Music Director & Orchestra

Elizabeth Schulze, Music Director

With passion, verve and illuminating musicianship, Elizabeth Schulze has been conducting orchestras and opera companies, advocating for music education, and electrifying audiences in the States and abroad for more than two and a half decades.

Recipient of the 2013 Sorel Medallion in Conducting for her adventurous programming, Schulze is in her 23rd season as the Music Director and Conductor of the Maryland Symphony Orchestra and is the newly appointed Music Director and Conductor of the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra in Alaska.

Schulze made her European debut leading the Mainz Chamber Orchestra in the Atlantisches Festival in Kaiserslautern, Germany. She appeared in Paris as the assistant guest conductor for the Paris Opera and has also appeared in London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Vienna with the National Symphony during its 1997 European tour. Her most recent international work includes conducting in Hong Kong, Jerusalem and Taipei.

Schulze’s recent guest conducting in the States includes appearances with the Buffalo Philharmonic and the New Jersey, Detroit, San Francisco and Chautauqua Symphonies. Her positions with U.S. orchestras include an appointment as Associate Conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra, Music Director and Conductor of the Flagstaff, Waterloo/Cedar Falls, and Kenosha Symphony Orchestras, Principal Guest Conductor of the Hudson Valley Philharmonic, Cover Conductor and Conducting Assistant for the New York Philharmonic, and Assistant Conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic, an appointment sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Since the beginning of her career, Schulze has been a spirited advocate for music education. Her far-ranging work included a long association with the National Symphony Orchestra’s Summer Music Institute (SMI). For more than 15 years Schulze conducted, taught and mentored dozens of young musicians at SMI at the Kennedy Center.  She has also conducted the American Composer’s Orchestra in LinkUp educational and family concerts in Carnegie Hall and throughout New York City. And for six years, Schulze joined her mentor Leonard Slatkin, teaching at the NSO’s National Conducting Institute.

Her music education and mentoring work spans the Elementary School to the University. She was an artist-in-residence at Northwestern University and has guest conducted the orchestras of The University of Maryland, the Manhattan School of Music and Catholic University of America. She has also guest lectured at the Juilliard School and the Curtis Institute of Music.

Schulze’s own education includes training in Europe and in the States. She graduated cum laude from Bryn Mawr College and was an honors student at the Interlochen Arts Academy. She holds graduate degrees in orchestral and choral conducting from SUNY at Stony Brook.  She was the first doctoral fellow in orchestral conducting at Northwestern University and was selected as a conducting fellow at L’École d’Arts Americaines in France.  She was the recipient of the first Aspen Music School Conducting Award. At Aspen, she worked with Murry Sidlin, Lawrence Foster and Sergiu Commissiona. As a Tanglewood fellow, she worked with Seiji Ozawa, Gustav Meier and Leonard Bernstein.

Schulze is represented by John Such Artists Management, Ltd.

2022-2023 Orchestra

* On leave

+ One-year position