"Failed" Musician Becomes the Voice of Chicago Symphony

Phillip Huscher ’71 came to Colorado College from small-town Kansas pointed vaguely toward art, but what kind — visual arts? music? “I had no idea which way the pendulum would swing,” he says now. His first assignment from music Professor Albert Seay was an eye-opener: list the pieces of classical music you love most. “I didn’t know many,” says Huscher. “That was illuminating for me!”

Huscher also found illumination in campus life. “I had classmates from all over the country, and other countries too. I learned how much we all have in common, and that has been in play throughout my career. And CC was the first place I was taught the importance of rigor and elegance and precision in writing. I didn’t think at the time it would be so important to me, but it’s extraordinarily vital to what I do.”

Indeed, Huscher daily combines music and writing, as the full-time concert lecturer and program annotator for the Chicago Symphony. “My role is to be the link between composer, performer, and listener; I put the three together in the same ‘room of thought,’” he says. “I help people find their way into pieces of classical music. I’m not as interested in communicating the historical circumstances of its creation or the analytical details of the piece as its importance.

Phillip Huscher and Professor Michael Grace '63 came to CC the same year - one as a freshman, the other as a "fresh" professor. Grace remembers Huscher as "a blond skinny kid from Kansas, a serious and talented pianist. "I knew immediately that his intellect matched his performance talent. He excelled in music history - in research skills, critical thinking, determining what was important in the music he studied, and in his ability to articulate in writing what he saw and heard in the music itself. That was why I encouraged him to pursue graduate study at a prestigious university." Ten years ago at an orchestra concert in Chicago, Grace was dumbfounded to see program notes written by one Phillip Huscher. "It had to be the same person! I was very proud of the student who had shown such prowess at CC."

“Behind every great piece of music is a great story, and that’s how we unlock that piece of music. For program notes, you must write as though making that connection matters as much as anything else in life, and that I got from Michael Grace. For him, music is not just an academic pursuit — he is passionate about it! Michael made me see how big the world of classical music is — it doesn’t matter just to old people and those in foreign lands. He ushered me into the fact that classical music was a cool world to live in.”