Chad Smith is on a mission. The CEO and president of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) wants to make the case to the world that the humanities are universally essential, not merely because they enhance earning potential or supplement other skills, but for their own sake.
“I am a humanist,” Smith said during a recent visit to Boston University. “I believe that we understand each other, we understand our world, we understand ourselves better because of the study of the humanities.”
A guest of the Metropolitan College Arts Administration program, Smith was welcomed to BU as the featured speaker for the fourth annual Daniel Ranalli Lecture, held Tuesday, April 15, 2025, at the Howard Thurman Center. Named for MET Associate Professor Emeritus Daniel Ranalli, who in 1993 founded the MET Arts Administration program and served as its director until 2014, the lecture series invites prominent arts leaders to Boston University to share perspectives, outlooks, and lessons learned over storied careers with students and the MET community.
Today, Chad Smith is the leader of the BSO, but it wasn’t so long ago that he was on the outside of the concert hall looking in, with only his guile and attire at his advantage. Educated nearby to Boston, in his younger days, eager to attend the performances of the storied, 144-year-old orchestra, Smith was short on resources, so he resorted to creative means.
“I had literally no money. But I did have a tuxedo. And so I would put on my tuxedo, and I would come in the back door and say to security, ‘I’m with the caterers,’” he said. “And it worked for three years.”
The small act of subterfuge wouldn’t get past today’s security, Smith acknowledged, but he estimated the trick helped him to see around 200 BSO performances. Now, Smith continues to be committed to the BSO’s founding philosophy that classical music be made accessible to all. As Smith described, it was BSO founder Henry Lee Higginson who imbued these values into the organization at its outset.
A Civil War major, Higginson returned from the war to a rapidly changing Boston. He founded the orchestra, Smith explained, with a vision to “give concerts of good music, very well performed… and for tickets to have prices which are fair, and then to open our doors wide.” This spirit of accessibility, still paramount to the BSO’s modern-day philosophy, was rooted in a sense of democratic equality.
“He said that his hope was to draw in, by degrees, a larger and less educated class of society, tackling head-on the idea that classical music was an elitist art form from its founding,” Smith told the gathered audience. “That spirit of cultural access, the democratizing of beauty, has been one of our founding principles that we have endeavored to play out over decades.”
Fifty years later, another BSO music director, Serge Koussevitzky, echoed these sentiments. Koussevitzky, a Russian immigrant and double bass player, was the BSO’s leader during the tumult of World War II, and it was in that context that, according to Smith, he professed, “Great symphony music must be accessible to all. It must reach not only those who can afford to hear it in a concert hall, but also the workmen in the factories in the war plants and the servicemen in the camps.”
Koussevitzky believed in the power of music to heal, comfort, and inspire. “It is a leading force which is essential for preserving and restoring beauty and peace in the world,” Smith quoted. “This was 1943, as bombs were crashing across his homeland,” he added.
Now, Smith suggested, it is the humanities themselves that are under attack, marginalized culturally in favor of higher-earning fields. And it is entities like the Boston Symphony Orchestra that are seeking to counter that current by demonstrating the inherent value of humanities through examining the human condition, its eternal challenges and mysteries.
“People in my line of work are often called to justify the value of what we do, using the criteria of our detractors,” Smith said. “For example, the frequent argument against cutting music education in schools references the benefits of music education from math comprehension, as if the fact that music education and the study of music itself, music comprehension, isn’t enough—that somehow we have to justify this pursuit because it supports or amplifies another pursuit.”
All these “bottom line” metrics, in their hunt for quantifiable value, elide the fact that arts are valuable for their own sake, Smith insisted. “The nature of the arts and humanities is to look for the less obvious kinds of value. So how do we do that? We must speak not only of the quantifiable benefits of our work, but also the intangible benefits,” he said. “Because the work of the humanities is to pursue questions to which there is no definitive answer.”
Musicians, Smith suggested, are uniquely situated to invoke these kinds of questions.
“The great works of orchestral music that form the heart of our canon, the works that you can hear at the Boston Symphony every single week, probe questions like, what does it mean to be a human? How does the divine continue to inspire us and lead us forward? What’s happening to our world?” he said. “We’re not so hubristic to think that any one work is going to fully answer any of those questions. That’s not the flaw in our form. That’s the point—because we too, as humans, are unfinished.”
