MUSE/IQUE's Artistic & Music Director
RACHAEL WORBY
A trailblazing conductor and “music evangelist,” Rachael Worby founded MUSE/IQUE with a passion for breaking down barriers—bringing live music to everyone and regaling the stories behind the music. In her role as Artistic & Music Director at the Pasadena nonprofit, she has explored compositions from the classical repertoire and the Harlem Renaissance alike, reimagining film music, American folk, pop, jazz, and more with tailor-made arrangements and world-class performers.
​
MUSE/IQUE is the natural crescendo of a staggering, glass-smashing career that saw her transform the Wheeling Symphony Orchestra before remaking the Pasadena Pops, and a career that was inspired by another music evangelist: Leonard Bernstein. Worby saw Bernstein conduct his famous Young People’s Concerts at Carnegie Hall when she was eight—her young voice can even be heard on one of the broadcasts—and she was ignited with the same curiosity and mission mindset. “In the most natural way,” she says, “I experienced the power of music. For me, it transformed from a beautiful, everyday household element to an instrument of expression, storytelling, and activism.”
Defying every naysayer who told her a woman couldn’t be a conductor, Worby sought out lessons with the renowned French composer, Jacques-Louis Monod, after completing her music studies in piano and musicology at Indiana University and Brandeis University. (She also studied with the German conductors Max Rudolf and Otto Werner-Mueller while living in Manhattan.) In 1982, after brief stints at two small New England orchestras, she became the conducting assistant at Spokane Symphony in Washington. Her next job, Assistant Conductor for Youth Concerts at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, gave way to a high-profile, twelve-year run leading the very Young People’s Concerts at Carnegie Hall that first activated her imagination. Taking up Bernstein’s mantle with a unique gift for connecting with young audiences, Worby reached more than 22,000 school children every year; in doing so, she wrote a new future—in which a woman was the first conductor those children ever experienced.
​
Worby led the Wheeling Symphony Orchestra for 17 years, reshaping a ragtag regional band into an orchestra that attracted national attention (at a time when the ceiling for women who had their own orchestra was, as she put it, “constructed of ferro-cement.”) She was appointed to the National Council of the Arts, which she served on for four years, but she also set her sights on the wider world—founding the American Music Festival in Cluj, Romania, and forming a rich collaboration with the Irish Chamber Orchestra. She was conductor of the Pasadena Pops from 2000–2010, appearing in several Rose Bowl Parades, before founding MUSE/IQUE. The group’s debut concert in July 2011 featured her friend, the opera legend Jessye Norman, and music by Gershwin, Ellington, Monk, Bernstein, and John Williams on a lawn on the Caltech campus.
​
Worby has always bucked convention, wearing a wireless microphone and speaking directly to her audience, whether on stage at the Mark Taper Forum or in a middle school classroom, sharing her passion and knowledge about music and erasing the silent wall between musicians and listeners. All in service, she says, of “deconstructing the notion of ‘concert’ and replacing it with what I call an ‘event.’ The experience begins the moment you step out of your car. The environment that surrounds you for the duration should be one to which you would like to return."
