My whole life—going all the way back to my school days—has been tied to an intense September–May work schedule, followed by a relatively calmer summer.

It’s the first time in a long while that I am a completely free agent.

I spent the last three years as Assistant Conductor with The Philadelphia Orchestra.

Before that, I was pursuing an Artist Diploma at New England Conservatory. This current moment feels like the most reflective time I’ve had since we all experienced our BIG collective reset back in 2020.

This summer, I’ve been exploring again—deeply, and with intention: 

I didn’t start my life as a classical musician.

The real birth of my musical self came through the electric guitar. My heroes were the legends of Classic Rock and the Blues: Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Beatles, The Doors, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Van Halen, B.B. King, Rush.

I didn’t just want to be really good at guitar—I wanted to write great songs.

Especially when I discovered Rush and their space-rock epics, with Neil Peart’s bookish and eloquent lyrics (maybe a little long-winded, but still…)

I still remember writing my first song. Somewhere, buried on a hard drive or MP3 player, there’s a hilariously cheesy Tristan Rais-Sherman original from 2001 or 2002.

Writing music has remained a constant in my life. I’ve taken long breaks, and over the past three years, I wrote almost nothing.

But in the past few weeks, I dove back in.

I rediscovered old hard drives and Google Drive folders—about 60 recordings of demos, little kernels, and fragments of undeveloped ideas. But there’s a lot of beauty there, and reviving my love of creating my own music has been one of the most positive forces in my artistic life lately.

 has also led me to rediscover myself as a conductor—as a musician who studies and interprets the works that have been left to me.

My responsibility is to imagine a vivid sound world—imaginary stories, visions, situations. To enter the mind of the composer at the moment of creation.

To revel in the logic, the craft, the imagination—the creativity—of the composer at work.

As an undergraduate at Ithaca College, I almost added an Art History minor to my Cello Performance degree. I think I was one class short of the required credits.

One of my favorite college experiences was taking a master’s-level seminar on the work of Marcel Duchamp. I wrote the biggest paper of my life discussing 

 His ideas—like many artists who followed him—influenced me deeply.

“An ordinary object [could be] elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist.”

Art isn’t art because it’s beautiful. Art is art because it was chosen.

Composing is just choosing. We all have the same notes available to us. You simply must choose the right ones.

When I get a brief musical idea, it feels like I found it—like it already existed just beyond perception until it presented itself. And often, I’ll get a brief flash of the entire sound image of the song—like a strike of lightning. It disappears immediately, and then I have to dig through my imagination to choose the right notes—the ones that must be there. The ones that exist at the perfect center of logic, experience, taste, and style.

It has been a joyful experience to return to choosing.

Choosing the right notes.
And choosing my own path.
My own destiny.

The Creative Act

I remember the early days of the internet. I am a millennial. It’s embarrassing to say out loud, but there it is. Born in 1990.

That being said, I am so lucky to have grown up in the early days of the internet. I was the age that MySpace was designed for when MySpace took off, and Facebook, and every other tool that runs our lives now.

I remember elementary school when an incredible piece of technology hit the shelves.


Combined with a controversial and world changing software program - Napster.


A black market appeared in the 4th grade classrooms of Fairfield, Connecticut. You come up with a wishlist of the hot new songs, hand it to whoever was rumored to have a CD Burner…a few days later, you would have your own special illicit mixtape.

There was an innocent, special magic to all of this. Like you were discovering something hidden, a secret underground network of music sharing and recommendations.

It was addicting, and exciting, and it became a lifestyle for me.

All throughout middle school and high school, I would spend hours and hours, every single night in the following loop:

Look up all the bands that influenced them, and that they influenced, and their side projects, and repeat the process from step 1 on each of them.

It was so enriching, so rewarding. I was curating my own journey through modern music history.

, and get obscure musical recommendations from strange musical sprit guides from somewhere out in the cyberspace.

In college, I would sit in the library and look up contemporary composers, listen to their music, look at their scores. Always trying to build and acquire knowledge.

Our day-to-day experience and interaction with culture, society, and news has been distilled and focused into a few apps.

Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Spotify, and a few others.

Absolutely every piece of media you interact with now has a goal behind it, it’s always been the goal but now they are not shy about it, it governs every single click you make.

The conversations that happen in Spotify’s offices, I can almost guarantee you, do not revolve around what is best for us as listeners. They DEFINITELY do not revolve around what is best for Artists.

The “important” topics that the “important” leaders at Spotify are discussing are things like - the AI arms race, shareholder demand, stock price, how to generate more paid users, how to raise the price of a premium membership, how to stuff in more advertising space.

 of the apps you use every single day, every click you make, every corner of that website or app, I can promise you has been talked about in endless meetings over and over again on HOW to drive monetization. How to increase your time spent in the application. How to get you to spend money in the app, or how to compel more advertisers and businesses to spend money in the app. How to shoehorn AI technology into this application? 

I have been depressed lately when I think back to the pure joy I used to feel combing through the $1 bin at a record store. Finding some tiny, obscure band on 

 and knowing that I had unearthed some kind of hidden knowledge.

