Get Up and Dance!

An engaging orchestral conductor, award-winning pianist, and passionate educator, Gonzalo Farias is the Assistant Conductor of the Houston Symphony. In an ever-changing world, Gonzalo desires to establish music-making as a way of rethinking our place in society by cultivating respect, trust, and cooperation among all people in our community.

Gonzalo was born in Santiago de Chile, where he began his piano studies at age five. He earned his bachelor’s degree at the P.C. University of Chile and then continued his graduate piano studies at the New England Conservatory as a full-scholarship student of Wha-Kyung Byun and Russell Sherman. He won first prize at the Claudio Arrau International Piano Competition and prizes at the Maria Canals and Luis Sigall Piano Competitions. As a conductor, he attended the University of Illinois working with Donald Schleicher, the Peabody Conservatory with Marin Alsop, and worked privately with Larry Rachleff and Otto-Werner Mueller.

Besides having a fond love for piano, chamber, and contemporary music, Gonzalo is a passionate supporter of second-order cybernetics to help understand communication and how complex systems organize, coordinate, and interconnect with one another. This includes the interdependent and recursive nature of musical experiences in which performers and audiences alike interact, respond, and co-create each other’s space. His final doctoral thesis, Logical Predictions and Cybernetics, explores the case of Cornelius Cardew’s “The Great Learning” to redefine music activity as a self-organized organization. In addition, he has a warm affection for his formal studies of Zen Buddhism, which has been a major influence on his approach to music and life.