Kurt Rohde examines the structural problems embedded in how opportunities circulate in contemporary music — how access, relationships, and institutional permission compound quietly over time, rewarding the already-known and making it nearly impossible for others to even reach the starting line. Drawing on his own experience of benefiting from systems he later came to question, Rohde argues that radical transparency is the only meaningful corrective, and points to the San Francisco Arts Commission's fully public adjudication process as a working model. The conversation moves from critique to practice: his work with the Composers Conference, his approach to selection rubrics that are simultaneously rigorous and honest about subjectivity, and a conviction rooted in his own experience growing up gay in Poughkeepsie — that community doesn't just appear, and that small acts of deliberate openness are often all it takes to make something possible for someone else.
Listen to music/Maker with Tyler Kline wherever you get podcasts, or at musicmakerpodcast.com.
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micro/Maker is a production of Loose Leaf Transmissions: Made for All Ears.