Of course, there is a difficult dilemma here.

Due to the dominance of Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Spotify etc, on culture, on consumption, on our daily lives - it is very difficult to divest from these. Especially if you are attempting to create something, sell something, be an artist. You are going to 

 to use these platforms to get your message out.

But there is a way to rebel. There is a way to push against this and seek out more authentic experiences. A way to reject endless monetization, AI, and advertising.

Yes, you need to purchase a ticket. But once you sit down in a concert hall, and the curtain rises on an opera production, or when the conductor stands on the podium in front of an orchestra - everything disappears.

There is no light show. There is no amplification.

There is nothing generated by AI, nothing driving engagement, no project management dogma behind it. Just pure action, emotion, skill, training, and collaboration.

Opera and orchestral performances, unless they are performing something that specifically calls for amplification to be used (which is very rare), is nothing but the raw acoustic sound of 60-100 musicians playing on stage, the pure raw voice of the singers.

There is no backing track. There is no click track or metronome. It is the most fluid, organic, and in-the-moment kind of artistic expression that humans are capable of.

You might say, “Well Tristan - they’re just reading notes on the page! Isn’t it the same thing every night?”


Imagine you went and saw three performances, three nights in a row, of a theatre troupe performing 

 Do you think you would see exactly the same thing every night? It’s the same words, surely it must be the same? Of course it’s going to be different.

Have you ever had to deliver a speech or a lecture? Or filmed a video? Have you practiced saying your lines in the mirror, testing different inflections, patterns, rate of speech. And then in the moment of performance, something completely different or unexpected happens — maybe good, maybe not so good?

Notated music is abstract. There is no clear meaning behind it.

Look at this page of piano music from Robert Schumann’s 

How much crescendo? How music ritardando?

But most importantly, what is this about? How should the listener feel? The performer needs to travel back in time, to 1838, to the mind of Robert Schumann - to try and transmit this abstract sound-image-feeling to the live audience in person.

This is raw. This is imagination, it cannot be algorithmically generated. It is as pure, fresh, and unique as any experience you can possibly find.

So I urge you to REBEL against the major companies that have hijacked our minds, our attention, our money.

Rebel against the endless, relentless stream of advertising. Do not participate in the war for your attention span. Rebel against AI generated playlists, against the wishes of stockholders, against the wishes of overpaid Project Managers and SVPs of Marketing Analytics.

The Orchestra is Rebellion

Orchestra After 5 has become one of my favorite projects—a chance to introduce major works of the classical repertoire to entirely new audiences. For me, it’s about meeting people where they are, breaking down barriers, and showing them why this music matters.

When I talk to people who are not regular attendees of orchestral concerts, I’m struck by how little they know about the orchestral world. They don’t know the rituals—when to clap, what to wear, or what the conductor is doing on stage. They don’t recognize the names of composers or pieces, and they have no way of judging whether the performance is “good” or not. For someone in their 20s or 30s, the idea of attending an orchestra concert can feel intimidating, expensive, and, at worst, irrelevant.

But I believe that with the right introduction, anyone can connect with classical music. Take Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, for example. When I introduce this piece, I don’t talk about sonata form or orchestration. Instead, I tell the story of a young, ambitious composer, madly in love with a famous actress, pouring his heart into a hallucinatory roller coaster of madness, drugs, and the occult. It’s a piece about being young, chasing your dreams, and surrendering to the irresistible pull of destiny. When you frame it like that, anyone can relate.

In fact, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover that classical music has found a vibrant and enthusiastic audience on TikTok. While many users may not know the names of the pieces they’re hearing or the stories behind them, they express a deep emotional connection to the music. Comments like the ones below are everywhere. It’s proof that the power of classical music transcends knowledge or experience—it speaks directly to the heart.

I’ve given hundreds of pre-concert lectures for the Philadelphia Orchestra, and my goal is always the same: to address each audience member as if they’ve never heard an orchestra before. Words like “Tchaikovsky,” “Symphony No. 6,” or “Pathétique” might mean nothing to them, and that’s okay. Instead, I focus on the story behind the music—the hidden narrative behind the music, his mysterious death just days after the premiere, and the feelings of pessimism, despair and devastation that Tchaikovsky portrays in the final moments of the symphony. By building an emotional bridge to their own lives, I hope that when they hear the music in the concert hall, they’ll close their eyes and let memories, ideas, and connections pour in. 

 we are creating an environment where the audience can have a life-changing experience.

I think our challenge as artists is to recognize that while this music is in our blood—it is our passion, our life’s purpose, our guiding light, our job, our career—it can be a brand-new, even foreign experience for others. We must always find ways to welcome and open the doors of understanding to ever wider audiences. Not doing so robs people of potentially life-altering experiences and, worse, dooms our art form to slow and inevitable entropy. But if we meet people where they are, if we tell the stories behind the music and build those emotional bridges, we can create a future where classical music is celebrated and enjoyed by people of all ages.

The Creative Act

The Orchestra is Rebellion

Meeting New Audiences Where They Are

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