fountain that the contracted, planned, and advertised concert had been “postponed” due to health concerns on the part of Mr. Thomas, Thomas did in fact plan and conduct three NWS concerts in the following 2022-23 season – just not the one featuring Mr. Fountain’s music.  Ultimately, the NWS chose to program only one-third of one work (i.e., one movement of an unrelated three-movement work) into a completely different program: the “Ritual Dances of the Amaks” in a program titled Spanish Dances that also included music by Carlos Chavez, Gabriela Ortiz, Manuel de Falla, and José Pablo Moncayo García – an approach that not only failed to deliver on the contracted all-Fountain concert, but also diluted the impact of Mr. Fountain’s work. Finally, even though Mr. Thomas continued to actively conduct other concerts elsewhere during the 2022-23 season (and in fact conducted NWS concerts on October 22, 2022 and May 6 and 7, 2023), he never conducted Mr. Fountain’s music, which had been submitted in good faith some two years earlier.  To this date the NWS has never given the planned, contracted, and advertised all-Fountain program.

Source: https://primousfountain.com/historical/

A very great wrong has been done here – not only in depriving Mr. Fountain of the contracted and disingenuously postponed-out-of-existence concert of his music conducted by an important and widely beloved conductor, but also in depriving the musical world of the experience of an all-Fountain concert that would have offered a small but inevitably impressive sampler of his large and multifaceted oeuvre. And the fact that Mr. Fountain, who is African American, was essentially directed to stand aside and be happy with a scrap of what this white conductor and predominantly white orchestra deigned to offer him only adds insult to injury.

So yes, a very great wrong – or rather, a nest of wrongs: breach of contract, racial discrimination, false advertising, and copyright infringement.

Look, we all understand that maestro Thomas was, and still is, regarded with great reverence throughout the classical-music worlds; this likely accounts for at least some of the reluctance to point out his wrongdoing in this case. (Disclosure: I understand that affectionate reverence – Thomas’s 1975 recording of Carmina Burana with Peter Binder, Judith Blegen, Kenneth Riegel, and the Cleveland Orchestra is the version by which I learned that work, and I still find it compelling.) But the fact remains after his diagnosis with glioblastoma multiforme in 2021, Michael Tilson Thomas continued conducting – he did so, in fact, until his concert of April 26, 2025 with the San Francisco Symphony. He had time and ample opportunity to conduct the music of the superb composer whose music he had promised to champion five years earlier. But he didn’t.

Nor, as I said earlier, has the NWS ever given, or resumed planning for, the all-Fountain concert they contracted to give. That’s relevant because there are multiple parties involved here, not only Michael Tilson Thomas. The maestro missed his chance to showcase the work of this distinguished “American Original,” but the orchestra could still do so – and it ought to. If the NWS possessed the wherewithal to reduce their programming of Fountain's work to a sliver of what they had promised and program a bunch of other music instead, they also possessed the wherewithal to find and secure the services of one of the many conductors out there who would have quite gladly stepped in to help them make good on their word -- especially in the case of the music of such a distinguished composer. If the all-Fountain concert had to be postponed to a specific later date, even one that it yet in the offing (but coming soon), that would have been better than this disingenuous mischief.

None of those things happened. Instead, they chose an obviously facile "solution" -- one that neither admitted their failure to deliver nor promised any substantive future delivery, and one that smacks of white commodification of Black art and white exploitation and mistreatment of Black artists. No amount of dissembling damage control from this orchestra will suffice to remove the suspicion that they aggressively advertised their all-Fountain program in 2021 for opportunistic reasons as the American public, for one all-too-brief moment following (especially) the murder of Mr. George Floyd, flirted with the idea of acknowledging and perhaps even beginning to correct some of the systemic racism and concomitant exclusion of African American composers that is (let’s face it) in the DNA of this country. That moment of light passed, though, and we’re now in the middle of a full-on retrenchment – with Mr. Fountain left empty-handed and the musical public again contenting itself with endless repetitions of canonical favorites by the same old same-olds (almost all of them white).

Do the right thing, NWS: program a full concert -- OR TWO! -- of Primous Fountain's music. It would be a way to honor the apparent wishes of your late music director, and the world of music would be so much the better for your having given Mr. Fountain's work the recognition and performance it richly deserves!

A final note: I’m sadly late coming to this conversation. I first heard of the issue back in February 2025, directly from Mr. Fountain, and it’s come up in correspondence and conversation with three other friends since then. I have no expertise in the legal issues entailed here, but the issues are also ethical and centered on things that matter deeply to me. I encourage anyone who’s reading this not to settle for my take on it. Instead, please check out the very good article by Elisabeth Campbell in the Miami Times, or any of the other press that the issue is garnering (most of it is very, very careful, treading too lightly IMO.) Most importantly, visit Primous Fountain’s website and treat yourself to his work: you won’t hear it from the NWS, but you don’t have to settle for what they offer!