Indeed, art lasts because its aspirations are lasting, because it speaks to universal elements of the human experience. As an example of the richness of the humanities, Smith brought up Beethoven, whose work still resonates and reveals. Through the humanities, modern thinkers can study the master composer’s work not only for its sonorous qualities, but its cultural context. Mentioning Beethoven’s famed Ninth Symphony, which was written between 1822 and 1824, Smith described the world of Vienna and Europe at the time, as well as the era of Napoleon and the French Revolution before it. Beethoven’s work, Smith insisted, can only be appreciated with a full perspective on its context—a practice which continues today.
“He responded in music, and I will say that’s happening everywhere in our world,” he said. “Composers are responding to the world today. Artists are responding to the world today. Their work is a reflection or response, a provocation to what is ahead.”
There is also value in recognizing the cyclical elements of the human experience. Again mentioning Beethoven, Smith raised the matter of his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. Where the former was a shocking feat, the latter was “pastoral,” Smith said; a smaller return to nature, with “babbling brooks and a thunderstorm and the sounds of birds.”
“Beethoven looked to nature as an escape. As an escape from the chaos,” Smith said. “At that moment, he needed to retreat to something understandable and manageable. Well, today, artists are still retreating to nature, but a nature profoundly changed.”
Paying close attention to works such as these, Smith said, is an essential study. “The humanities attempt to show that our struggles, as a society and as individuals, have been prefigured by other societies and other peoples. When we see that the individual and the collective problems have been confronted before, we understand what work has already been done, and we find ways that we can contribute to that conversation.”
As Smith sees it, his band of musicians is well positioned to address the big questions humanities tackle.
“As an orchestra, we exist at the intersection of humanity,” he said. “The Boston Symphony’s core work is orchestral music, music being one of the fundamental disciplines within humanities. But by being a part of the larger body of ideas, we’re attempting to do what other humanities are meant to do to help us better understand ourselves, each other, and the world.”
Of course, humanities-oriented arts organizations need qualified leaders in order to achieve their goals and aspirations. During a question-and-answer session moderated by Metropolitan College Director of Arts Administration Douglas DeNatale, Smith shared lessons and memories from his career journey, including his earliest foray into arts leadership and administration.
Smith told the story of his first job the field, as a personal assistant to musician Michael Tilson Thomas. It was not a glamorous opportunity, driving mostly, getting coffee, but Smith was so impressed by Tilson Thomas he deemed the experience worthwhile. “I just wanted to be near greatness,” he said.
A shared moment of mutual musical appreciation led to Tilson Thomas offering Smith a chance at programming. From there, his mentor encouraged Smith to move to LA and even helped him land a role as a junior programmer for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. While all the attention was going the orchestra’s new home at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Smith landed an assignment programming the Hollywood Bowl, which he says he had “no business programming.” It was the start of a storied run with the “LA Phil” for Smith, who would eventually become its CEO.
In Smith’s experienced opinion, today’s most successful arts organizations are the ones that maintain relevance by clearly articulating their values. The BSO accomplishes this by not only holding excellence in performance paramount, but by putting a premium on community engagement and how they communicate with audiences. He cited things like bilingual programs and educational outreach as evidence of this approach. This isn’t a retreat from the BSO’s storied standards of excellence, Smith insisted, but rather an evolved definition of success—one that includes the highest aspirations.
“The BSO does not exist to perpetuate itself—it exists to advance our art form,” he said. “We are uniquely constituted to ensure that classical music has a future.”
That future, he argues, depends on how fully we embrace the humanities in modern life—how deeply we value art, expression, and reflection as tools for understanding ourselves and our world.
Pursuits such as classical music, while enjoyable, are vital to solving some of the world’s biggest challenges, Smith held. “The humanities are not soft. They are steel under pressure. They are the connective tissue that brings us together to transcend our differences.”
Smith suggested that his line of work offers an apt model for collaboration and cohesion. “An orchestra is, I believe, one of the greatest examples of community, in our world. One-hundred-and-three people who all have very different opinions,” he said. “And let me assure you, every single one of them has a very different opinion.”
As he laid out over the course of his special Boston University lecture, Smith’s vision for the humanities encompasses more than just the arts themselves, but rather about how the practice of and appreciation for them can help societies reflect, connect, and move forward together. He asked for the audience to recognize the humanities as both mirror and guide—tools for understanding our past and shaping our collective future.
Calling Boston “the knowledge center of the world,” Smith charged that arts organizations like the BSO, and arts managers at the helm of such groups, have a responsibility to reflect and amplify that wisdom. “My goal for the Boston Symphony is that we become the orchestra of ideas,” he said, charting his vision for the future. “My hope is that the Boston Symphony is seen as essential; that what we do is essential; the conversations that we help facilitate become essential; and that, more, we appreciate that the humanities themselves are essential.”